What Flock cameras really see – and how

Police departments across the U. S. are installing Flock cameras, saying the surveillance devices help deter theft and solve crimes, like helping find stolen property and missing people. But as the technology and its use by federal agencies https://www.npr.org/2025/11/07/nx-s1-5587724/some-sanctuary-states-discover-feds-mining-local-license-plate-data expands, a handful of people have taken matters into their own hands https://www.npr.org/2026/08/21/nx-s1-5939851/flock-cameras-police-block-surveillance-vandalize. A hacker collective ripped down a Flock camera and made a copy of the software inside for investigative journalists at 404 Media and Wired. We talk to one of those journalists, Joseph Cox https://www.404media.co/author/joseph-cox/, about what he and his colleagues found, how the data is being used, why some residents are pushing back against the cameras and the future of the technology. Interested in more science and technology news? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Planet Visionaries. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers creating real climate solutions. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Where I live, there are 23. In Los Angeles, the nearest city to me, there are at least 992. In your city, there might be zero, 10, maybe more than 100. Thing is, they just keep putting up more of them. Yes, I am talking about Flock cameras.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Flock cameras are a type of automatic license plate reader, or ALPR. And these are stationed all across the country, cities, towns, you know, small communities, crossroads, everywhere, basically.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  This is Joseph Cox. He's an investigative reporter for 404 Media, which covers surveillance, technology, cybercrime, and how they all intersect. And he told us, these cameras don't just keep track of license plates.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  They constantly scan the license plate, brand, color, model of every single vehicle that drives past them. And they then make that data available to law enforcement to search without a warrant.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  When Flock Safety was founded in 2017, it was really more of a Ring camera type operation. The primary product was these personal household surveillance cams that you could set up yourself. And they were meant to catch things like package theft, maybe, or robbery, or carjackings. But these days-

• 1:41Speaker 02

  It has expanded beyond that. Now, it is a nationwide network of cameras that is used to combat all sorts of things, from kidnappings, to missing persons, to murders. It really is the entire spectrum of crimes that these are now being used to try to solve.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  In part because Flock's network is national.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  It is not like a cop in Texas only searches the cameras in their town, or in their jurisdiction, or even their state. The way that Flock is designed is that they will actually search cameras in California as well, or Illinois, or Virginia, anywhere around the country on this national network. And that fundamentally changes the quality of this surveillance, and how it works, and the impacts of it.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Joseph recently got a very rare look inside one of these cameras. Last month, a hacker collective ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a copy of the data inside it, and then made that data available to journalists at 404 Media and Wired. Together with Wired's investigative reporter, Druv Marotra, Joseph analyzed the data to figure out what Flock tracks, how they track it, and what kind of information is stored. And the scale of what they found is surprising.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  This really is a constant form of surveillance. It is not like the occasional photo, the occasional video clip. It is very much tracking every single vehicle that goes by, and, in many cases, people as well.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  So today on the show, the Flock Surveillance State. What are Flock cameras up to? How are local and federal agencies using that data? And should this kind of blanket surveillance even be legal? I'm Nate Rot, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:58Speaker 01

  Okay, Joseph, so you got a very rare look inside one of these Flock cameras, by which we made a hacker collective literally tore down a Flock camera and copied the code that was inside and provided it to you. Can you kind of start by telling us how this camera works? Like, what happens when something's in its view?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So when a vehicle drives by a Flock camera, it detects it, and it then takes a very quick series of images of this vehicle. In our analysis, we found that a vehicle going past typically has something like 28 images taken, but that can stretch up to 100 images, presumably to make sure that, you know, if one of the images is blurry, for whatever reason, it's actually going to be useful. And it can also tell sort of, maybe the speed it's going, and the direction it's obviously going, and that sort of thing. What Flock then does is it isolates the interesting things about that vehicle. Primarily, that is the license plate. So you can see it detect it and draw a little

• 6:02Speaker 02

  rectangle around the license plate. It also does this with potentially interesting stuff on the vehicle, like a bumper sticker, or we saw, I think, an American flag as well. So it takes all of those images, it saves them, and it then sends them off to Flock's servers for more processing. And it does this essentially instantaneously, you know, in the blink of an eye.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  So Flock bills itself as an automatic license plate reader, right? But what they're building, from what you're describing right now, and what I read in your article, is that it's kind of more than that. Can you tell me what kind of additional information they're collecting through these photos?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yes. So Flock definitely goes beyond license plates. They will get the color of the vehicle, its model, its brand, whether there's any damage to the vehicle, such as, oh, there's a strange dent on the back right bumper, or something-

• 6:57Speaker 01

  They got a lot of that on my car.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  There's just this database of people's, like, really stupid crashes.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're like, this guy really needs to see a mechanic. And you're like, I know.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  So all of that is collected, just in the same way the license plates are, essentially. But the reason that's interesting for Flock and for its law enforcement customers is that cops can search Flock not just by license plate, but also by what they call free-form searches, which is basically, you know, natural language. They can type in English into Flock, saying, show me a red Toyota that has a Trump sticker on the back, or show me a blue Fiat or whatever with the American flag. And the reason a cop might want to do this

• 7:50Speaker 02

  is because maybe they don't have the license plate of the vehicle, but a witness-

