{"slug": "the-great-flock-hunt", "title": "The Great Flock Hunt", "summary": "Flock Safety's network of AI-powered surveillance cameras has become a major political issue ahead of the 2026 election, drawing bipartisan opposition from figures like Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, who introduced the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act in July. The company, founded in 2017, dominates the Automated License Plate Reader market, leasing cameras to cities and homeowners' associations, but critics argue the interconnected system violates privacy rights.", "body_md": "# The Great Flock Hunt\n\nC ampus security is on to us. For the past 30 minutes, I’ve been doing laps around a satellite campus of a small Virginia university in the back of a conspicuously rigged-out Toyota Tacoma, a fat disc-shaped antenna magnet-clamped onto its roof and connected to a thick tube of cables that run into a black box by my side. In the front seat are two professional security researchers – call them hackers, if you want – who go by their online pseudonyms Koko and Hedge. Koko and Hedge’s work is all above board, but they still ask me to keep their legal names off the internet. In return, they agree to take me hunting for the cybersecurity world’s greatest enemy: the AI-powered mass-surveillance cameras that have popped up all over America.\n\nWe spot our prey, but still need to get the shot — and we’ve already been passed by one city police squad car and another campus cop. Hedge is riding shotgun and navigating, neck bent over two iPhones, the glow lighting his face from below. Koko is watching for cops and keeping an eye on the numbers flashing on a small, homemade device fastened to his windshield. “OK, around this corner,” Hedge says. “We’re going to pass it on the right.” In the back seat, I twist around, trying to line up my phone camera with a night vision scope Koko brought along.\n\nKoko crawls through the intersection. I get the target – a Flock Safety surveillance camera perched above the sidewalk on a long black pole – in frame just as its infrared flash goes off. It’s invisible to the naked eye, but on the night vision scope it’s a blinding pulse of white light. I catch it all on video — but it also catches us: the truck I’m in, the license plate, and almost certainly me, glued to the back window, phone in hand.\n\nOver the past few months, Flock Safety has gone from a little-known, quietly-expanding security camera company into public enemy number one for a vast political coalition. Flock’s critics, which include left-wing anarchists, suburban soccer moms, libertarian computer dorks, and hardline far-right secessionists, have all claimed that the company’s nationwide network of interconnected surveillance cameras violate Americans’ right to privacy in new and frightening ways. That grassroots anger has, in turn, made Flock a defining issue in the 2026 election cycle.\n\n“Little cameras, watching your every move, to collect information about you without you even noticing,” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said in a new campaign ad on the website X. “That’s all been part of a regime that’s been pushed by, well, this guy: who happens to be the guy I’m running against – Mike Rogers.”\n\nOpposition to Flock has also crossed party lines. In July, Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett introduced the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, a single-page, simple bill that would bar the federal government from “purchasing or accessing” any “mass surveillance” technology, specifically mentioning [Flock cameras](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/flock-cameras/) and devices that use biometric or facial recognition features to profile people.\n\n“We’ve gotta put some guardrails in,” Rep. Burchett tells me over the phone. “You want to follow my ass, get a dadgum warrant.”\n\nFlock, which has been around since 2017, primarily makes cameras known as Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, which it then leases to cities, towns, and homeowners’ organizations, promising their clients an always-on, easily-searchable database of surveillance footage for stopping crime. There are many companies who make ALPRs, many of which offer similar services, but in the past few years, Flock has come to dominate both the market for this technology and the spotlight that it now commands. In some form or another, license-plate capture technology has been around for at least a decade — but privacy experts and security researchers have warned that the Orwellian capabilities and slap-dash vulnerabilities of Flock’s cameras represent a new, drastic security threat for everyday citizens like you and me.\n\nFlock claims its cameras focus only on vehicles — but critics say they’re collecting so much more: giving the government tools to analyze identifying features on vehicles and pedestrians alike, creating profiles that can log everything from a bumper sticker on a car to the color of clothing a jogger wears. That data is held by a private company, which sells it to whoever is willing to pay. And once they have it, anything goes. Across America, rogue cops have used Flock data to [stalk ex-wives and girlfriends](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-police-officers-used-vast-network-cameras-spy-their-exes/), held families at gunpoint after faulty readings, and kept[ one woman in jail for 13 days before admitting that the cameras had led them astray](https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/one-alpr-camera-hit-eight-180933450.html). Mistakes happen in police work, of course, but security researchers also say Flock is also barely bothering to secure their cameras: they’re easy to hack and exploit by anyone with the right gear. All this adds up to a systemic invasion of privacy that is causing sane and rational experts to use words in interviews like “panopticon” and “big brother.” The future is here, and our laws have yet to catch up. Flock did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent by *Rolling Stone.