When you hear the word Flock, you might think of birds in the sky. But in 2025 America, Flock means cameras—everywhere. Flock Safety, a startup-turned-surveillance powerhouse, has quietly woven one of the most expansive surveillance networks in the nation—tens of thousands of automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras capturing vehicles, recording movement, and feeding searchable data into police systems, neighborhood security groups, and increasingly, federal agencies.
On the surface, it’s about safety. In fact, the company’s own tagline stresses its mission: making communities safer. The promise is straightforward: catch more stolen cars, recover missing children faster, help police solve violent crimes, and give neighborhoods tools to deter trouble. In a world where police staffing is tight and crime moves faster than patrol cars, it’s hard to argue against more eyes on the street.
But America needs to look deeper. Because the very same cameras that can save a life can also map your life. And history—from our own Constitution to China’s modern digital authoritarianism—teaches us one thing: when safety is traded for control, freedom rarely comes back.
How Flock Works
At its core, Flock’s technology is an advanced form of automated license plate recognition (ALPR). Cameras positioned at neighborhood entrances, main roadways, or business corridors scan every passing vehicle, day and night. But these aren’t just plate readers.
Flock calls its system Vehicle Fingerprint® technology. Along with the license plate, it records details like:
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Vehicle make and model
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Body type (SUV, truck, sedan, etc.)
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Color
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State of registration
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Temporary tags
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Missing plates
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Distinctive features (roof racks, bumper stickers, unique decals)
This allows investigators to search not only for a plate number but also for vehicles matching a description. Flock’s FreeForm™ search lets you type “blue Ford pickup with ladder rack” and the system will filter cameras across your city or county to find it.
The tech is not science fiction. It’s available today, and it’s spreading fast. Flock says its default data retention policy is 30 days, unless local law or contract specifies otherwise. After that, data is purged. The company emphasizes that its system is not designed for facial recognition, and that it does not capture or process faces. This is a deliberate design choice, repeated in marketing and FAQs.
Still, once a vehicle can be tracked through space and time, the leap to tracking individuals is much shorter than Flock admits. You don’t need a face to know where a person is—you just need to know their car. And that’s where civil liberties alarms start ringing.
Here’s the Catch
The same system that can catch a criminal can also map your daily life. Every trip to church, every political rally, every visit to your doctor—logged and time-stamped.
Civil liberties groups from the ACLU to local advocacy organizations warn that ALPRs create mass movement logs of law-abiding citizens. These logs can reveal sensitive details: who attends a protest, who visits a reproductive health clinic, who drives into a neighborhood known for political organizing.
In August 2025, Illinois became ground zero for this debate. A state audit revealed that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) accessed Illinois Flock data, violating a 2023 state law designed to block federal agencies from using ALPRs for immigration or reproductive investigations. The fallout was immediate: Illinois ordered CBP cut off, Flock scrambled to install new filters, and lawmakers demanded answers.
The episode proves a fundamental truth: once data is collected, it will be used. Promises of “limited access” mean little when federal agencies find a back door.
And that’s why “no facial recognition” is not enough. Flock may not capture faces today. But what about tomorrow? And even without face ID, enough data points can build a profile every bit as invasive.
The Bigger Ambition: Drones and Beyond
In March 2025, Reuters reported that Flock Safety raised $275 million in fresh funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Greenoaks Capital and Bedrock Capital. That round pushed the company’s valuation to roughly $7.5 billion, nearly doubling from just a year earlier. Flock now claims more than $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), with year-over-year growth around 70 percent. It serves more than 4,800 law enforcement agencies and nearly 1,000 private enterprises, with businesses now making up about 30 percent of its revenue.
Where’s that money going? Straight into infrastructure and expansion. The company has opened a nearly 97,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Smyrna, Georgia—often rounded up to 100,000 in press reports. That plant is not only assembling license plate reader systems but also refurbishing devices, producing solar components for their camera units, and, most notably, manufacturing drones. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp himself attended the ribbon-cutting, touting that the plant would create 210 new jobs over the next several years.
This drone initiative comes on the heels of Flock’s acquisition of Aerodome, a California startup focused on “Drone as First Responder” technology. With Aerodome’s tech and the new Georgia facility, Flock intends to produce U.S.-manufactured drones for law enforcement in 2025. These drones can be deployed automatically when 911 calls come in, arriving on scene before officers. They can livestream video, track suspects, and feed intelligence back to dispatch.
So Flock is no longer just a camera company—it’s becoming a full-spectrum surveillance provider, spanning poles, panels, and now aerial eyes in the sky.
The ratchet effect is clear:
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Today: Vehicle fingerprinting with 30-day retention.
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Tomorrow: Drones patrolling above neighborhoods.
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Next year: AI linking it all together into predictive policing dashboards.
The company will say it’s about eliminating crime. But history tells us something else: capability always seeks application.
The China Comparison: Golden Shield, Skynet, Sharp Eyes
If you want to see what happens when surveillance layers lock together, look at China’s surveillance triad.
