Somebody is photographing every car on your street. We are writing down who.
Cameras on poles at intersections photograph every vehicle that passes — plate, time, place, direction — and keep the record whether or not anyone is suspected of anything. Flock Safety is the largest supplier of them to American police departments.
The camera is the entry point, not the extent. What those readings become is a searchable history of where vehicles have been, pooled across agency and state lines and reachable by people who never installed a camera anywhere. Audit logs obtained through records requests show it searched nationwide for a woman whom authorities said had self-managed an abortion, and searched with “immigration” and “ICE” entered as the stated reasons; federal agencies have held access. There is no national register of who operates any of it, how long the records are kept, or who else can search them.
And it is not only about cars. Flock also sells Condor, a pan-tilt-zoom camera pointed at people. In June 2026 the company told InvestigateTV it does not track people and described its cameras as capturing fixed points in time rather than performing continuous tracking; a Condor on a public trail then panned, tilted and followed the reporter as he walked past, on video, and Flock’s own training material for the product said it would acquire and track a person as they walk. Six months earlier, at least 60 Condors were found streaming to the open internet with no password — live video and thirty days of archive, including children on a playground swingset. Both are sourced and dated on the guardrails audit.
We are assembling one from public sources, and publishing what we find along with what we cannot find. We are against mass surveillance and we are not pretending otherwise — that decides what we think is worth measuring. It does not decide the numbers, which come out of a database and are checked in public.
Three questions you can answer right now.
Who watches my town? — type any US town or county and see which law enforcement agencies are documented as running Flock cameras there, including the county sheriff whose cameras do not stop at the city line.
Free, no account, nothing stored. The most useful thing on this page.
Where does the data go? — which agencies say, on their own transparency pages, that their plate data reaches federal agencies.
Built only from what agencies publish themselves, with the denominator stated: this covers the ones that publish anything at all.
Did the promised reforms happen? — in August 2026 Flock announced changes to retention, auditing and search limits. This holds three things apart: what the company committed to, what its critics said about it, and what the agencies’ own pages actually show.
The company’s own words are quoted as a subject source — authoritative for what was promised, evidence of nothing else.
The question we cannot answer: “was my plate searched?” That needs individual search logs, and we hold agency-level records only — no plates, no drivers, no searches, not withheld but never collected. Have I Been Flocked answers it from public records requests. Separate project, not affiliated with us, and the right place to go.
What is actually in the pile.
2,662 law enforcement agencies across 45 states are documented as operating Flock automated license plate readers. 2,453 are matched to a specific town or county, which is what makes them findable by name — covering 1,843 towns and 567 counties. We hold 5,323 dated observations, and we add to them rather than overwriting, so change is visible instead of silent.
Agency records come from the Atlas of Surveillance, a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, used under CC BY 4.0. Every entry was compiled by researchers from cited public sources, and we link to the source for each one. We did not gather this from nowhere and we do not present it as ours.
What this cannot tell you, and why.
This section is longer than the one above it, and that is deliberate. A tool about surveillance that oversells its coverage teaches people to trust a gap.
- An empty result is not an all-clear. Our records come from research that is still in progress. A town with nothing recorded is a town nobody has documented yet — never a town without cameras. Every result is a floor, not a ceiling.
- We do not know where the cameras are. We hold which agencies operate them, not their locations. We cannot tell you which intersections near you are covered.
- We do not know how many, or for how long. Camera counts, retention windows and data-sharing lists exist on the transparency pages agencies can optionally publish. See below for what happened when we went to collect them.
- The lookup covers plate readers, not Condor. Everything our town search can find is an ALPR deployment. The pan-tilt-zoom cameras described above are a different product and are not in our records at all — so a town result, empty or not, tells you nothing about whether one is watching a park near you. We have not found a public source that maps them.
- Flock is not the only vendor. Other companies sell the same technology and are not in this data at all.
- Dates are citation dates, not today. An entry documented in 2025 says what was true when a researcher checked. Where no date was recorded we say “date not recorded” rather than implying it is current.
- 209 agencies are not matched to a place yet and will not appear in a town lookup even where they operate — university police forces and statewide agencies mostly, whose jurisdiction is not a town at all. That is a limit of the tool, not of the agency.
Where this goes.
The transparency figures, if we can get them. Flock offers agencies an optional page publishing camera counts, retention windows and who they share with. We know the addresses of 493 of them, taken from the public research that cites them. On 21 August 2026 we requested them, identifying ourselves honestly as our transparency crawler. Every request came back HTTP 403 behind a bot challenge — including the request for robots.txt, the file whose only purpose is to tell automated visitors what they may do.
We did not work around it, and we will not: no disguised User-Agent, no spoofed browser fingerprint, no challenge solvers. We ask as ourselves or we do not ask. A page any person can open in a browser is not currently readable by an identified researcher collecting it systematically, and that is worth reporting rather than quietly routing around.
Better coverage of the places we already know. Matching an agency to its jurisdiction is done by name, and it refuses rather than guesses when a name is ambiguous — naming the wrong police department is worse than naming none. The remainder needs a slower, more careful pass, and that work is queued.
Change over time. Every observation is stored with its date and nothing is overwritten, so once we have two readings of the same thing we can show what moved. Retention windows quietly lengthening, or a sharing list growing, is the kind of thing that is invisible in a snapshot and obvious in a series.
Whatever you tell us is missing. If your town is wrong, absent, or your local agency is listed under a name nobody uses, tell us — corrections from people who live there are the fastest way this gets better.
Where every number comes from.
Agency records: the Atlas of Surveillance (EFF and the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Reno), CC BY 4.0. Town and county names: the US Census Bureau gazetteer. Transparency figures, where we have any: the agencies’ own published pages, captured with the date we read them. Statements by Flock Safety: quoted from the company and labelled as the company’s account of its own conduct, which is authoritative for what was said and evidence of nothing further.
Everything here is at the level of agencies and jurisdictions. Nothing on any of these pages is about an identifiable person, and no plate, driver or individual search appears anywhere in this data.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Flock Safety, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Have I Been Flocked. Corrections and missing agencies: [email protected]. If you administer a portal we visit and want us to stop, that is on the crawler page and we will honour it.