*\n\n“In the old days, it was just impossible to do these things,” says Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who leads the privacy organization’s surveillance cases. “You couldn’t follow someone around 24 hours a day. That was just physically impossible. This technology makes that possible. It changes the relationship of surveillance to people in a really fundamental way.”\n\nCrocker says Flock and other interconnected ALPRs give the government an enormously powerful tool. There are at least 131,000 ALPR cameras in the U.S., over 80 percent of which are owned by Flock. If you have access to Flock’s system, you can plug in a license plate number or even a description of a vehicle and see footage from many of those cameras, effectively telling you almost everywhere their car has been, and sometimes even who was inside it. You can tell what time they arrived somewhere and what time they left. Flock makes all of this information available to its customers at the push of a button, with no warrant or effort required, even if the target isn’t suspected of any crime at all.\n\n“It’s easy for everyone to understand how invasive that could be,” Crocker says. “People get, intuitively, that no one is immune from this sort of surveillance.”\n\nAnd people, broadly, are pissed: hating Flock is one of the hottest trends on social media. Content creators from across the political spectrum are making guides on the best tools to cut down Flock cameras, blasting them off poles with shotguns, and dissecting every misstep the company makes.\n\nAmerica’s Great Flock Hunt began almost exactly one year ago, when Benn Jordan, a musician and technology YouTuber released a video titled “[Breaking the Creepy AI in Police Cameras](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ).” In Jordan’s first video about Flock, he spent much of its runtime figuring out unique ways to fool the cameras’ license plate readers using his own AI programs. But his plain English introduction to what Flock Safety was actually doing is what connected with his audience. Today the video has 3.6 million views.\n\n“It just opened up a rabbit hole that kept going and going,” Jordan tells me. “And it’s still going – now it’s reached critical mass.”\n\nA few months later, he was back with a far more provocative take. Working with a security researcher going by the name GainSec, Jordan showed how Flock’s specific protocols and tech were immensely vulnerable to cyber attacks — some of which would let them tap right into the cameras’ live feeds — in a video called “[We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in 30 Seconds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY).” Jordan and GainSec found unsecured video feeds they could patch right into and watch, vulnerabilities that let them into back doors in Flock’s database and the camera’s code, and even unsecured databases of Flock’s users, down to the names and addresses of police officers using the system.\n\nOnline, the security and hacking world lit up. Here was a company, the consensus went, that was doing almost everything wrong — at the people’s expense.\n\nI started seeing other Flock videos around this time. They came across my feed, at first, through the fringes: [3D-printed gunsmiths](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ghost-guns-homemade-firearms-1235576813/), hard-line anti-fascists, weird black-pilled internet denizens, and even some crunchy far-right secessionists in the Pacific Northwest were suddenly all posting about these little black cameras on aluminum poles. Many of them were posting a map on a site called [DeFlock.org](http://deflock.org/), which showed the United States as an enormous constellation of lights — thousands upon thousands, with every dot on the map representing an ALPR camera. They were *everywhere*. To date, DeFlock has mapped more than 131,000 ALPR cameras in the United States, around 80 percent of which are owned and run by Flock Safety. The map, along with a searchable database called [HaveIBeenFlocked.com](http://haveibeenflocked.com/), are the product of a massive public undertaking by a community of hackers who adapted an old A/V-club hobby into a service for the public good. They call themselves “wardrivers,” and for the past year or more, they’ve been fighting to track down every single Flock device active in the United States.\n\nIN MID-AUGUST, I HOPPED IN A rental car and drove from New York to a suburb of DC in Northern Virginia, to meet Koko, a security consultant, entrepreneur, and dedicated wardriver who agreed to take me Flock hunting for a few days. Koko shows me into his house, where his two friendly cats climb all over a dining room table covered in hard-shell Pelican cases — think a boxy briefcase made of industrial plastic — crammed with electrical gear. One of Koko’s friends, another security researcher named Hedge, is along for the ride as well, tinkering with his own gear when we walk in.