Golden Shield (1998–2006): The backbone. It unified police databases—household registration files, biometrics, political dossiers, travel logs—and created the infrastructure behind China’s infamous Great Firewall. It centralized information control and policing at a national level.
Skynet (2000s onward): The eyes. Hundreds of millions of cameras with AI-driven facial recognition blanket cities. In 2017, a BBC journalist in Guiyang tested the system: within seven minutes, police intercepted him after cameras flagged his face. Skynet provides real-time identification, tying faces to ID cards across urban China.
Sharp Eyes (2015 onward): The community arm. Its slogan—“The masses have sharp eyes”—pushed surveillance into villages and even living rooms. In some towns, residents could flip on their TVs and watch live feeds of local streets, deputizing ordinary citizens as watchers. Sharp Eyes filled the gaps Skynet left in rural areas.
Together, these systems created a layered dragnet: Golden Shield as the database spine, Skynet as the AI-powered eyes, and Sharp Eyes as the community enforcement arm.
And it doesn’t stop there. In Xinjiang, this architecture enabled predictive policing, movement restrictions, and mass detentions of Uyghurs and other minorities. Databases, biometrics, and AI fused into a chilling apparatus of control.
Skynet and The Terminator
Here’s the part that should make Americans pause.
China proudly named its national surveillance project Skynet—the very name of the rogue AI in The Terminator. In the films, Skynet became self-aware, turned defense systems against humanity, and unleashed global war.
In Beijing, Skynet is real. It doesn’t launch missiles—yet—but it erases privacy, catalogs behavior, and automates social control.
What Hollywood imagined as a warning has become a policy aesthetic in the world’s most populous nation. A movie metaphor is now a government brand.
The lesson for America? You don’t need self-aware AI to lose freedom. You just need a government willing to link cameras, databases, and algorithms—and a public willing to shrug.
The Social Credit Question
China’s social credit system is often misunderstood. It isn’t a single app scoring every citizen from 0 to 1,000. Instead, it’s a patchwork of blacklists and red lists—systems that track compliance with rules, flag “untrustworthy” individuals or businesses, and impose penalties like:
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Travel restrictions (no plane or high-speed rail tickets)
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Business bans (inability to get licenses or contracts)
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Public shaming (names and faces displayed on billboards for debts)
Some local pilots experimented with point-based scores. Others focused on corporations. But the underlying principle is the same: link behavior to consequences, using data trails.
For America, the risk isn’t a Beijing-style decree. The risk is soft social credit: ALPR data cross-matched with insurance databases, predictive policing models, or private-sector blacklists. Imagine your driving patterns quietly shaping your insurance premiums, your credit checks, even your employment background screenings.
You don’t need a universal score to feel the pressure. All you need is invisible math deciding what you deserve.
Even China Is Backpedaling—Slightly
Here’s the irony. In June 2025, new Chinese regulations banned companies from forcing facial recognition for services like payments, ticketing, or building access. Alternatives must be offered. Signs must be posted. “Necessity and proportionality” must be shown. Violators face fines and liability.
Even Beijing—architect of Skynet and Sharp Eyes—is recognizing that unrestrained face capture breeds backlash.
So ask yourself: if China, the surveillance state, is tightening the reins, why are we rushing headlong into systems with fewer guardrails?
The American Crossroads
At The Craig Bushon Show, we say it plainly: Technology is never neutral. It always serves somebody’s agenda.
Flock’s tools can be used well: recovering stolen cars, catching violent offenders, helping find missing kids. But the same system, without oversight, can erode liberty. It’s not the tech itself—it’s the rules that govern it.
So here’s what every community should demand:
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No facial recognition. Not today, not tomorrow, not hidden in a firmware update. Lock it in writing.
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Short retention. Thirty days or less for non-hit data. Longer only with court order.
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Strict access control. Every query tied to a case number, every search logged and audited.
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No federal back doors. Out-of-jurisdiction access only with explicit legal authority.
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Audit and oversight. Civilian review boards, public reporting, and sunset clauses that force programs to justify renewal.
The Terminator Lesson
In The Terminator, Skynet wasn’t evil at first. It was efficient. Too efficient. The world outsourced judgment to it. Then the line between defense and domination disappeared.
In China, Skynet is already real. It’s not self-aware—but it doesn’t have to be. It monitors, it flags, it enforces.
The warning is this: freedom doesn’t disappear in one dramatic moment. It’s chipped away, one camera, one database, one exception at a time.
If Americans don’t draw the line—demanding transparency, accountability, and limits—we risk becoming the very thing our science fiction once warned us about.
Final Word
Because The Truth Is Not Hate Speech, and the truth is simple:
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You don’t need face ID to lose privacy. License plates and metadata will do.
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You don’t need a universal social credit score to feel pressure. Soft scoring already shapes our lives.
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You don’t need Skynet to be self-aware to lose freedom. You just need people to stop paying attention.
Technology is never neutral. Used well, it protects. Used recklessly, it controls. The choice is ours—today.
Disclaimer
This article reflects the research and analysis of The Craig Bushon Show Media Team. It is intended for educational and commentary purposes only. All information is drawn from publicly available sources and represents opinions designed to spark critical thought and public discussion.
