What should you do when local governments blindly hand over the keys to the Fourth Amendment by installing Flock Safety poles? You look to Dayton, Ohio, where city workers ended up smothering their own cameras with trash bags in a move that’s simultaneously symbolic and ultraefficient.
Those who don’t yet know about this company can be sure that it knows a lot about you. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the invasion of privacy: “Flock Safety provides ALPR (Automatic License Plate Reader) technology to thousands of law enforcement agencies. The company installs cameras throughout their jurisdictions, and these cameras photograph every car that passes, documenting the license plate, color, make, model and other distinguishing characteristics.”
The ACLU of Massachusetts warns in its new resource guide: “Law enforcement can track drivers’ real-time and historical location information. In other words, they can see exactly where you’ve been and where you’re going. And they don’t even need a warrant.”
If that sounds eerily familiar, it may be due to Flock catching some heat last year after 404 Media reported that police in the Lone Star State utilized Flock’s nationwide network to search nearly 90,000 cameras, including many deployed in Massachusetts, to hunt a woman who skipped Texas for abortion care. That development along with other privacy concerns spurred Cambridge to end its Flock contract, with municipal leaders saying that “two cameras were installed by their technicians … without the City’s awareness … following an outstanding work order that should have been canceled when the City originally deactivated the cameras and account.”
Flock has flouted rules in other places too. According to the Dayton Daily News, public workers there had to resort to placing “bags over the city’s cameras.” The article continues …
“This follows [Dayton’s] suspension of use of its Flock cameras … after realizing its data was being scanned for immigration reasons, in violation of city policy. A Dayton Daily News investigation found other area police departments allow their data to be accessed for immigration purposes.”
Outrage over Flock spiked in Ohio after an announcement last month that an unpermitted back door in Dayton’s system “resulted in more than 7,000 searches related to immigration enforcement made by outside agencies.” But despite these and other revelations, not everyone is bagging Flock. In the commonwealth, the company is growing on multiple fronts.
The City of Boston entered a pilot contract with the company in 2024, while the cameras are also in Brookline and Watertown and about a hundred other Mass municipalities. In the latter, as well as in neighboring Waltham where police procured 16 Flock Safety cams at an annual cost of $3,000 per unit, the lack of any real oversight process for funding the equipment caused a major rift among city councilors and calls for reform from the public.
There’s still a flockload of momentum coming down the Mass Pike, much of which can be traced back to Beacon Hill. Flock Group, Inc., the parent of this fully realized Big Brother, spent $60,000 in 2024 lobbying state lawmakers on matters regarding law enforcement technology. Last year, it doubled down, dropping $120,000.
And of course, this sort of sophisticated mass surveillance is all the rage among tech investors. Flock Safety has a $7.5 billion valuation, and last year the burgeoning behemoth opened a 50,000-square-foot drone lab in Georgia. The company also has a new Boston office in Fort Point that “will be home to roles across sales, engineering, customer success, and beyond, with plans to add 150 net new jobs in the area over the next two years.”
The site DeFlock.org, which tracks the equipment, has mapped more than 100,000 ALPR cameras nationwide. At that scale, the invasion of privacy can seem overwhelming, even insurmountable, but the same resource also documents nearly 70 municipalities which terminated their contracts. Organizers have shared several tactics for blinding these uninvited eyes in the sky: the simple trash bag treatment is only the latest approach, if not the greatest in its literal reminder of the limitations of advanced technology.
I am definitely not encouraging people to get Hefty on Flock’s ass. I’m not sure how you would get caught, since Flock claims that its cameras don’t scan biometric data or use facial recognition software, but it’s nonetheless risky to bodybag them. Unlike a billion-dollar company that faces zero repercussions for unauthorized neighborhood surveillance, you will likely get in deep shit for defending your Fourth Amendment rights.
