Blog Post # 1
“He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.” - Michael Foucault
“Fewer officers, tighter budgets, higher demands. Flock helps agencies do more with less by connecting public and private partners nationwide.” - Flock for Law Enforcement
Flock Safety, a private company that provides automated license plate readers (ALPRs), has built a vast surveillance system across the United States. Flock coordinates an interconnected camera constellation to capture passing vehicles and convert those images into searchable data. Increasingly, Flock has partnered with local law enforcement agencies who are able to use that information to determine vehicle location and reconstruct someone’s movements over time. With limited budgets and fewer officers, this technology offers clear benefits. Flock is able to help police departments locate stolen vehicles, find missing persons, and track individuals accused of criminal activity.
As of August 2026, Flock claims more than 120,000 cameras covering more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 6,000 communities capturing 20 billion plate scan per month. This system complicates the traditional clear distinction between public and private surveillance. While many Flock cameras are purchased or maintained by agreements with local governments, homeowners associations, and other private organizations, law enforcement may be able to access the data collected. As a consequence, a citizen can be monitored by a system they did not vote to create, operated by a private company they do not belong to, and searched by government officials that can misuse it.
Across the country, law enforcement officers have been accused of and charged with misusing Flock systems. Flock responded by announcing additional safeguards, including expanded automated reviews for suspicious searches. While these reforms are needed, they underscore the core problem: such an advanced surveillance system requires increased responsibility and regulation.
Criticism against Flock has been growing: More than 150 cities have rejected Flock cameras or other license plate readers from their jurisdictions, and opposition is growing across the political divide, from Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis (“If you want to get in your car and you want to go down to Buc-ee’s in St. Augustine, it’s really none of the government’s damn business if you’re doing that, right?”) to Vermont Independent Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders (“We cannot allow America to become a surveillance state where a handful of AI oligarchs profit by giving the government the power to track our every movement”).
The controversy surrounding Flock is not about whether police should be allowed to use cameras, as surveillance has always been a part of criminal investigations. But the scale and ease of modern surveillance technology has changed the calculation. In the past, a police officer investigating a robbery would have asked businesses for security footage, interviewed local witnesses, and physically searched an area. Flock changes this process by allowing an officer to enter a license plate and immediately identify where that vehicle has traveled. What once required significant time and resources can now be accomplished with a few clicks.
These advantages are exactly why the technology is attractive to law enforcement, but it also demonstrates the underlying citizen concerns of constant surveillance. In his work on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, Michael Foucault describes a prison in which prisoners are under constant threat of surveillance, but they can never know if they are being watched at any given moment.
The power of this system comes not from the active supervision itself but from the very possibility of being observed; those in the prison could be watched at any moment by anyone. Eventually, the potential of being surveilled is enough to influence behavior.
Flock creates a similar possibility in our own lives. Most people whose license plates are captured are not suspects, and they may never know when their movements are being recorded, searched, or shared. The question is no longer simply whether someone is being watched, it is whether they can know when, by whom, and for what purpose they are being watched.
The Panopticon no longer watches us from the prison tower, it sits on the telephone pole of every corner.
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