\n\nWardriving, they explain, is a relatively simple concept: you pack your car with all the signal-receiving gear you can get and drive around seeing what you catch. Basically every device with a battery or power cable these days is emitting some kind of signal, mostly WiFi or Bluetooth. An extremely simple “wardriving” session, then, would be just traveling along a route and logging the raw number of WiFi and Bluetooth signals you pick up: phones, cameras, computers, cars, et cetera. For some people, that’s the whole hobby — there are online leaderboards of wardrivers competing to put up the most numbers, games that they can play by “capturing” digital territory on real-world maps. Both Koko and Hedge have designed their own specific devices that are tuned to detect Flock cameras as well as other ALPRs and surveillance devices. Doing that is more complex: it requires reading the MAC address — a sort of digital serial number — for a device their gear detects and cross-referencing it with a known list of MAC addresses used by Flock cameras’ manufacturers. (This is in imperfect science. There is one brand of Bluetooth-enabled CPAP machine and certain electric toothbrushes known to have similar MAC addresses to Flock cameras, so sometimes you get false positives if you drive too close to the house of a heavy snorer.)\n\nWhen you get this deep into the hobby, things get a bit more serious. The gear Koko and Hedge are packing – pocket-sized, 3D-printed boxes with tech inside that they call the Marauder and the Biscuit, respectively — can go beyond passive monitoring. They can spoof WiFi networks, clog up bandwidth, mimic AirTag signals, and all kinds of other mischief. At one point, to demonstrate, Hedge taps in a short command to the Biscuit – which is a 3D-printed mini-computer about the size of a hockey puck that pairs with your smartphone. There’s a brief pause, and then *my* phone goes haywire, inundated with Bluetooth signal spam — new Airpods connections, contact requests, an avalanche of popups that make my phone basically unusable until Hedge shuts it off.\n\n“We mess with each other all the time,” Hedge laughs. “Usually when someone’s on the toilet, and we know they’ll be on their phone.”\n\nKoko loves the pranks too, but is serious about what this tech can do. On the way back from DEFCON, a hacking conference he attended in early August, several attendees were pulled off a plane by armed air marshals after they set up a malicious WiFi network while on board their flight home.\n\n“This stuff should be seen no differently than owning a firearm,” Koko says. “It all depends on the person wielding it.”\n\nI take his word for it, seeing as he also has a Glock 19 holstered in the front of his waistband.\n\n“So, anyway,” he says. “Want to go do some wardriving?”\n\nKoko quickly dashes my dreams of watching black-clad hacker gangs scrambling sensors and hacking at Flock poles with skill-saws. That’s definitely going on, somewhere, but most wardrivers, like Koko, keep all their activities strictly above board (at one point, for instance, Koko refused to park in a handicapped spot even though the parking lot we were in was entirely deserted at 11 p.m.). We load up Koko’s truck, a four-door 2023 Toyota Tacoma: Koko gets in the drivers’ seat, clipping the Marauder to the windshield. A bigger version of the same tech sits in the back seat, hooked up to a clunky round antenna on the roof. Koko’s truck only has one bumper sticker, an image of a guillotine that says “MAKE CONSEQUENCES GREAT AGAIN.”\n\nOur first stop is the “most controversial,” Koko says: the Lowes parking lot. There are three Flock cameras there and several other non-Flock police cameras. Activists suspect that Flock’s data has been used to plan immigration raids, which frequently target hardware store parking lots where migrant day-laborers often wait for work. We drive around the lot slowly, parking next to one of the cameras to take some photos and video. It’s late in the day, and our gear isn’t picking up the camera’s signature, even though we can see it right there. This is interesting to Koko — he has a theory that some of Flock’s solar-powered cameras shut down their WiFi and Bluetooth signaling after dark to save power, uploading data only through the cell networks, which are much harder to detect.\n\nStuff like this is all part of the puzzle. It’s what makes it fun for Koko and Hedge, who are in their early 30s. They both make their living primarily through selling the Marauder and Biscuit devices, which are currently selling out as fast as they can make them due to the new influx of privacy-conscious wardrivers. But the mysteries of Flock are also what piss them off: they know better than anyone the kind of data everyday people are giving up to the now-omnipresent cameras in their midst.\n\n“Before, you had more control over the data you put out,” Hedge says. People enjoyed a reasonable amount of privacy in public; they could use cash for purchases and paper tickets for transit. The CCTV footage that did exist was, at best, lazily reviewed by a manager somewhere if and only if there was an incident. Now, he says, the cameras are always on, always taking data. “It’s hard to avoid going to the grocery store.”\n\nKoko and Hedge take me through a couple parking lots and a small condo development that has three new Flock cameras posted right at its entrance. Then we swing back by the house to grab some more gear. As night falls, Koko busts out a military ballistic helmet with a night vision scope attached — crucial for picking up Flock cameras’ infrared flash. We then head to a satellite campus of George Mason University, which the DeFlock map shows us is infested with Flock cameras. Koko wants to test another theory: Flock claims that their cameras are built to collect data from cars, not people, but he is pretty sure they’ll go off even if a person walks past. We do laps around the campus, recording the cameras going off as the truck drives by. Eventually, we find one pointed right at the sidewalk, and hop out. We wait for there to be no cars in sight, and then Koko and Hedge walk past. They make it about five yards past the camera, next to a row of electric scooters, before the IR flash goes off. We repeat the process with one person, then two. The camera snapped us all. Eventually, a campus security cruiser rolls past. We take that as our cue to leave.