WIRED analyzed the software by examining code Flock served from its own login portals. Loading those pages returned a user interface for screens that would ordinarily appear only after a police user signed in, letting reporters reconstruct portions of the authenticated applications, their prompts, search fields, tools, and controls, without actual access. The files appeared to contain everything needed to reconstruct the interface from scratch.
Before an officer runs a search, the software can ask for a justification. The code shows that by default an officer has to type a reason for the search; however, the form appears to place no requirements on what that reason says or how long it must be. If a department also requires a case number, the form checks only that it contains at least three characters. WIRED could not determine whether Flock applies additional checks on its servers after the information is submitted.
WIRED shared its findings with Buchodi, a pseudonymous independent security and privacy researcher who has spent more than a decade reverse engineering consumer software and surveillance technologies. Buchodi examined Flock’s code separately and reproduced key parts of the analysis.
References to the tools Flock offers, the data they can apparently reach, and the suggested prompts Flock authored for police are fixed in the code WIRED reviewed. What that code cannot show is how the system behaves in use. It contains no instructions given to the model itself, and it does not reveal what Flock’s servers do with a request once submitted, what they send back, or whether they refuse any command.
Flock has said little about the tool in public, but Garrett Langley, its chief executive, once likened it to a crime analyst who is, in his words, “always awake, always watching out for you.” At a demonstration for police chiefs in Denver last year, Langley described the ability to search every camera in a city for cars tailing an armored truck, pulling up the registered owners of those vehicles and checking their arrest records, in under a minute.
Investigators who try it, he said, get “addicted.”
The company Langley started in Atlanta, where his first camera was a phone in a waterproof box, now logs 20 billion plate scans a month. Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and other venture firms have poured money into the business, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round. The company’s original tagline was“the first public safety operating system that eliminates crime;” and Langley recently told Vanity Fair that Flock would have solved the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, Savannah Guthrie’s mother, had its cameras been deployed where she vanished.
Flock counts roughly 140,000 monthly active users.. At the company’s new Atlanta headquarters, a gold-painted camera covered in signatures commemorates an earlier ritual of marking each additional $1 million in revenue with a new camera. “Now we do more like a million a day,” Langley recently told Vanity Fair.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, says a system like this one was inevitable. “To use all the data collected, you need to build in the ability to query it,” he says. “To make things easier for police officers who are not going to create their own agentic tools, you must preprogram the system with some natural language prompts and automated workflows.”
