Full transcript
This has been a subject that has been
flooding your social media feeds and
it's flooding your local municipalities.
Today on this episode of Off Air, I'm
going to talk about the Flock
surveillance camera, those little tiny
black boxes that you may see going up in
your neighborhood. I'll share with you
the capability of the Flock camera
system, how it detects people and
vehicles, and why you should be
relatively alarmed about these going up
in your neighborhood.
If you're a concerned citizen, somebody
worried a bit about mass surveillance in
your neighborhoods, you may want to
watch this episode of Off Air. And if
you like the content, make sure you
click like and subscribe. I'm federal
criminal defense attorney Ron Chapman.
Today we're going to talk about the
Flock surveillance system, why the
Supreme Court is allowing it, why many
municipalities are approving it, and why
many protests have sparked across the
nation related to this surveillance.
Once we dive deep into the technology,
I'm sure you're going to find that this
is not what meets the eye. And there's
much more to look at when it comes to
the Flock surveillance system. For those
of you who read a lot, Machiavelli laid
out in The Prince that a ruler must
sometimes appear as a lion and sometimes
as a fox. But as we'll see today, the
cleverest predators don't roar or sneak.
They wear the uniform of the protector.
They arrive promising order, safety, and
the common good while quietly building
the machinery to watch, catalog, and
control every subject who steps in the
open. That's the oldest trick in the
book of power. First, I'd like to tell
you a bit about Flock Safety and why you
should be concerned. Flock Safety is an
Atlanta outfit founded in 2017. It's
exploded into a national surveillance
empire boasting over 90,000
solar-powered, cellular-connected
cameras hooked into networks serving
more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies
across 49 states. The company claims
they perform over 20 billion scans of
vehicles every single month. The
flagship hardware, the Falcon LR, SR,
and Flex models use infrared night
vision and machine learning algorithms
to capture not just your license plate,
including all 50 states plus Canada and
Mexico, but a full vehicle fingerprint.
The make, model, color, body type,
decals, bumper stickers, roof racks,
ladder racks, dents, even the absence of
a plate altogether. No plate, no
problem, according to Flock Free Form.
This is a natural language AI processor
that allows you to search for certain
types of vehicles if you're law
enforcement. The system spits back hits
across an entire national database. Now,
this platform, Flock OS, runs on Amazon
web servers cloud with a default 30-day
retention, meaning that it keeps the
files for 30 days before getting rid of
it. It has real-time hotlist alerts if
you have a beyond the lookout out tied
to NCIC, the government database that
tracks people's movements. The company
itself admits that one nationwide query
can ping more than 83,000 cameras at
once. Video feeds and live clips are
rolling out as we speak. It doesn't just
detect license plates, it detects
people. These black mechanical ravens
are starting to dot your landscape. This
database that has been developed
indefinitely includes you and your
personal movements. Now, imagine this,
you roll out of your driveway at 7:12 in
the morning, same as always, headed to
work, to the store, to drop the kids off
at school. The Flock is perched
overhead. It tracks your movements. It
reads your plate. It snaps the make,
model, color, the stickers, even the
dent from the last winter. It builds
your complete vehicle fingerprint and
logs the exact timestamp and GPS
coordinate. 30 days of your life at
every intersection, every errand, every
predictable pattern stored, searchable,
shareable. No warrant, no probable
cause, no knock at your door. You're not
a suspect, you're just driving. You're
just going about your normal day. But,
Flock doesn't care, it circles anyway.
It takes pictures of you, it records
you, it tracks your movements because it
can. Because Flock has been allowed to
do so, because someone sold your
municipality on the idea of safety
through the Flock camera system.
This is Flock Safety's pitch. They went
to local municipalities, local law
enforcement. They said, "We can track
suspects. We can do the things that your
cops on the road can't do. We can be
your eyes in the sky. We can protect
your citizens. We can store that data,
and you can use that as cold, hard
evidence in court." According to Flock,
officers get mobile app alerts,
real-time NCIC hits, and custom hot
lists. The system
and Flock brags about solving crimes.
And sure, it may solve crimes. But, it
does it at the expense of surveilling
everyday Americans going about their
business, being branded, logged, filed.
And as this database grows fatter and
fatter, it knows more and more about
you, and it is in essentially private
control. Cities learned this, and they
began canceling contracts left and
right. Flagstaff, Arizona voted
unanimously to rip the Flock out after a
privacy outcry, and physically remove
the cameras. Ithaca, New York killed its
deal over data sharing fears. Mountain
View, California discovered federal
agents were dipping into their local
Flock feeds without telling anyone, and
ran an audit and terminated the contract
entirely. Santa Cruz became the first in
California to sever ties. Redmond,
Washington suspended operations. Oak
Park, Illinois walked away. Oxnard,
California paused after a vendor
misconfiguration
let nationwide queries, including
federal agencies access their data
without approval. At least 30
municipalities,
some reports now put it closer to 50,
have ditched or paused Flock
surveillance since early 2025.
