The Orange traffic barrel on the side of Arizona State Route 60 looked like any other piece of construction equipment. It had the same yellow-and-white striping, the same tapered shape.
It also had a camera lens carved into both sides, a solar panel, and a cellular transmitter feeding data to a private company’s servers.
License plate readers disguised as traffic barrels. Orange traffic cones with cameras inside. Speed trap signs with AI-powered sensors. This is how Flock Safety operates — a $7.5 billion surveillance company that has deployed more than 100,000 cameras across the United States, more than any law enforcement agency has ever controlled.
These new camouflaged cameras are a partnership between Flock and law enforcement and the plan is to use them extensively to track vehicle movement and broader surveillance We are witnessing the surveillance state being established in America… this only ends in mass surveillance
The company says it solves crimes. The court filings say it does something else.
1.6 Million Illegal Searches in 7 Months
On February 26, 2026, the Oakland law firm Gibbs Mura filed a class action lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court against Flock Safety. The complaint, co-filed with Milberg PLLC, alleges that Flock violated California’s ALPR Privacy Act by sharing license plate data with federal agencies on a massive scale.
The numbers are specific. Between mid-2024 and early 2025, out-of-state and federal agencies queried San Francisco’s Flock database more than 1.6 million times in seven months, according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are seeking $2,500 per violation under California Civil Code Section 1798.90.55. At 1.6 million violations, the exposure runs into the billions.
The list of agencies that accessed the data reads like a federal law enforcement directory: FBI, ICE, CBP, ATF, DEA, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, VA Police at the Loma Linda Medical Center. San Jose PD audit logs showed search reasons listed as simply “CBP” and “ICE” — no case number, no warrant, no explanation.
“The audit noted that in May of 2025, the US Department of Veterans Affairs Police Department at Loma Linda Medical Center, a federal law enforcement agency, conducted two nationwide queries that included OPD in its search,” the city of Oxnard stated in a February 27, 2026 news release.
Ventura County found the same problem. The Sheriff’s Office audit showed 364,000 unauthorized accesses between February and March 2025. The National Lookup feature had been disabled in June 2023 to comply with California law. Somehow, it reactivated itself. “No one from our agency activated the national lookup feature,” the Sheriff’s Office confirmed.
Flock offered three possible explanations: an employee from the sheriff’s office, a Flock employee, or an automatic system bug. The company said “technical logging limitations” prevented them from determining which one it was.
They do not know how the data left. They cannot prove it will not happen again. They kept no records that would let anyone figure it out.
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