\n\nIT’S ODD, STANDING IN FRONT of these cameras. I’ve been on TV plenty of times; as a journalist, I’m vaguely used to being treated as a quasi-public figure, albeit an extremely non-famous one. But it’s another thing entirely to stand in front of a lens that you know is recording you on behalf of a private company — not just to make sure you don’t swipe a candy bar at the self-checkout, but to keep a detailed record, if it can, of who you are and how you move about the world. Because we’ve already seen how much power that data conveys. Just last week, [ Wired reported](https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/) that Flock had developed a new AI tool for tracking not just vehicles but their specific drivers, matching them with known “associates.” Flock did not dispute any of the capabilities\n\n*Wired*described. In July,\n\n[404 Media reported](https://www.404media.co/how-cops-use-flock-to-track-people-not-cars/)that police departments around the country were running Flock searches for physical descriptions of people, such as “person on skateboard,” or “woman wearing grey shirt, blond hair, black shorts.” Police have\n\n[used Flock data to search a man’s car on suspicion of possessing marijuana](https://www.404media.co/cops-used-flock-to-track-a-man-across-state-lines-to-create-pretext-to-search-his-car-for-weed/)after tracking him traveling between Michigan, where weed is legal, and Wisconsin, where it is not. Local, state, and federal law enforcement are\n\n[all reportedly tracking social media users who have posted anti-Flock content](https://www.404media.co/the-government-is-monitoring-anti-flock-tiktok-and-instagram-accounts/). Flock’s CEO, Garret Langley,\n\n[once called DeFlock, the camera-mapping website](https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/flock-safety-ceo-calls-citizens-130000971.html), a “terroristic organization whose primary motivation is chaos.”\n\n“The fact that they don’t have to get a warrant for [running a search of Flock’s data] is really shocking to me,” Crocker, the EFF lawyer, says. “The law has a hard time keeping up.”\n\nFlock, for its part, claims that its product is solving crimes and saving lives. That’s hard to refute. The technology is clearly powerful — in the right hands, in the right situation, there’s no doubt that an ever-vigilant surveillance net would stop horrific things from happening. Like a gun, it depends on who wields it. The argument against Flock, right now, is that a loophole in the American legal system has allowed a group of tech guys to invent a really, really big gun, which they have then loaned to the government with few restrictions and oversight. That’s not how this country is supposed to work, Koko thinks. He joined the Navy straight out of high school because he wanted to serve his country. He’s proud of that. The Navy taught him cryptography and signals intelligence and crammed years of computer science education into a few focused training units, skills he used on behalf of his country and still wants to use to help the people who live in it.\n\n“I feel like the presence of these cameras kind of undermines the idea that people are entitled to that freedom and their privacy,” Koko says.\n\nThe day after the university hunt, we’re talking all this over back in Koko’s office. I notice a post on my phone: Flock Safety, announcing a new slate of privacy and accountability measures. Everyone crowds around Koko’s PC to pore over the statement, trying to puzzle out what the new “default retention period” for camera data means. Koko and Hedge aren’t impressed.\n\n“I mean, this is too little too late,” Koko says.\n\nWe pile back in the truck. There’s another subdivision nearby with several cameras Koko and Hedge haven’t been able to pick up. They’re on the DeFlock map, and you can see them with your eyes, but they’re not showing up on the Marauder or Biscuit — perhaps some evidence that Flock is changing some of their tech, or has systems that the two researchers aren’t familiar with.\n\n“I like the idea of understanding something that we’re not fully meant to understand,” Koko says.\n\nOn the way back, we drive through a quiet intersection with one camera, facing south, already on the map. As we pull up at the stop sign, I spot something else. “Wait,” I say. “Isn’t that another one?” There’s a second camera, pointing north, affixed to the side of a telephone pole. “Is that on DeFlock?” Hedge asks. We pull out our phones to check. It’s not. Hedge taps away, dropping a pin in the map, putting the new camera in the system, rotating the icon so it shows the exact angle the lens is facing. He zooms out, and the new camera becomes another dot, one of two at that intersection, of a dozen in that town, of hundreds in that part of the state. If you go outside right now and drive around, chances are, you might find one, too. It’s a small comfort, I think, to at least know where these cameras are, to be able to see them for yourself. After all, they’ve already seen you.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-great-flock-hunt", "canonical_source": "https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/flock-surveillance-camera-backlash-1235613132/", "published_at": "2026-08-31 13:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-31 13:23:39.996810+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-ethics", "computer-vision"], "entities": ["Flock Safety", "Abdul El-Sayed", "Mike Rogers", "Tim Burchett", "Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-great-flock-hunt", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-great-flock-hunt.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-great-flock-hunt.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-great-flock-hunt.jsonld"}}