Flock taught cops how they could surveil the No Kings protests and “small parades” using a mix of Flock’s technology and law enforcement’s own databases in a webinar last year. As Flock publicly downplays the power of its automated license plate camera network and highlights its use to solve violent crime, the company’s seemingly endless trove of webinars, training sessions, and blog posts show it offers far more invasive capabilities.

In the webinar, Flock’s director of market management Caity Peak explains how real time crime centers — which are police surveillance centers that utilize Flock cameras and other surveillance cameras — can be used for emergency response, but can also be used to surveil “established events” like 4th of July fireworks displays, parades, bike races, Mardi Gras, and protests. The webinar shows just how routine the idea of always-on surveillance has become, and how casually it is used during extremely innocuous events. 

Peak explains that police can use FlockOS, a software platform that combines Flock’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR), drones, gunshot detectors, 911 data, and other surveillance cameras (including ones Flock does not own) into a “single pane of glass” or single piece of software to look at various types of surveillance in one place during both emergencies and relatively mundane events in a city or town. 

“Imagine that you’re an incident commander, and you’re working this No Kings Protest,” Peak explains while a dashboard shows a series of surveillance tools overlaying the city of Denver. “If I’m somebody assigned a traffic post that’s working this No Kings Protest, I really don’t have time to go in […] and look at all these places [for different intelligence]. This is an example of viewing all of that in one place. I’m an officer, I can see the response plan that’s included, I can pull that up if I need it, but I can also see live video footage as that protest moves throughout the park.”

Peak says the surveillance footage can be used to monitor the protests without having cops physically on the ground “making it worse, getting attention.”

“I’ve got the video footage to monitor when things go sideways, I know when the environment is starting to shift. But I also know a lot of other things as well. I can see traffic flow, so as people are blocking the roadway, maybe that’s OK for a while, but if I see that traffic has been stopped a while, I may need to send officers to that area because I know that road rage is imminent,” she continues. The dashboard Peak shows includes traffic information, a “response plan” for the protest, the floor plans of nearby buildings, as well as a series of video feeds of both outdoor-mounted cameras and cameras inside businesses and government buildings. 

404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation previously showed that police have specifically used Flock cameras to monitor the No Kings protests and other First Amendment-protected activity. 404 Media found California cops used Flock to monitor an “immigration protest.” The EFF found that the following law enforcement agencies ran Flock searches related to No Kings protests and rallies:

This webinar shows this type of surveillance is not anomalous, and is specifically taught by Flock. The webinar also shows that Flock’s latest public stance — that its ALPR cameras are noninvasive technology, that they take only static images at a single place and time, and that they are primarily used to solve the worst crimes — is wildly misleading. Flock has time and time again pitched itself to police as a sort of operating system to solve crime and do real-time surveillance and predictive policing. ALPRs are just one part of this broader surveillance apparatus that Flock has created, markets to police, and teaches them how to use. These real time crime centers are proving increasingly popular with police; Flock now says on its website that more than 4,800 cities around the country are running FlockOS software. 

Matt Patin, a former New Orleans Police Department officer and current Flock employee, explains in the webinar that the dashboard can show ALPR data, body camera footage, and other data to “give me a full situational awareness of what’s going on.” Peak explains that, back when she was a cop, she used to hope that people would plan events near intersections that had ALPR cameras. “We’d have to pick which intersection is going to make sense [for an ALPR camera], where do we see the most traffic, where do we see the most events, and then I hoped that if an event happened in front of a camera, it’s one that’s in an intersection where I chose to put [the ALPR] and not one where I chose not to put an ALPR,” she says, adding that she would try to think which types of cameras and drones to use to police a specific event. “I want to make sure I have as many tools to make myself dangerous if and when I need it,” she adds.

Peak goes on to give another example, in which police would surveil a car sideshow near Sacramento using a mix of drones, surveillance cameras, ALPRs, and monitoring of social media posts. “We knew it was likely to turn into nefarious activity based on who was promoting the car show,” she says. A list of “THINGS TO LOOK FOR” include “mismatched front and rear wheels, stickers representing car clubs, and covered up license plates with car club logos.” Peak then demos Flock’s free-form search, which is “AI-powered video search and alerts.” 

“Let’s take Flock’s free-form feature and say ‘hey, any time you see a car tonight with multi-colored wheels passing by any one of these five LPR cameras, I want you to send us an alert,’” she says. She then explains how Flock Nova, the company’s deeper investigative tool, can be used to marry LPR information with “all of your agency data,” which in this example includes “person data, IP data, email data, sex offender data, license plate data, vehicle data, and OSINT [open source intelligence].” A screenshot of the Flock system shows a “street racing suspect” complete with the man’s name, address, email, social media accounts, phone number, and various affiliations.

“It works like a Google Search,” she says, imagining a scenario in which cops pull someone over then use Nova. “I run him through Nova. I can query CAD [computer aided dispatch], RMS [records management system], OSINT, jail records. All these things we have integrated to see that we have contacted him before for sideshows, he has been contacted for spinning cars in an intersection in the last 90 days, he is related to this car club, and now with that information, I have the justification I need to actually tow the car for 90 days instead of just issuing a citation.”

Later in the webinar, police from New Orleans and Flock representatives spoke about how its system was used by police in the aftermath of the Bourbon Street terror attack that killed 14 people on Jan. 1, 2025 and during the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras that year. The webinar highlights how this tech is used after a crime, and how the data often filters across agencies. Ross Bourgeois, who runs New Orleans' real time crime center, says that the city used a "tremendous amount of cameras in a very short time" to recreate the terrorist's movements.