Many other residents showed up to
council meetings and said in plain
English,
"Not in my town." And there are
lawsuits. The Institute for Justice sued
Norfolk, Virginia on behalf of residents
Lee Schmidt and Crystal Earington after
one was tracked 526
times in just 4 months by the city's
176-plus
Ravens. A federal judge initially let
the case proceed calling the setup
notably similar to cell site location
data, which the Supreme Court determined
in Carpenter may require warrants. But
in January 2026,
the same court granted summary judgment
to the city dismissing the case brought
by the people ruling that this dragnet
was constitutional
under the facts of the case. You got
that right. Federal judge declaring that
Flock surveillance is constitutional. I
wonder if there was any conflict of
interest there.
The judge warned though that future
expansions could cross the line. Now,
the plaintiffs appealed in California, a
couple of plaintiffs filed a class
action lawsuit in San Francisco Superior
Court in February 2026 accusing Flock of
violating the state's ALPR Privacy Act
by letting out of state federal agencies
access California drivers' data more
than 1.6 million times in 7 months from
San Francisco's alone. 1.6
million times
it was accessed. The California Attorney
General sued El Cajon for the same
Moore brought his own class action
against the city, and Texas fined Flock
$500 for operating without a proper
license in one investigation. Even
Washington courts ruled Flock data is a
public record open to request, much to
the state's dismay. These mechanical
Ravens, the Flock systems, keep
circling, but the lawsuits are starting
to clip their wings
a little bit. Flock Safety markets
itself as the protector of the flock. It
stands for public safety, making sure
that stolen cars are recovered, that
missing kids are found. It's very noble
on its face. Yet, the very same system
gets used to stalk ex-wives, harass
protesters exercising their First
Amendment rights, target certain
religious communities with
discriminatory searches, chase women
across state lines for their
reproductive choices, as one lawsuit
argued. In Johnson County, Texas, a
lieutenant ran a nationwide Flock query
for a woman who'd obtained an abortion,
searching 83,000 cameras across state
lines where the procedure is legal.
Court records later showed officers
considered charging her in a death
investigation into the fetus. Now, I'm
not taking any particular stance on
abortion on this channel. That's not
what this is about. But, I think the
nationwide surveillance for an
individual accused of something like
that is a little troubling when it comes
to Flock cameras.
In Milwaukee, an officer ran his
ex-girlfriend's plates five unauthorized
times in a single month. In Kansas,
another used Flock to track his
estranged spouse.
In Norfolk, Virginia, one resident got
tracked 526 times in just 4 months by
the city's 176 plus Ravens. Flock
promised to keep the wolves away while
it quietly became the biggest wolf on
the block.
Warrantless, unaccountable, and growing
searches have dominated this Flock
system. Either these cameras are
undermining the very freedoms they claim
to defend, or they were never about
safety
in the first place. They were really
about control, about turning every
public road into a data corral where
your movements belong to whoever logs in
first and can access them. The
Constitution guarantees the right of the
people to be secured in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects against
unreasonable searches and seizures. I
spent years in courtrooms fighting
institutional overreach and on
battlefields where bad intel
caused a lot of problems. Sometimes a
video or a feed causes a
misunderstanding and governments or its
private contractors can track the wrong
person, can lead to egregious
constitutional violations,
and warrantless searches. The Supreme
Court's been drawing this line for
decades and Flock walks right up to it
with these mechanical ravens that it's
put in the sky. One of the first cases
we should talk about is Katz versus
United States. The Supreme Court there
ditched the old trespass-only rule and
held that the Fourth Amendment protects
people, not places, and that you have a
reasonable expectation of privacy. And
you don't forfeit that right just
because you drive on a public road. Then
came United States versus Knotts in
1983. There,
a short-term tracking on public streets,
the court said, was fine. That's not a
search, but the justices in that case
warned that if you're following people
more than just a little bit, it may get
into a search. Let's fast forward to
United States versus Jones in 2012. The
government slapped a GPS device on a car
and tracked it for 28 days. The nine
justices agreed that that was a search
and Scalia's majority used trespass as a
basis for that. The court determined
that long-term pervasive tracking
reveals the privacies of your life, your
habits, your associations, your entire
pattern of existence. Justice Sotomayor
nailed it. Cheap automated surveillance
changes the citizen-government
relationship in ways inimical to
democratic society. Later, the court
ruled in Carpenter versus United States
that historical cell site location data
that happened over months required a
warrant. Chief Justice Roberts wrote
that even public movements when
aggregated create an encyclopedic
chronicle that invades the reasonable
expectation of privacy that we all
share. The data was comprehensive,
automatic, and inescapable in that case.
Sound familiar? Flock's vehicle
fingerprints do exactly that. 30 days of
plates, times, locations, patterns,
searchable across 83,000
cameras with just a few keystrokes by
law enforcement. Lower courts in cases
where Flock has come up keep citing
Carpenter directly. They add Kylo versus
United States, a case that discusses
that technology reveals details that
other data may very well not and should
be potentially looked at as a search.
