If you discovered an unidentified surveillance camera bolted to a pole in your town, you might have questions. Whose is it? What is it recording? Where does the footage go? St. Lucie County, Florida, found twelve such cameras — unpermitted license-plate readers from Flock Safety — and asked a simpler question: how fast can these come down? The county gave the mystery owners 30 days to remove them, no questions asked. The cameras came down. Case, more or less, closed.
“Our goal was to get the cameras out of the right-of-way within 30 days,” county spokesperson Erick Gill said, as Ashley Belanger reports at Ars Technica, via The Washington Post. “We accomplished that goal.” Asked about the cameras of unknown origin, Gill simply reiterated that the directive was removal. The county, he says, lacks the resources to investigate who owned the seven cameras nobody ever claimed. Goal-setting is a powerful management technique: if the goal is defined narrowly enough, it cannot help but be achieved.
Residents are taking it less calmly. They “remain upset,” per the Post’s phrasing. Hannah Galindo, a 31-year-old resident who petitioned to get the cameras removed, told the paper she worries “that data could be anywhere” — data the unpermitted cameras were collecting the whole time. “It sounds like when you do something wrong, and you don’t want to get caught, and you kind of just want to sweep it under the rug,” she said.
Five of the 12 cameras were eventually claimed by city law enforcement in Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce. A Flock spokesperson told the Post that a police department had mistakenly issued guidance saying officers could register multiple cameras under a single permit, even though the county required individual permits. Neither Flock nor either police department will confirm who wrote that guidance. Seven cameras, meanwhile, belong to persons unknown — though not, it seems, unknowable.
Here is a fun contractual subplot: over three years, the Port St. Lucie Police Department’s Flock contract ballooned from $22,000 to $470,000, hitting that figure in 2025 — the year before the county mandated removals on county roads. So there was certainly money available for cameras. There is just, per Gill, no money available for finding out whose cameras the other ones were.
Flock, for the record, knows. It simply isn’t saying. “The cameras have been removed and belonged to several different customers,” a company spokesperson told Ars. “Flock does not share specifics regarding individual agency contracts, camera counts, locations, or deployments.” (The company did not respond to the Post’s emailed questions about who operated and removed the cameras, or about the permitting confusion.) The county doesn’t know and doesn’t want to; the company knows and won’t tell. The residents get to choose which of those is worse.
The opacity is not exactly out of character. Over the summer, American cities were terminating Flock contracts at a record pace, and in audio from a private police conference shared Monday by 404 Media, CEO Garrett Langley assured police that the nationwide protests “are not real,” blaming Russian bots: “Social media chatter on Flock is down about 95 percent from July. It went down 50 percent last week when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Literally 50 percent overnight.” The protesters, he explained, are “the same people with the same signs and the same message. That’s not normal. That’s not organic at all.” The ACLU — which maintains a “DeFlock” toolkit, updated the day the audio leaked, and warns that “creepy cameras make it possible to track everyone’s movements” without a warrant — was presumably unavailable for comment from Moscow.
There is also the small matter of how big the network actually is. Flock told the Texas Tribune in August that law enforcement uses about 120,000 of its cameras nationwide. Then cybersecurity researcher Joshua Michael found a Flock access token that let him pull device locations without even logging in; he notified the company and, as one earlier map-making exercise showed, also built a map. Matt Busel, founder of the software studio Tensorust, analyzed it and counted 214,073 devices — nearly 100,000 more than the estimate, a gap he believes is Flock’s private camera network operating without regulatory oversight. “It is bigger than anything Flock says out loud,” Busel wrote. On St. Lucie, he told Ars that “Flock’s lack of transparency is a recurring pattern; they seem to prioritize obscuring the network’s footprint over public accountability.”
Flock’s response to Michael was a cease-and-desist letter — “An inadvertently exposed credential is not an invitation to access private systems or data” — demanding he pull the map, the data file and his research paper, and name everyone who received the data, on pain of an injunction plus statutory and punitive damages. An email to customers branded him a malicious actor and said law enforcement had been notified — while conceding, Michael points out, that Flock found no indication of unauthorized access when it closed the issue in December, “which is precisely the monitoring failure my research warns about. I’m not backing down.” He is self-funding his legal defense, taking donations on his website, and framing the fight in terms St. Lucie County might consider: “Our nation is not protected by ignorance of a risk.”
Or maybe it is. The county found surveillance cameras it couldn’t explain, made them disappear inside 30 days, and declared the goal accomplished. Everybody’s data could be anywhere; the county’s curiosity, at least, is safely contained.