08/28/2026
"No one should be able to track a woman's every movement without consequence and ordinary citizens shouldn't have their movements tracked. Here's how to protect yourself and push back."
For four months this year, a Kentucky police officer typed a woman's license plate into a nationwide surveillance system and watched where she went. She was his ex-girlfriend, and by the time investigators counted, he had run her plates 2,048 times -- tracking two of her vehicles across Kentucky and Indiana as he harassed her and, court records say, made threatening comments. She went to court and obtained an order of protection against him. He kept watching. In the 19 days after the order was granted, he ran her plates another 241 times.
Asad Zahir was not tailing her car or staking out her house. He was using Flock -- the private company whose license-plate cameras now blanket thousands of American communities -- and he logged the reason for his searches as a "narcotics investigation," though the woman he was tracking was not the subject of any investigation and had no history to suggest one. Zahir was arrested on Wednesday and charged with 10 counts of official misconduct and unlawful access to a computer. What makes his case unusual is not the conduct. It is that he was caught at all.
Zahir is only the latest. Flock knows where you drive, when you leave the house, which roads you take, what time you come home -- logging your car's movements through a network of AI cameras that scan some 20 billion license plates a month, in more than 6,000 communities across the country, and store them in a database police can search without a warrant. It is the kind of mass surveillance Americans tend to associate with authoritarian states like China -- yet it has been built here, in only about seven years, by a for-profit company, with little public debate and almost no oversight. And it has become, in the hands of the wrong people, a nearly perfect tool for stalking women.
Marci Bakely thought she was losing her mind. For months, the 50-year-old Air Force veteran could not understand how her ex-boyfriend always seemed to know where she was -- texting her about a doctor's appointment, a date, a grocery run, sometimes within minutes, though he lived 15 miles away. She installed three cameras around her home to see if he was staking out her cul-de-sac. She bought a hidden-camera detector and waved it down every wall.
Three times she drove to a mechanic and asked him to scan her car for trackers. The answer, when it came, was worse than a tracker: her ex was a police chief, and he had searched her license plate, and her teenage daughter's, roughly 600 times through Flock. He was arrested on charges of stalking, harassment, and misusing the system; in April, before he could stand trial, he was found dead at his home, in what officials said was a su***de.
Bakely's case is not an outlier, and neither is Zahir's. A recent Washington Post investigation identified at least 50 law-enforcement officers charged or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes; Flock's system was involved in 46 of them. In 26 of the cases, investigators and prosecutors said the officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes' new partners, or women they wanted to meet. The surveillance was nearly effortless: no warrant, no case number, just a plate number typed into a search bar and, moments later, a map of where someone had been.
Those documented cases are almost certainly a fraction of the real number, because the system is built in a way that keeps its own misuse hidden. Search logs are held by individual police departments, and only some have ever been released through public-records requests, so most people have no way of knowing whether their car has been tracked. When an advocacy group in Joplin, Missouri, obtained its local logs, it found that 85% of searches were justified with a single word -- "suspicious," "drugs" -- and that fewer than 3% were tied to a criminal case.
The safeguards that might catch abuse, like requiring a case number or auditing officers' searches, have long been optional, and most departments left them switched off. Many logs are never reviewed at all. The women who do find out tend to learn by accident -- a call from an internal-affairs investigator, or a search of their own plate through a website called Have I Been Flocked.
The records tell the same story in city after city: a man with a badge using a national surveillance system to trace the movements of a woman trying to get away from him. In Wisconsin, a Menasha officer used Flock to check whether his then-girlfriend had gone to a clinic to seek an abortion, then contacted the clinic to try to obtain her medical records, confronted her at home, and began calling her as many as 19 times a day. In Texas, an officer ran a woman's plate through a nationwide network of cameras to track her down after she had an abortion.
In Kansas, a police chief tracked his estranged wife through Flock and used the location data to turn up where she was, once while she was intimate with another man. In Florida, an officer showed his girlfriend footage of herself driving, placed a tracker in her belongings, and reminded her that he carried a gun; when she threatened to call the police, he told her, "The police are already here."
