FLOCKED

Brittney Gilliam took her four nieces and her six-year-old daughter to get their nails done on a Sunday morning in Aurora, Colorado. They left the salon with their hands behind their heads on a parking lot, four police officers standing over them with weapons drawn.

The license plate reader had been wrong. The plate that triggered the stop belonged to a stolen motorcycle in Montana. Gilliam was driving a Colorado SUV. The system did not check before the officers acted on its alert. Aurora later paid $1.9 million to settle the case. The technology that produced that morning is now installed in more than six thousand American communities.

You have probably driven past one in the last twenty-four hours.

FLOCKED is the plain-English briefing on the Atlanta-based company that has quietly built the largest privately-operated mass surveillance network in the United States. In less than a decade, Flock Safety has installed an estimated ninety thousand cameras across forty-nine states. The cameras read every license plate of every vehicle that passes them. The data is shared with police departments, with federal agencies, and through configurations that most local governments did not know they had authorized. The company is valued at $7.5 billion. Most Americans cannot identify one of its cameras when they look directly at it.

Inside this book:
The Texas police officer who used the network to search for a woman who had obtained an abortion. The 1.6 million federal queries against San Francisco PD's data in seven months. The Illinois audit that uncovered a Customs and Border Protection pilot Flock leadership claimed not to know about. The Mountain View suspension. The Oxnard discovery. The 364,000 unauthorized federal accesses. The Ring partnership that died after the Super Bowl. The cities that have already canceled their contracts. The lawsuits seeking billions in damages.

And what you can do about it.

The second half of this book is built for action. How to map your own surveillance exposure. How to file public records requests on your local police department's search history. How to fight a Flock contract in your HOA. What plate covers and films are actually legal in your state. What to do if you have already been caught up in a wrongful stop. How to support the cities and lawsuits that are pushing back, and the cross-political coalition that has already produced more than thirty cancellations.

This is journalism plus harm reduction. Sourced from investigations by 404 Media, Wired, the New York Times, NPR, and the New Republic. From lawsuits filed by Gibbs Mura, the California Attorney General, and the ACLU. From state-level audits in Illinois and California. From the grassroots groups documenting and resisting the cameras in their own neighborhoods.

The cameras are watching. This is the briefing that should have come with them.