---
title: "A map of America’s police cameras is bigger than the company says it is"
description: "A researcher’s count of 300,000 Flock devices, and a Senate hearing the company skipped"
author: "Albion Grey"
published: 2026-09-28T14:44:31Z
modified: 2026-09-28T17:20:53Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-map-of-america-s-police-cameras-is-bigger-than-the-company-9432f8
language: en
tags: ["surveillance", "privacy", "security", "politics", "data", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A map of America’s police cameras is bigger than the company says it is

*A researcher’s count of 300,000 Flock devices, and a Senate hearing the company skipped*

By Albion Grey · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-map-of-america-s-police-cameras-is-bigger-than-the-company-9432f8

## In brief

- Joshua Michael mapped about 300,000 Flock-associated devices, versus Flock’s claim of more than 120,000 cameras
- The inventory includes 170,000-plus cameras plus 130,000 supporting devices, built from an exposed access token
- Flock says it has never suffered a data breach and no customer data was compromised
- Flock’s CEO Garrett Langley and executives from Axon, Motorola and Verkada skipped a September 23rd Senate hearing
- Flock is seeking removal of the map; a trademark complaint’s origin is unconfirmed

Counting police cameras is not a crime in America. It is, however, becoming contentious. Flock Safety, the country’s biggest maker of automated licence-plate readers, publicly describes itself as operating more than 120,000 cameras nationwide. A cybersecurity researcher who set about mapping the estate reckons the true infrastructure is more than twice that size—and the firm’s response has been less of a denial than a demand to stop counting.

Joshua Michael, the researcher in question, published an interactive map locating roughly 300,000 Flock-associated devices across the United States, [according to The Intercept](https://theintercept.com/2026/09/24/how-many-flock-devices-in-united-states-300000/). The arithmetic needs care. Flock counts cameras; Mr Michael’s inventory includes more than 170,000 of those, plus some 130,000 supporting devices: acoustic sensors, processing units, networking hardware and equipment that links third-party cameras into the network. The two numbers are not directly comparable. But the gap between them is precisely the point.

The map’s origins are awkward for Flock. Mr Michael says he found an unauthenticated access token exposed in the company’s infrastructure in November 2025 and notified it. He then used the token to query ArcGIS, a third-party mapping service Flock employs, according to Tom’s Hardware, and preserved a December 2025 snapshot of the resulting location data. He later verified parts of the map by visiting sites in person. Entries label individual devices, sometimes with addresses. One entry is tagged “FBI Pilot Camera” at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, according to The Intercept—though that reflects a database label, not any confirmation from the FBI of an operational relationship.

Mr Michael’s deeper concern is what the diagram shows in aggregate. A network of this density, he warns, could reveal the movement patterns of federal agents, elected officials and military personnel. That is his risk assessment, not evidence that any foreign actor has peered into Flock’s systems. It is nonetheless the kind of assessment senators like to hear in person.

Flock’s position is that nothing untoward happened. In a January 2026 blog post the company said it has never suffered a data breach and that customer data has not been compromised, characterising earlier disclosures as vulnerabilities that produced no exfiltration. Mr Michael’s account—that the map was built from location data accessible through Flock’s own infrastructure—sits uneasily with that. Whether an exposed infrastructure record amounts to a breach of customer data is a semantic dispute with real stakes, and it remains unresolved.

The semantics might have been thrashed out on September 23rd, when the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism convened a hearing pointedly titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network”. It was not. Flock’s chief executive, Garrett Langley, was invited but did not appear, according to CNBC; nor did executives from Axon, Motorola Solutions or Verkada, fellow travellers in the surveillance trade. The map drew wide attention the next day.

The hearing went ahead regardless. Senators and civil-liberties advocates pressed on how long Flock’s data are retained, which agencies may search them and whether fishing through vehicle records requires a warrant. The subject is fresh in lawmakers’ minds: one witness recently [told Congress how a Flock ping and an incurious investigation](https://rews.cc/a/one-ping-from-a-flock-camera-13-days-in-a-florida-jail-for-t-c737fe) cost the wrong woman 13 days in a Florida jail. Mr Langley’s empty chair answered none of it.

Flock has since sought to have Mr Michael’s map removed. A trademark complaint from another surveillance app arrived shortly after the hearing, though available reporting does not establish that Flock filed it. A takedown demand, moreover, establishes nothing about a map’s accuracy or legality; those are questions for independent legal and technical judgment, not lawyers’ letters.

The contest over whether the network holds 120,000 cameras or 300,000 devices misses the larger obscurity. No one outside the company can say with confidence what the infrastructure collects, who may query it or how long the records persist. A firm that sells vigilance to the state has shown a marked allergy to scrutiny of itself. That asymmetry, rather than any single number, is what the map has made visible.