# Invasion of the "FLOCK" Cameras
# Upper Echelon — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3cMU55dIIc

There is a war fought all around us
every single day, which many people have
never even heard of. It's a battle
against authoritarian surveillance, and
we, the people of this nation and the
world for that matter, are currently
losing that war.
Let me begin by describing the enemy, or
at least one of them.
Flock Group Incorporated is an American
safety technology company headquartered
in Atlanta, Georgia, who specializes in
the production of multiple devices, but
chief among them something called ALPRs,
also known as automated license plate
readers. These cameras, individually
powered by their own solar panels,
utilize a proprietary AI model to
capture and interpret images of passing
vehicles, or so they say. Far beyond any
sort of current competitor, Flock
cameras gather information such as make,
model, car, and license plate, but also
other visible characteristics like roof
racks, aftermarket parts, or even bumper
stickers. In the past few years, over
90,000 of these cameras have popped up
all across the United States, with
hundreds of thousands more globally. But
the distribution framework for how these
cameras end up in local communities is a
little bit obfuscated. Flock as a
company doesn't have just one contract,
they have thousands. The hardware that
they make and the software that they're
perfecting in order to run it are being
sold to police precincts, private
businesses, major corporations,
municipalities, and everything in
between. According to the company
themselves, using court decisions as
well as elected representative
statements for justification, according
to the company themselves, what they're
doing is not mass surveillance. But if
you look just a tiny bit deeper, it
becomes flatly impossible to ever accept
that explanation. The way that Flock
represents their products and services
appears to be wildly different from
reality. Quote, "Flock ALPRs do not and
cannot track vehicles, much less
individual people. ALPRs take a
point-in-time image of the rear of
vehicles on public roadways. They are
incapable of tracking the whole of
anyone's movements, a determination that
has been consistently made by courts
across the country." End quote. That
statement from the official Flock
website needs to be immediately
disputed. Right off the bat, taking a
photograph of a vehicle with a
timestamp, a license plate, and a
location absolutely is fundamentally
tracking them. If you take one snapshot
with one camera, but then take five more
during separate intervals across a
25-minute journey at various different
locations, you are undeniably tracking
movements, period. It may be true that
the cameras themselves are employed by
different jurisdictions or companies. It
may also be true that whatever customer
originally purchased the cameras had no
intention for them to be used in such a
way, but the simple truth of the matter
is that compiling this type of
surveillance data into a searchable
index, which is what they're doing,
allows for the tracking of citizens. And
if we take a much more precise example,
we can see exactly how that's possible.
Let's use the Bessemer City, North
Carolina Police Department for
demonstrational purposes. This
particular client operates about 20 LPR
cameras. They've cataloged over 72,000
vehicles in the past 30 days alone, but
all of this data is being shared with
almost 2,000 additional organizations
across the entire country. These are
mainly local police departments or
federal law enforcement agencies, but
the concept of this isn't mass
surveillance falls apart immediately
when you realize that the majority of
your clients communicate, share, and
coordinate their data not only with each
other, but also the government.
Historically speaking, governments with
the ability to individually track the
movements of their population do not end
up using that ability to enhance
freedoms. Still, the concept of ALPR
cameras is a mere surface-level issue
because the true scope of the problem is
much, much, much, much larger.
All over the Flock official website are
safety proclamations. Safer communities,
privacy first, utopian claims of a
better society. But, if you look at
their FAQ, you'll find statements like
this one. Quote, "Who has access to
Flock footage? Flock will not share,
sell, or access your data." End quote.
Elsewhere, again, quote, "Nobody from
Flock Safety is accessing or monitoring
your footage." End quote. That sounds
good as a simple declaration on a
website, but after a series of public
records requests by a man named Jason
Hunyar in Dunwoody, Georgia, the depth
of the issue becomes far more obvious.
It would seem, based on public records
disclosure, that Flock employees are not
only accessing data from cameras
routinely, they're also facilitating API
access for various third parties,
despite the fact that their customer,
Dunwoody, Georgia PD in this case,
allegedly didn't have an existing
agreement with that third party. These
records also appear to show that Flock
employees were deliberately masking
certain accounts from having their
searches appear in audits, as well as
numerous Flock employees either
accessing live cameras or previous
recordings. In some cases, these cameras
were positioned to view pools,
gymnastics rooms, and fitness studios.
While the VP of business development,
Bob Carter, seems to have accessed many
such cameras, one in particular at a
children's gymnastics room in the local
Jewish community center, allegedly
during a sales demonstration.