“We were able to use our network of cameras and license plate readers to map out what he did when he entered the city a day or two before the event, up until he executed the event and engaged the police and our shooting situation at the conclusion of it,” Flock's Patin said, adding that footage running through FlockOS were eventually shared with the Department of Homeland Security, federal fusion centers, and the FBI. “7 terabytes of information, which was a lot of data, and we were able to share that with our fusion center and our federal partners. Homeland Security, HSI [Homeland Security Investigations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and FBI.” 

Waterways in Chicago and northern Illinois have supported industrial activity for more than a century, and now those same bodies of water are drawing an influx of proposed data centers that would tap into the region’s plentiful resources.  These proposals have drawn considerable scrutiny, with experts and advocates concerned about the lack of transparency and […]

The post Chicago has abundant water. Data center developers want a taste. appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Axon says cops are asking it to make its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) look different from Flock cameras because Flock vandalism has become so widespread, according to comments Axon’s CEO made in a now deleted webinar.

The comments highlight how Axon is trying to take advantage of sustained opposition against Flock's license plate cameras, with one law enforcement customer suggesting a camera redesign would “help with the optics while we batten down the hatches” as the backlash spreads.

As 404 Media has reported, some towns and cities are switching from Flock to Axon’s cameras after cops did lookups for ICE in Flock, tracked a woman who self-administered an abortion, and have repeatedly abused their access to stalk ex-spouses. ALPRs constantly scan the license plate, brand, model, and other identifying features of all vehicles that drive past the camera and then make this timestamped log of activity searchable by law enforcement without a warrant.

In an August 26 webinar that was hosted on Axon’s official Vimeo page called “From backlash to trust,” Axon Chief Customer Officer Mike Wagers took a question from the remote audience and asked, “is there any talk — and there has been talk — to redesign Outpost, our fixed ALPR camera, to not look exactly like a Flock camera?”

“We are looking at [...] do we change the general shape,” Rick Smith, Axon’s CEO, replied.

At another point in the webinar, Smith brought up Axon’s Lightpost product, which is an ALPR and AI-powered camera that attaches to an existing streetlight. “Frankly, we’ve had a lot of customers saying, hey, we’d like something that looks different because there is all this blowback. ​​It's harder to vandalize because it's up higher,” he said.

Smith also said, “We’ve had some people say they’d like to see us make just a different camera, because our ALPR camera looks like an ALPR camera.” Another idea Smith brought up, pending customer feedback, is to go in the other direction and make ALPRs more explicit, with signs showing where they are located and a description of the city’s ALPR policies. 

MegaraMedia, a YouTuber, downloaded a copy of the webinar before it was removed and shared it with 404 Media.

During the webinar, Axon asked its law enforcement customers to chime in with questions and answer a customer survey. 404 Media scanned the QR code displayed during the webinar to view those questions. One, which appears to be the one Wagers paraphrased, read, “Is there any talk to redesign the Outpost to not look exactly like the Flock camera — I think it will help agencies with the optics while we batten down the hatches…”

Axon did not respond to a request for comment.

Around the country people have destroyed Flock cameras, including tearing them down, backing trucks into them, or spray painting over their lenses. Authorities have arrested and charged multiple people in connection with that vandalism. In one case, a cop made a fake, 3D-printed Flock camera to essentially act as bait; authorities then charged a man who broke the fake camera with three felonies.

One explicit reason some cities have ditched Flock for Axon is Flock’s national network. This allows a cop on one side of the country to search cameras not only in their own jurisdiction or state, but in another state entirely. When reporting on how local cops were performing Flock lookups for ICE, 404 Media found that some police departments did not know or understand their cameras were accessible by other agencies.

Smith said of the backlash against Flock and ALPR more generally: “This has been a hell of a storm.”

In a further fudging of the concept of online ownership, Sony Interactive Entertainment is disputing player ownership of its games, according to a legal filing it submitted to California’s Northern District Court on August 21. This follows a suit brought against Sony in June by four PlayStation Store customers who claim that the company doesn’t clarify the difference between buying a license to a game and owning it outright, as Olds once did when games came in lacquered polycarbonate plastic discs and cartridges that one could fling across the room in a pique of Game Over failure—or just sell them for money, if one was so inclined. 

As reported by former Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo on his Game File Substack, Sony’s response to the suit asserts that Section 1 of its Homeric Software Product Licensing Agreement explains that “the Software is licensed [,] not sold.”

To justify this logic, Sony further asserts that one cannot “own” a digital copy of a game because, as it’s a digital file rather than physical media (which is currently being phased out by game companies like SIE), it cannot be possessed by any one individual. “In the digital age, it is not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining ‘ownership’ of a digital game,” Sony claims. “Were that the case, then [the plaintiff] would not have been able to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem on February 25, 2026, for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after [the other plaintiff] had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14, 2026, because [they], not Sony, would have owned it then.” 

This digital-game reality is a quantum leap from the days when players could borrow their buddy’s Dark Souls disc after they’d chucked their own into traffic after getting their ass handed to them by Manus, Father of the Abyss, for the umpteenth time. Obviously, there were many physical copies of that game going around, as opposed to the only digital copy of Resident Evil Requiem that’s still somehow available to license on the PlayStation Store.

Indeed, Sony’s argument—that gamers don’t actually own shit when they hit “Buy Now” and “Complete Purchase” on the PlayStation Store, because those are words and words are wind—comes after the company recently emailed PlayStation account users to tap on their onerous Terms Of Service agreement. It reads, in part: “[In] addition to licenses of Virtual Content being subject to purchase and cancelation [sic] terms and conditions of the storefront/vendor, the availability of Virtual Content is not guaranteed, prices are subject to change, and order sizes may be limited without prior notice to you.” Here’s a fun part: “Purchases of Virtual Content licenses may be non-refundable.”