▪️ EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was first published in American Thinker. You can link to it here.▪️
Wonder if you’ve been Flocked? Wonder if your neighborhood has been Flocked? What the Flock am I talking about?
Flock cameras are those new, souped-up Big Brother “traffic” cameras that have been breeding like ants all over the country. They are very good at capturing your license plate and and other identifying information:
Flock cameras…
…are different from typical license plate readers because they are much more powerful — and not limited to just license plates. These cameras record and analyze every passing vehicle — the make, model and color of a car, other identifiers like scratches and dents, and anything else they can see. Even a pedestrian, bicyclist, or animal who happens to be caught in the frame of a Flock camera can be swept up in the vast and unregulated Flock surveillance network.
The cameras then analyzes the recordings using an AI algorithm, uploads the data unencrypted to a national surveillance platform, runs the data against sometimes faulty “hit lists,” and then stores the data in a manner that permits access by law enforcement and Flock users anywhere.
These small, unassuming cameras allow police to potentially sit with unblinking eyes 24/7 on every street corner, in every parking lot, and in every neighborhood. The data captured by Flock’s cameras can reveal very private details about a person’s life, including what meetings a person attends, what doctors’ offices and religious institutions they visit, who a person associates with, and even where they sleep at night.
You may be wondering where these Flock cameras are in your neighborhood and whether or not you have been captured by them. Happily, there are very easy ways to check.
First, the map. Below is a screenshot of the actual map you can search at DeFlock.
I live in an extremely rural area in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina and I was shocked at the number and locations of the Flock cameras in my tiny little town. You can search by zip code, city/town name, or even an exact address.
Next there is a website where you can search your car’s license plate to see if you have been gathered up in the surveillance. It’s at a website which is perfectly named “Have I Been Flocked?”.
Now, to be clear, this is not a search of the official Flock database itself. It’s a search of publicly available data gathered up via FOIA and crowdsourcing at “Have I Been Flocked,” so it is definitely incomplete.
I searched both of our license plates and came up empty, though I am absolutely certain I am in the official Flock database based on the camera placement I observed by just looking at the map above with my zip code. Being in the master Flock database seems likely for most of us. Whether or not our data has been examined or exploited by someone…well, that’s the rub, isn’t it?