By Ghost Zero

On July 30, 2025, a 9NEWS reporter in Denver asked Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley a simple question on live TV: did Flock have federal contracts? His answer: "We don't."

Around the same time, Flock assured the Loveland, Colorado police department that federal agencies no longer had access to its cameras. The chief said so publicly.

Less than a month later, on August 25, 2025, Flock posted this on its own website: "some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information." The company admitted it had run pilot programs with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations. Technically, Langley's answer may have held up. There was no contract. There were pilots.

This is Part 1 of The Warrantless Road. It covers who built the network, who paid for it, and who is watching through it.

A Startup From Atlanta

Flock was founded in Atlanta in 2017 by Garrett Langley, Matt Feury and Paige Todd. Langley's own story is that it started after a string of break-ins in his neighborhood.

Then the money came. SEC filings and the company's own announcements show:

– 2018: a $10 million round led by Bedrock Capital, with Peter Thiel's firm Founders Fund taking part.
– 2021: $150 million led by Andreessen Horowitz.
– 2022: $150 million at a $3.5 billion valuation.
– March 2025: $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, led again by Andreessen Horowitz.
– 2026: Flock told Fortune it raised $500 million at an $8.3 billion valuation, about $1.2 billion in total.

That is what a neighborhood camera company turned into: one of the most valuable surveillance businesses in America, with cameras in more than 5,000 communities.

The People Behind the Money

Investors are entitled to their views. You are entitled to know them.

Peter Thiel did not found Flock and has never sat on its board. His firm invested. In 2009, Thiel wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Marc Andreessen's firm led two of Flock's biggest rounds. Explaining a political theory called the Iron Law of Oligarchy on a 2025 podcast, he said it "basically says democracy is fake. There's always a ruling class."

Read both in full and decide for yourself. But when the people funding a nationwide tracking grid talk like that about democracy, it is fair to ask who the grid is for.

The Federal Back Door

Here is how the network works. Each police department buys cameras. Then it can join Flock's "National Lookup," which lets any other enrolled agency search its cameras.

Senator Ron Wyden's October 2025 letter to Flock says Flock told his office that 75% of its police customers had enrolled. The same letter reports about 200 searches by Customs and Border Protection and 175 by Homeland Security Investigations. It says more than 14% of 11.4 million searches it reviewed gave nothing but "investigation" as the reason, and it describes local officers running searches on behalf of federal agents.

The records keep piling up:

– 404 Media, August 2025: data from three police departments showed CBP regularly searched more than 80,000 Flock cameras nationwide. One department said it did not know it was sharing with CBP.
– University of Washington, October 2025: Border Patrol searched the data of at least ten Washington departments that did not explicitly authorize it. The report calls it a "back door."
– Illinois Secretary of State, August 2025: an audit found Flock let CBP into Illinois cameras in violation of state law. Part 5 covers that one.
– Government Accountability Office, December 2024: CBP, ICE and the Secret Service all have agreements to search third-party plate reader data, which the GAO calls a nationwide source of license plate data.

In January 2026, Flock added a single switch that lets a department turn off all federal sharing. Ask your department whether it is switched off.

From a Plate to a Person

Flock does not stop at plates. Its own materials describe a product called Nova that turns "a plate hit" into "a suspect list": names, phone numbers, addresses, jail records. In May 2025, 404 Media published leaked plans for Nova to draw on data brokers and even breached data. Flock says Nova will not use breach data.

Flock's FreeForm tool lets officers type a description like "man in blue shirt and cowboy hat" and search connected video for people who match. That is not license plate reading anymore. That is people tracking.

Wide Open

A grid this big is also a target.

– The National Vulnerability Database lists CVE-2025-59403: a Flock camera app with administrative functions that required no authentication.
– In December 2025, 404 Media found at least 60 Flock Condor cameras with livestreams and admin panels open to the internet. Anyone could watch, download 30 days of video and change the settings.
– In September 2026, WIRED and 404 Media analyzed a single Flock camera that hackers had taken off a pole. In about 21 days of logs, it had photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles.

Who Pays to Keep It Running

Federal lobbying filings show what Flock spends to shape the rules. Its lobbying firms reported $840,000 in income from Flock in 2025, all of it through two firms, BGR and Mercury. In the first three quarters of 2026 they reported $790,000, and two new lobbying firms registered for Flock in September. One of them lists its issue as "appropriate federal guardrails for ALPR technology." In other words, the company is lobbying on the very rules meant to limit it.

And your tax dollars help buy the cameras. The Justice Department's Byrne grant program lists plate readers as allowable equipment. Its new Model Cities program, worth nearly $300 million and announced in June 2026, lists them too.

My opinion, labeled as my opinion: nobody in your town voted to let Border Patrol search your driving history. Nobody asked you whether a startup valued at $8 billion should log your car every time you pass a pole. Police departments were told federal agencies no longer had access, and weeks later the company admitted its own statements were inaccurate. I do not consent to this network, and the answer is to take it down.

What You Can Do

The goal is removal. Start by finding out what your town signed.

– Ask your city council and police department in writing: do we have a Flock contract, when does it renew, and are we enrolled in the National Lookup? Then tell them: I do not consent. End the contract and take the cameras down.
– File a public records request for your department's Flock audit log, including every search of your town's cameras by outside agencies. That shows who has been watching through your poles.
– Ask whether any federal grant money paid for the cameras. Follow the money out loud at public comment.

If your town will not take them down yet, demand the fallback in writing while you keep pushing:

– Federal sharing switched off, and National Lookup turned off.
– A public list of every outside agency with access, updated every quarter.

Safeguards are the floor, not the goal.

Start today. Search your city council's records for the words "Flock" or "license plate reader" and find out when the contract renews.

The full research is in The Flock Files: How a $7.5 Billion Startup Built America’s Surveillance Grid – and How We Stop It, free in the Red Pill Library. Part 2 of The Warrantless Road covers what happens when the machine is wrong, Part 3 covers officers who abused it and the honest ones who want it checked, Part 4 covers the way out, and Part 5 covers Illinois. I also put this subject into song form, released by Vigilant Protocol as FLOCKED and by The Valkyrie Project as SMILE, with songs from Redline Republic and Axiom 312 on the way. Protocol Media is building an archive for every topic it covers: books, briefs, music, art and short-form video, backed by the Evidence, Founding and Acts Records. The work is underway and the documents are still being added, so the page keeps growing.

ART AS THE WEAPON. TRUTH AS THE AMMUNITION.