But, we really haven't seen the Supreme
Court decide on the overall AI
surveillance picture. We certainly look
forward to that. But, the court has been
crystal clear. Technology doesn't just
get a free pass because it's new, or
it's public, or municipalities vote on
it. States are trying to plug the gaps
and expand Flock's camera system, but by
doing so they may engage in a violation
of that Carpenter type surveillance that
the Supreme Court doesn't like. Now,
some states are saying if you delete the
data after a certain amount of time,
it's not considered a search. New
Hampshire demands deletion after 3
minutes if a plate isn't hit. Washington
just signed the Driver Privacy Act,
21-day retention cap on Flock data, and
no sharing with out-of-state or federal
agencies. They also put a ban on near
sensitive locations. And, they also
included a warrant requirement for
non-law enforcement actions. California
bars out-of-state sharing for Flock and
mandates privacy policies. Illinois and
Virginia prohibit feeding data to
federal agencies for civil matters like
abortion or protest tracking. Arkansas
caps retention at a whopping 150 days,
but Flock's national system often
bypasses these rules.
They might use state-specific filters
for how you search for content in that
state, but they still collect and
aggregate and may very well store that
data out of state in violation of
state's rules. Now, as I lay out in my
book, Truth and Persuasion in a digital
revolution, we are deep into
hyperreality now, where the simulation
of safety feels more real than the
actual liberty that it devours.
Algorithms curate our fear, sell us back
the cure, and they call it progress.
These mechanical ravens in the sky,
Flock Safety, create a hyperreal
security that feels more concrete than
your own right to move without being
logged like livestock. Heck, your phone
tracks you all day long anyway, so why
not give up that little bit of security.
But, the problem here with Flock
surveillance is not simply that it could
track your movements. It's that it can
store your movements. It's that those
movements can be accessed by anybody.
And with that frequent access to your
movements, it can be used and sold
to the highest bidder. Many of you gave
over your DNA to 23 and me. You might
now be giving over your movements to
Flock. And how are they doing it? By
getting your hard-earned tax dollars to
pay for surveillance systems. And
through that, what we will get is less
police on the street, less community
policing, less interaction with the
public, and instead, we will have the
surveillance system sit behind cameras,
wait for crime to occur, and then track
people who commit it. We're getting much
closer to Minority Report. They might
even track those movements to try to
predict crime in the first place. Crime
prediction is something that is already
happening and will continue to happen as
Flock gets this data. Now, even if it
doesn't retain the data and can't use it
for a specific citizen, there's still a
problem. Flock is tracking the movements
of individuals. It's tracking our
patterns. It is using those patterns to
be able to market to us, to be able to
tell the police where to put a police
presence. And when that happens, we have
a national independent company deciding
what data our police force gets and
potentially even selling it to other
data aggregators such as Palantir. All
in all, this adds to Peter Thiel's data
picture. If you're curious about Peter
Thiel, I've done a couple of videos
about him already, and this gives him
eyes in the sky on virtually all
Americans if Flock surveillance becomes
ubiquitous. So, what can you do? If your
municipality is considering Flock, you
probably should write your lawmakers to
discuss that. You should probably attend
some meetings to find out what kind of
contract they have with Flock and what
they intend to do with this data. And if
you're the kind of person who says,
"Hey, I don't mind a camera. I have a
Ring doorbell. I don't mind a camera
watching me because it might eventually
protect me." Just ask yourself whether
that camera has the ability to stop
crime before it happens or whether it is
a false sense of security leading to
surveillance but very little crime
prevention. At the end of the day, you
get to decide your relationship with
technology. You get to decide whether or
not you like Flock, but we should be a
part of the conversation, and that's
what episodes like this are designed to
foster. I'd love to hear some of your
comments about your community and
whether or not it uses Flock, about if
you've had any interactions with Flock,
and if you've attended any community
meetings related to Flock. I think that
a great discussion in the member section
or the comment section would help a lot
of other people understand this
technology and their relationship. If
you're curious about how I personally
feel, I feel that these surveillance
systems are a false sense of security. I
feel that law enforcement and community
should be banding together to stop crime
instead of just putting cameras up in
the air. This is nothing new. I lived in
England when they started putting
cameras in the sky and realized that it
didn't stop any crime whatsoever. And in
fact, that video was almost useless in
figuring out when crime would occur. I
think Flock is one of those technologies
we buy, we don't understand, we use, and
we pretend helps us, but it just
continues to close the noose of mass
data surveillance around us. Thank you
for joining me today on this episode of
Off Air. Make sure you click like and
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support the show. It takes a lot to put
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certainly, if you'd like to hear about
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[music] I read it, and remember those
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first and may result in a new episode of
Off Air if the topic is something that
we are able to cover. Thank you so much
for joining me today on Off Air. I'm Ron
Chapman, and I look forward to seeing
you next time.