The company has since done a fair bit of
damage control on all of this, including
a letter to the affected community
apologizing for poor judgment, but
there's a couple of things we now need
to address. First and foremost, license
plate readers on public roadways are not
the only product that Flock sells.
Obviously, if it were, why would they
ever be in the gym or the community
center?
Far from it, actually. In addition to
the AI-powered license plate scanners,
Flock also manufactures microphones.
They're called Ravens, and they, quote,
"Detect community disruption, expand
awareness of non-violent threats,
including sideshows, fireworks, and
other disruptive community activity."
End quote. Not only is the company
selling widespread, always-active
roadway detection, which is being shared
by an exponentially growing number of
local and federal law enforcement
agencies, they're also selling audio
detection, and if you want the most
horrifying example of all, on top of
this, they're selling AI-powered
motion-tracking surveillance cameras
called Condors, specifically designed to
monitor, track, and zoom on human
targets.
These are the type of cameras that were
presumably accessed live by their
employees, despite all of the claims on
their website, but these cameras are
called PTZ, pan-tilt-zoom,
which are purpose-made for the tracking
of people and faces. That may seem fine
to some of you, subjectively. We all
have different thresholds in terms of
privacy invasion, but what if I now said
that a large number of these Flock
Condor cameras had been hooked up and
left openly accessible to the entire
internet? Jointly published by Ben
Jordan and 404 Media, it turned out that
many of these cameras were publicly
viewable, which is dangerous from a
security perspective right off the bat,
but also gave picture-perfect insight
into what they're actually doing. These
cameras track movement. They will zoom
in on phone screens when visible, and
they're positioned everywhere from
playgrounds to parking lots, walking
paths, stores, and more. Even the LPR
cameras, license plate readers, are now
popping up aimed at basketball courts,
bike trails, and entrances to major
consumer locations, thoroughfares,
malls, things like that. You don't have
to look very far to find examples where
the camera is taking infrared pictures
of people, not vehicles. No vehicles are
even present in such cases. And for the
sake of totality, in their second
quarter 2025 law enforcement summary,
Flock unveiled that all of their LPRs
will become video-enabled with a mere
software patch. Just to clarify, as the
company simultaneously claims, even now,
as of initial publication, as the
company claims that LPRs do not
constitute mass surveillance because
they're simply point-in-time images,
they have also offered a very simple
upgrade, completely free, I might add,
so that existing cameras can now have
video capabilities enabled at the press
of a button. It's kind of like
Schrödinger's camera, a network of
surveilling devices taking point-in-time
images, but it's technically not a
surveillance network, according to them,
even though the cameras literally also
have video, except when someone uses it
that way, because that's what it does
and how it's being used. Freedom of
Information Act and public records
requests are now showing definitively
that these cameras are being used for
traffic citations. The information is
being used by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, ICE, across deportation
activities, and for the purpose of
monitoring protests, as well. The
cameras that are definitely not a
surveillance network are being used
precisely how one might theoretically
begin using a mass surveillance network
before it's fully completed. Contained
in now public records from Danville,
Illinois as a description for why law
enforcement agencies are then using the
Flock database, we can see ICE plus ERO,
which is enforcement and removal
operations for ICE, which means that
Flock cameras, whether or not they were
ever intended to become this, which I
would presume they were based on company
decision-making, Flock cameras are being
used as an integrated surveillance
database across the United States where
federal law enforcement agencies access
real-time data, previous license plate
pictures, car specifications, and even
always-listening microphones to track,
arrest, and deport targets. This is
where it gets tricky, okay?
The individual reason why law
enforcement decides to use a mass
surveillance system isn't the only
factor that matters. A certain group of
people, politically, tend to support the
idea of law enforcement doing this, at
least in terms of immigration. It's a
very controversial subject in America
right now. But what we need to
understand is the difference between a
framework and general usage of that
framework. If you have a network of
interconnected companies or police
departments, in this case most of all,
all sharing audio-visual surveillance
with each other, but they only ever use
that system for the tracking and
conviction of, let's say, high-profile
violent criminals, a sizable share of
the population has no real issue with
that. The problem comes when that very
same system is used for more.
Under the Raven description for Flock
microphones discussed previously, we can
see fireworks and community disruption.
