Key Points
- 1.Flock Safety is an 8.4 billion dollar surveillance startup that uses automated license plate readers to track vehicles across the United States.
- 2.The Falcon camera runs machine learning inference on the edge using a 2017 Android system-on-module and an LTE modem.
- 3.Law enforcement agencies can use Flock Safety to query vehicle movements and build complete location histories without warrants.
- 4.The third-party doctrine established by the Supreme Court allows police to access voluntarily shared data without violating the Fourth Amendment.
- 5.Grassroots projects like Deflock and local community opposition are pushing back against the installation and use of automated license plate readers.
Summary
Flock Safety is an 8.4 billion dollar police technology startup that began in 2017 by engineer Garrett Langley. Frustrated by unsolved crimes in his neighborhood due to missing license plate numbers, Langley built an automated license plate reader and marketed it to homeowners associations before expanding to police departments. Today, Flock cameras operate in thousands of communities, scanning billions of plates every month. The company claims its technology helps solve twenty percent of reported crime in America, though independent analysis of studies like the one in Vacaville, California, indicates that auto theft drops occurred before cameras were installed.
The flagship camera, called the Falcon, is an engineering design that functions as an Android solar powered spy device. It uses an Open-Q 624 system-on-module from 2017, a NimbeLink Skywire LTE cellular modem, infrared night vision, and a motion-triggered camera. Rather than streaming video to the cloud, the Falcon performs machine learning inference directly on the edge. When a car passes, the device captures stills and generates what Flock calls a vehicle fingerprint, logging the make, model, color, dents, rims, roof racks, and stickers. Only the images and structured metadata are transmitted over LTE to Flock's cloud database, keeping bandwidth low and the hardware cheap enough to deploy extensively.
Once in the database, vehicle scans are constantly checked against hotlists for stolen vehicles and Amber alerts. When a wanted car passes a camera, local police receive push notifications with real-time location tracking. The database aggregates scans to map where individuals sleep, work, visit, and park. Because departments can opt into nationwide sharing, officers in small towns can query travel histories across all fifty states.
This mass surveillance operates through a legal loophole known as the third-party doctrine. Established by Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s, the doctrine dictates that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily turned over to third parties, meaning the government does not need a warrant to access it. While the Flock dashboard requires officers to input a case number and select an offense type before running a search, audits have revealed numerous instances of misuse, such as sheriffs and police chiefs tracking ex-girlfriends, family members, or federal immigration targets.
In response to privacy concerns, backlash is growing across the country. Cities like Austin and Evanston have voted to remove their Flock cameras entirely, and a federal lawsuit in Virginia challenges the surveillance as a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Additionally, an open source project called Deflock has mapped the locations of tens of thousands of Flock cameras across the United States using OpenStreetMap data, helping communities track and document local surveillance infrastructure.
How Flock Safety Cameras Work
Flock Safety uses small solar-powered cameras called Falcon mounted on poles to capture vehicle license plates and images. Instead of streaming video to the cloud, the camera runs machine learning inference at the edge to capture vehicle stills and build a vehicle fingerprint consisting of the make, model, color, dents, and bumper stickers.
Data Aggregation and Law Enforcement Access
Every car passing a Flock camera is recorded in a database and compared against hotlists for stolen vehicles and Amber alerts. Law enforcement agencies across the country can query this nationwide database to track vehicle movements, allowing officers to reconstruct where a car has been without needing a warrant.
Legal Justifications and Pushback
The legal foundation enabling this surveillance relies on the third-party doctrine from the 1970s, which states individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in data shared with third parties. However, a growing backlash is forming, with cities like Austin and Evanston voting to remove their cameras, and open-source projects like Deflock tracking camera locations.
Worth watching for
Developers, technologists, and individuals interested in privacy, surveillance technology, and law enforcement tools.
- surveillance
- privacy
- machine-learning
- law-enforcement
- security