r/FlockSurveillance

Something tells me that the authorities will not be using these cameras to identify the Patriot Front cowards who rolled into DC to intimidate the populace. Likely to avoid self incrimination.

The ACLU has laid out a detailed case that Flock Safety, one of the country’s most widely used automatic license plate reader companies, has a documented pattern of misleading the very governments and communities it sells surveillance technology to. The clearest example happened in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in April 2026, when a city council member directly asked Flock’s chief information security officer whether the company’s system could create a heat map tracking where a vehicle had driven over time. Flock’s representative said no, the council approved the contract that same night, and by the next morning the city learned the statement was false, since Flock later admitted its system does generate exactly that kind of tracking heat map for up to a full month of vehicle movement.

The fallout was immediate and unusually swift. Oshkosh’s city council reconvened within 24 hours and unanimously voted to revoke the contract it had just approved, with Deputy Mayor Joe Stephenson saying he did not know how the council could govern if Flock told “untruths, mistruths, exaggerated truths,” and Mayor Matt Mugerauer bluntly stating he did not want to work with a company that gives bad information. Flock’s response was to call its false statement “one small misconception” and “a minor nuance,” while complaining it had not been given a chance to explain itself, a response the ACLU says reflects a broader corporate habit of treating factual misrepresentations as public relations problems rather than serious credibility failures.

According to the ACLU, Oshkosh was far from an isolated case. In Colorado, Flock’s CEO publicly denied the company had any federal contracts after a police chief raised concerns about federal access to local license data, only for Flock to later admit it did have pilot agreements with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security. The company also published a blog titled “Does Flock Share Data With ICE? No,” despite knowing ICE could access its data indirectly through local police partners, and after reports surfaced that Texas law enforcement used Flock data to track someone who sought an abortion in Illinois, the company rolled out a new oversight tool it claimed would significantly reduce misuse, a claim an ACLU of Massachusetts investigation found could be defeated by officers simply typing vague words like “investigation” or even nonsense like “hehehe” into a required search field. The ACLU says Flock has even falsely claimed to have partnered with the ACLU itself on ALPR legislation in New Mexico and system design in Illinois, claims the organization flatly denies ever happening.

FLOCK is Flock Safety, the private company whose license plate cameras blanket Florida. Every pass gets logged — plate, time, place — and sixty million reads later, your local sheriff has a searchable map of where everyone's been, no warrant required. F.U.C.K. (the Fixed Urban Capture Kit) is my answer: an open-source pipeline that runs the same logic in reverse — facial recognition, public data only — pointed exclusively at the politicians and sheriffs who authorized the dragnet. If tracking your movements without a warrant is fine, it's fine for them too. They built the doctrine. We just changed the target.

Which brings us to Chatrie.

The Supreme Court just ruled that pulling your location history is a Fourth Amendment search. Chatrie v. United States. Six to three. Kagan wrote it.

So, on the Fourth of July — because it's a Fourth Amendment audit and the calendar was right there — I filed synchronized records requests on Florida's three loudest sheriffs: Tony, Judd, Mina.

I asked each of them for two documents. Together, they form a subtraction problem.

The full play drops on Monday.

It. Is. Glorious.

Interesting