That is the particular terror of it: the man doing the stalking is often the institution a woman would call for help. "Where do you go as a victim if you're being abused?" said Adam Dodge, founder of the cyber-safety group EndTAB. "You go to law enforcement, right?"
Eva Galperin, who directs cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, described what the tool gives an abuser. "The goal of the abuser is to make themselves seem omniscient and omnipotent," she said. "You don't have to be watching your victim all the time. They just have to believe that at any moment you could be." The women describe living inside exactly that fear -- watched, unable to prove it, uncertain which cameras were his eyes. Some stopped leaving the house. Some began borrowing their relatives' cars.
The ones who reported it have often been waved off. Bakely filed for a restraining order against her ex, and a judge denied it, ruling that his conduct was "concerning" but that she could not prove ongoing stalking. In Pennsylvania, Alexandria Griffith warned her local police department and the district attorney's office that her officer husband was tracking and threatening her, and says both dismissed her. Days later, she says, he came to her parents' home with a gun and shoved her and her four-year-old son.
"A lot of people knew that all of this was happening," she said, "and they kind of just brushed me off." Where accountability came at all, it came unevenly: officers kept their access after being warned, and in some states no charges followed at all. In Idaho, a sheriff searched for his wife's car hundreds of times and faced no charges; the state's attorney general concluded that no crime had been committed.
For years, the company that built the network insisted this was not its concern. In barely seven years, Flock has grown from a single camera its founder rigged out of an Android phone in a rainproof box into a mass-surveillance network valued at more than $7 billion -- one most Americans have never heard of, backed by some of Silicon Valley's most powerful investors.
"We're not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions," its chief executive, Garrett Langley, told the Post. Asked whether the company should do more to restrict how officers use the tool, he had been plainer still: "I don't think it's our job to police the police." One of Flock's investors, the venture capitalist David Ulevitch, called the more than 40 documented misuse cases "truly a nonissue." A company that had assembled one of the most detailed records of Americans' movements ever created looked at the women its product helped stalk and saw a cost worth absorbing.
That posture has begun to crack, but only under pressure. This month, facing mounting scrutiny, Flock reversed course and announced that it would finally require the safeguards it had left optional for years -- an "Audit Assistance" tool that flags abnormal searching and locks the officer out pending review, and a case number for every search. Before the company made it mandatory, only about a third of its police agencies had bothered to turn the audit tool on.
Langley, who had said policing the police was not his job, now spoke of "a responsibility, maybe an obligation even." It was that newly mandatory tool that flagged Zahir's 2,048 searches. The system, in other words, had to build an artificial intelligence to catch its own users -- and the first thing it caught was another officer stalking another woman.
That such a tool was necessary at all is the indictment. It does not prevent the surveillance; it notices it, after the fact, once an officer has already run a woman's plates thousands of times. And it arrived only after years of scandals, dozens of documented victims, and a business calculation that the reputational cost had finally grown too large to absorb.
Nor has the company's instinct been only to fix the problem. A confidential guide Flock distributes to police departments, obtained by the technology outlet 404 Media, coaches agencies on how to defuse public opposition before it can form -- advising officers to brief city officials privately, before residents ever reach a public comment period, and to "own the narrative before someone else does."
On the specific charge that its cameras enable mass surveillance, the guide counsels police not to bother denying it -- "you're not going to convince opponents that it's not," it says -- but to change the subject to public safety. The same company now promising accountability has also written a playbook for steering communities past the scrutiny that might demand it.
That scrutiny is coming anyway. Over the past year, dozens of communities have moved to cancel their Flock contracts -- more than 20 jurisdictions in a single month this summer, the most since activists began tracking the company in 2021. The ACLU has mounted a national campaign it calls "Get the Flock Out"; in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the city council voted to bag the cameras in trash until they could be removed; in a small Texas town, residents simply sawed one down. Tempe, Arizona, canceled its contract the day before Zahir's arrest was announced.