These are not violent crimes, obviously,
but in a world where the government can
access all of that data on a whim from a
complex network of police departments
and third-party vendors who are all
sharing what they capture across every
facet of citizen life, in a world like
that, what possible mechanism is there
to stop the government from using LPRs,
microphones, and PTZ cameras all in
conjunction with one another, so that
the people buying and shooting their
fireworks, for example, because they're
specifically mentioned, are now
penalized. It's a revenue opportunity
first and foremost through civil
penalties against citizens. It's a
control mechanism and most of all, it's
a flexible foundation by which any
number of further authoritarian policies
can be executed or enforced in the
future. Networks like this don't just
snap into existence overnight. There
have been warning signs about the
creeping authority of the federal
government, at least in the United
States, for decades. In the wake of
September 11th, 2001, the Patriot Act
was largely viewed as a particularly
notable step down that road. More
recently, the Kids Internet and Digital
Safety Act has been making its way
through Congress, pushing towards a near
total destruction of internet privacy.
That'll be a future project on the
channel, ID verification, the assault on
the internet, stuff like that. But for
today's video, the focus is on Flock,
video surveillance, audio surveillance,
but even with that narrow focus, the
pattern itself is undeniable. Something
I found to be particularly notable,
especially when you consider the
contradictions on the official Flock
website, is that the company has
deliberately opted to exclude their
website from the internet archives. A
small thing in the grand scheme,
however, subjectively, I don't know if
I've ever seen a reputable company
intentionally exclude themselves from
the process of archiving information.
That practice, in my experience, is
almost universally reserved for con men,
scammers, and corporations that are
intentionally acting against the public
good. All of this makes no mention of
false positives, by the way. According
to Institute for Justice, dozens of
people have now been pulled over, held
at gunpoint, arrested, or jailed because
of mistakes that these cameras are
making. A particularly notable recent
case from Toledo, Ohio, occurred when
the camera mistook the number two for
the number seven, leading to a scenario
where the unsuspecting driver was
attacked by a police dog before being
arrested and detained while officers
repeatedly told him that his car had a
stolen license plate. Obviously, it
didn't. They were wrong, but that never
stopped the attack dog or the arrest.
There is an argument to be made that the
company selling the hardware isn't
responsible for how the hardware gets
used, which obviously does make sense to
a degree. It's not the first time that
argument has been made. But when you
manufacture something which is
purpose-built for the implementation of
a mass surveillance system, that's what
the functionality is designed around,
while excluding your own company from
the online archives, it does raise
questions. And it's also not the only
thing that Flock has recently done. In
January of 2026, shortly after
revelations that dozens of Flock cameras
were hooked up to the open internet, the
company made a host of changes to their
legal terms. A direct comparison shows a
multitude of differences, mainly typical
corporate jargon, a lot of it, but one
change in particular stood out to me.
Under the limitation of liability
section in February of 2026, Flock
proceeded to eliminate the entire
section on gross negligence or willful
misconduct. Previously, the company had
terms where deliberate or reckless harm
that they cause would not be subject to
limitations of liability, or at least
differently. However, after the change,
those protections were gone. If the
company were to go now and cause grossly
negligent or deliberate harm, such as
data breaches or willful lack of
security, things like that, if it were
to happen now, the number of recourse
options available to those impacted by
it would be greatly decreased, which is
explicitly by design. And all of this,
by the way, is taking place as the
company now manufactures camera-equipped
drones as the next component of a
nationwide surveillance state. Now for
the part about what you can do. As of
right now, at least eight different
cities across the United States, over in
the UK it looks like they're just
physically destroying the cameras, but
here in the United States, at least
eight different cities have been forced
to remove these cameras or at the very
least scale them back significantly
after public records requests. Because
of the nature of the footage, legally
designated as public records by certain
courts, multiple jurisdictions are
choosing to break contract entirely
rather than make any portion of it
public. Authoritarian operations like
this require subtlety. They don't thrive
in direct sunlight. So, considering how
frequently people ask, "What can we
possibly do about any of this?" I'd like
to include two separate links. The ACLU,
American Civil Liberties Union, and the
EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, who
both have excellent write-ups on what is
happening, why it's happening, and the
things that you individually can do to
help stop it. What those options are
changes dramatically based on region.
There is no one-size-fits-all, so I
can't give it to you. But, for anyone
who's interested, there are definite
ways of making an actual difference in
your local community.
Flock is a hardware manufacturer, a
software developer, and an AI
surveillance company where the products
that they make are the latest iteration
of a multi-decade war on privacy. The
words safety and security are all too
often a precursor before trampled
liberties and civil rights violations. I
believe that is happening again right
now. That's it. If you want to support
the channel, check out the links down
below. A special VPN deal, locals and
Patreon, channel memberships, the Upper
Echelon website, and more, much more.
But, I'll cut it there and stop
rambling. As always, thank you all for
watching, question everything, and have
a nice night.