Mark Zuckerberg told Congress Facebook doesn't track you across the internet.
Now a billion-dollar surveillance company is making the same promise about its cameras – and its own patent says something very different.
Flock Safety's own patent describes a system the company publicly swears doesn't exist.
Flock Safety's License Plate Reader Patent Reveals Facial Recognition Capability
Flock Safety runs cameras in over 6,000 communities across 49 states, scanning more than 20 billion vehicles every month.
The company's website says it plainly: its cameras "do not use facial recognition" and "are not general-purpose surveillance systems designed to identify people."
Flock's chief communications officer, Josh Thomas, doubled down on that claim during a television interview last June.
"We're not tracking people," he told Atlanta News First Investigates.
But the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Flock a patent in August 2022 – and what's inside it tells a completely different story.
The patent, co-invented by CEO Garrett Langley and co-founder Matt Feury, describes a "dynamic surveillance network" designed to stitch together independently owned cameras – at busy intersections, outside convenience stores, inside gated communities – into a single, searchable, nationwide system with no geographic limits.
It explicitly permits "face recognition data points" as a query method, describes a neural network that identifies pedestrians by sex, race, clothing type, height, and weight, and outlines a feature allowing a "subscriber" to register a named individual – the patent uses the example of a teenage daughter – and receive an automated SMS alert the moment that person passes any camera in the network.
That is not a license plate reader. That is a national tracking grid.
DeSantis Said What Every Conservative Is Thinking About Flock
Ron DeSantis has never been soft on crime, and he's not soft on Flock either.
"I'm all about law enforcement having tools to hold criminals accountable," DeSantis said at a Florida press conference in August. "No one's been stronger on law enforcement than me – but I don't want to have this become a surveillance state."
DeSantis told Floridians to think about what COVID lockdowns would have looked like with Flock cameras on every corner – tracking every movement, logging every destination, feeding it all into a database searchable by thousands of agencies.
"What we don't want in the state of Florida is to have a digital AI surveillance state where everything we're doing is being tracked at all times," he said.
He ordered Flock cameras removed from Florida state roads and called for legislation to protect Floridians from what he described as a "digital prison."
The governor put his finger on the problem every Republican should be talking about: the cities buying these cameras by the hundreds are the same cities run by Soros-backed prosecutors who let violent criminals walk the morning after their arrest – the same jurisdictions that declined to prosecute a single looter in 2020 while businesses burned.
They don’t want to fight, they want to monitor citizens.
Flock Lost 80 Cities and Made $500 Million Anyway
More than 80 cities have canceled or scaled back Flock contracts since early 2025, and it changed nothing for the company's bottom line.
Flock's annual revenue nearly doubled in the same period, and the company's valuation climbed to $8.4 billion after Andreessen Horowitz led a $275 million funding round in March 2025.
The company is now targeting 100 drone deployments by the end of 2026. Flock acquired a drone company and is pitching the devices as aerial "first responders" that can be airborne and recording within 90 seconds of a 911 call – flying license plate readers with the patented capability to identify a person by height, weight, clothing, and race, streaming that data into a nationwide searchable network.
Flock moves into a city fast, gets cameras installed before anyone has read the contract, then activates capabilities nobody agreed to.
The patent proves those capabilities were built in from the start.
Sources:
- John Loftus, "Surveillance Patent Shows Flock Spying Way Worse Than Advertised," The Daily Caller, September 17, 2026.
- "Flock Safety Crosses 100,000 Cameras as 53 Cities Cancel Over Unauthorized Federal Data Access," TechTimes, June 29, 2026.
- Ron DeSantis press conference, Florida International University, August 26, 2026, via Fox Business and Breitbart.