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a witness description.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Right. There was a hit and run or something. And they were like, oh, yeah, it was really bad. And the red car went this way. This data collection by Flock means that cops can still do that sort of thing. Also, the flip side is that it means that all of your dents in your car are being recorded and sent off somewhere.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  So you mentioned earlier that it scans more than just cars, right? It also, you found, can detect people, though right now, it doesn't do facial recognition.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. What happens with Flock is a couple of things. In the camera software we looked at, and this specific camera, it was detecting people on motorbikes, right? And it drew a box around a bike, and it drew a box around a person. Flock also has these other cameras, which are much more focused on people.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  People. And a few months ago, at this point, we found that a bunch of them were exposed to the open internet. And we were watching live flock camera video feeds. And we would watch as the camera would clearly identify a person, track them, and then zoom in on them to the point where we could see what was on people's phones. That's how powerful some of these cameras are. We could see them scrolling. The last thing when it comes to sort of people searching and flock is that police can search for specific people in that they can type, show me all of the footage with the man in the orange hoodie from this day. Now, flock would say, well, that's not facial recognition. That's not a specific person.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  I would counter that, I think, with, you're looking for a specific person who's wearing an orange hoodie, even if it's not facial recognition.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, what, what are these cameras that are doing these live feeds on the internet of people?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  So those flock cameras are called Condor cameras, and they're slightly different to the license plate reader ones in that they are much more about live videos. And I, I stress the difference between those cameras because they do have different capabilities, and not all cities have both. You know, the vast majority of cities or police departments have just the license plate readers. Some have these more powerful Condor cameras as well. But the end of the day is that flock sells both of these cameras, and a lot of people are buying both of these cameras.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  A lot of people being like law enforcement?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Primarily law enforcement, yes. Or, you know, cities as well. Yeah, yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  I know there's a lot of controversy around flock right now, but there are still companies that are actively trying to get involved with some of the surveillance footage that they're creating, right? Some had offered to do facial recognition. Can you tell us more about that?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yes. So the company that is offering to sort of add facial recognition to flock cameras is called Vidismo. I believe that's how you pronounce it. And their idea is that they are closing a gap that they think flock has in that they believe cops want facial recognition on these cameras, or more broadly, flock doesn't offer it. So Vidismo says, we are going to find that gap in the market, and we're going to close that gap, and we're going to make that technology ourselves. And my co-founder, Jason, I think, put it really, really well in that you can have a surveillance company draw a line in the sand, you know, we're not going to do facial recognition, we're not going to do XYZ.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  That does not stop another company coming in and attempting it. And that's what's happening here, where Vidismo is crossing that line when flock is not prepared to do so.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I'm curious, like, flock owns this data, right? They own these images, they own, I can see you're already, maybe not.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  I will, I'll put, I'll just say flock really stresses that law enforcement owns the data. They say, we are the collector, we're the processor, it's not up to us to decide how you use this technology, even if that technology has been used in a way that, you know, scares a lot of people.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Like, how, how does that work? It's just, any police officer with this information can access it?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So to use flock in a practical way, a law enforcement officer will log into the portal, basically a website, right, where they can access this data. They will type in a license plate, or maybe they'll do a free form search, like man in orange hoodie or whatever. Then they're shown the results. That's it. They don't have to go to a judge. They don't have to get a warrant. They don't have to get any form of court order. They don't even really need approval from, like, their superiors. You access the system and you use it. To be fair to flock, they do heavily audit the system. Every single search

• 12:54Speaker 02

  is logged, and officers are asked to provide a reason. So we will regularly get these large spreadsheets of all of the searches their police department has done on a flock camera, and it will be missing persons, carjacking, loitering, sometimes drunken behavior or DUI, right up to, you know, murder suspect or investigation, a shooting. Then the stuff that we're particularly interested in, where it will say something like HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of ICE, or it will say ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or sometimes it will say immigration.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Whoa, okay.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Yes. So in 2025, we at 404 Media published two stories that have triggered this national conversation going on about flock cameras. The first is that we found local cops were doing lookups in flock for immigration and customs enforcement. And this was during the very public surges of ICE activity around the country.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  The other one is that we found a Texas cop searched the flock network for a woman who self-administered an abortion. And of course, that came after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Privacy activists and civil rights experts have long warned that in the wake of that overturning, we're going to see more surveillance of people seeking reproductive healthcare. And we showed that's exactly what is happening. Basically, any sort of reason you could think that a cop might use this system, they probably actually have done that.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Right. There really is a range. I think there was one story I remember from 404 Media about cops looking up their exes.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  So the Institute for Justice, which is a civil rights law group, they compiled a bunch of local media reports that showed the cops were quite regularly looking up their ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, that sort of thing, stalking them, essentially.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Where do you think this goes next?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Well, hmm. I think that some lawmakers want to ban or restrict this technology. I don't think that will happen. The value to law enforcement is too great. Some civil rights groups are currently litigating this, including EFF, Institute for Justice, the ACLU. Their main question is whether you should need a warrant to query this data. And they're arguing that in court, that when you blanket a town in these surveillance cameras, that does shift the quality of the surveillance, and that should require a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. That is the next big conversation point. I think it's going to take a while, because courts take forever, obviously, you know, and court cases take

• 15:47Speaker 02

  a very, very long time.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  I understand that other people are also trying to map where these flock cameras are. I think that's one of the first Google results you get now when you search for flock cameras, a flock camera map. Why do you think people are working to publicize and share this information right now?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  I think that communities want to know whether flock cameras are in their neighborhoods or not. This is a very, very basic question. I think when you are subject to surveillance, when your neighborhood does buy surveillance technology, people want to know, well, have I swept up in this? Are people I care about swept up in this? People want to know whether there is a flock camera stationed, you know, at the end of their neighborhood, or the cul-de-sac, or their suburb, or city, or whatever. I think for the vast majority of people, it is just about getting information so they can make informed decisions as a community.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Joseph, thank you so much, man, for bringing us this reporting, and look forward to hearing what you guys publish next.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. I'm Nate Rot. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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