And there is a deeper problem that no audit tool will reach. The stalking cases are the most visceral abuse of Flock's network, but they are not the whole of it -- and by treating misuse as the problem to be solved, the company obscures the larger one. Even used exactly as intended, Flock is a standing record of where tens of millions of Americans go, searchable by police without a warrant. That infrastructure does not only enable a jealous officer to track an ex; it enables whatever the government of the moment decides it wants to find.
It is already happening. Federal immigration agents, who have no contract with Flock, have gained side-door access by asking local police to run searches for them -- more than 4,000 immigration-related lookups in a single year, reaching cameras in over 5,000 communities, including towns that never agreed to any such thing. In one case, Texas officers used the network to trace a woman who had traveled to Illinois for an abortion, tapping cameras in a state whose law expressly forbids it.
An officer stalking his girlfriend can be fired and charged. A nationwide surveillance system quietly repurposed to hunt immigrants, or women who cross state lines for an abortion, breaks no audit rule at all -- because that is the system working as designed. The women being stalked are the warning the country can see. What they reveal is a machine built to watch everyone.
Still the network grows, because growth is the whole design -- every new camera makes the system more powerful, more valuable, and harder to escape. For the women already inside it, none of this was ever abstract. Bakely, who learned that the man tracking her every move ran the police force she might otherwise have called, put the problem simply: "Who do you turn the chief of police in to?"
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No one should be able to track a woman's every movement without consequence -- and ordinary citizens shouldn't have their movements tracked and recorded by a private, unaccountable company. Here's how to protect yourself and push back. Here's how to protect yourself and push back.
--> Most communities adopted these cameras with little public debate, and local officials have the power to change that. Contact your city council or county board and ask whether your community contracts with Flock or another license-plate-reader company; whether officers must log a criminal case number for every search; and whether anyone audits those searches. Ask them to require warrants, mandate audits, or end the contract.
--> The ACLU's "Get the Flock Out" campaign helps residents find out whether their community uses these cameras and push for change, and includes a step-by-step guide for fighting Flock contracts and model policies for local officials at https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out
--> To find out whether your own license plate has been searched in Flock's system, you can look it up at https://haveibeenflocked.com
--> For more on how license-plate readers and other street-level surveillance work -- and how communities are responding -- see the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Street-Level Surveillance project at https://www.eff.org/issues/street-level-surveillance
--> If you or someone you know is being stalked or is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline offers free, confidential support 24 hours a day at 1-800-799-7233, or text "START" to 88788. For help specifically with technology-enabled abuse -- tracking, surveillance, and stalking through devices or data -- the Safety Net project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence offers survivor resources at https://www.techsafety.org
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- For a deeply reported look at how private data companies and government agencies have quietly built an American surveillance state -- the larger system that networks like Flock's are part of -- we recommend "Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780593443224 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4z6wXjd (Amazon)
- For a detailed account of how private companies came to harvest and profit from the details of our lives, we recommend "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781541758001 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4xnIOaQ (Amazon)
- For a potentially life-saving book for older teens and adults about the early warning signs of abusive relationships, myths about abusive personalities, and how to get help, we highly recommend "Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" at https://www.amightygirl.com/why-does-he-do-that
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- To read more about this week's arrest of a police office who stalked his ex-girlfriend using Flock cameras, visit https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/26/us/flock-kentucky-police-officer-arrest
- To read the Washington Post investigation that documented how police officers across the country have misused license-plate readers to stalk women, visit https://wapo.st/4xGdGUj
- For more on Flock's strategy for managing public opposition to its cameras, see Tech Times at https://www.techtimes.com/articles/322909/20260804/flock-safety-coaches-police-own-narrative-before-citizens-can-speak.htm
- To read more about the Texas officer who searched tens of thousands of cameras to track a woman after she had an abortion, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-texas-cop-used-83000-cameras-track-her-down
