A newly compiled map suggests Flock Security’s surveillance infrastructure in the United States is larger and more intricate than publicly acknowledged, raising questions about privacy and security amid political scrutiny.
A new map has cast fresh light on the scale of Flock Security’s surveillance footprint in the United States, suggesting the company’s network is significantly larger and more complex than the figure it has publicly promoted. While Flock told reporters this summer that it operated more than 120,000 cameras nationwide, a cybersecurity researcher’s dataset points to more than 170,000 cameras and more than 130,000 related devices, bringing the total to about 300,000 pieces of equipment across the country.
According to The Intercept, the map was compiled by Joshua Michael from location data taken from Flock’s own records. Unlike crowd-sourced projects that depend on public submissions, Michael’s system relied on data he said he extracted from an archived snapshot of the company’s database in December 2025. The result is not just a count of cameras, but a broader picture of the infrastructure that supports them, including acoustic sensors and networking hardware used to connect third-party devices.
The map has already been cited in Washington. The Intercept said Michael’s findings were referenced during a Senate subcommittee hearing on crime and counterterrorism this week, underscoring the growing political scrutiny around automated licence plate readers and the companies that supply them. Recent reporting by other outlets has also shown how widely Flock has spread, with estimates placing the company’s devices in more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 6,000 communities, and one public tracker recording more than 114,000 readers across 49 states and 2,345 cities.
The geographic spread is wide, but the data also reveals dense clusters. The Intercept reported that one concentration of 860 devices appears near Chicago O’Hare International Airport, close to the Rosemont Public Safety Department in Illinois. The map also shows cameras at detention centres, including one device named “C-F-23 FOXTROT MALE HOLDING 2/SHOWERS” at the Silverdale Detention Centre in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and another labelled “FBI Pilot Camera” at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington.
Michael told The Intercept that he found a vulnerability in Flock’s systems in November 2025 after discovering that an access token was being exposed publicly on the company’s website. He said that token allowed him to query ArcGIS, the mapping platform used by Flock, and retrieve device locations without logging in. In his initial email to the company, he said his testing was “strictly non-intrusive, limited to open unauthenticated endpoints, and did not involve bypassing authentication, modifying data, or invoking any billable ArcGIS or Google operations”.
He said Flock replied only after repeated follow-up messages and thanked him for the findings, but he heard nothing further. Michael then downloaded the data in December and published a technical account in January. After that disclosure, Flock appears to have fixed the problem. That sequence sits uneasily beside a January blogpost in which the company said it had never suffered a breach, a claim it repeated despite the apparent exposure of its device database. The discrepancy has added to a wider backlash, including an ACLU report that accused the company of misleading the public about its business practices, privacy commitments and security record.
The debate has now moved beyond scale and into trust. On Thursday, Michael said he was notified that Doppel, a company that describes itself as an AI-native social engineering defence platform, had filed a trademark complaint about his site and asked for it to be taken down, claiming it used the Flock Safety name without permission and could confuse customers. Michael’s map carries a disclaimer stating that it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Flock, but the dispute illustrates how fraught the company’s public image has become as concern grows over how widely its cameras are deployed and who can see the data they collect.
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