Flock Safety Caught Red-Handed: Condor Camera Tracked Reporter Despite Company Denials
Key Takeaways
- ▸Flock Safety's Condor PTZ camera actively tracks and follows individuals in real time, contradicting the company's explicit public statements that it 'focuses on vehicles, not people'
- ▸Investigators discovered unsecured live feeds from Condor cameras exposed on the public internet with no authentication, capable of reading text on nearby smartphones
- ▸Flock's network processes 20+ billion scans monthly across 80,000-100,000 cameras with documented warrantless access by federal immigration agencies
Summary
Flock Safety, a major U.S. surveillance camera provider, has been exposed for publicly denying capabilities that its Condor PTZ camera demonstrably possesses. During an investigative report by InvestigateTV in June 2026, a Flock Safety representative verbally denied the company tracks people—even as the Condor camera mounted on a public trail actively pivoted, followed, and zoomed on a reporter standing directly in front of the device. This contradiction reveals a fundamental gap between the company's public messaging and the actual functionality of its AI-powered camera system.
The Condor represents a significant escalation in Flock's surveillance capabilities beyond license plate readers. The PTZ camera actively locks onto and follows human movement in real time, with investigators finding that live feeds were exposed on the open internet without password protection—some cameras capable of zooming close enough to read text on passersby's phone screens. Flock's own training materials explicitly demonstrate how police can track suspects "from location to location to location" across multiple cameras, a practice the company has officially denied.
The scale of Flock's surveillance infrastructure is staggering: approximately 80,000 to 100,000 cameras conducting over 20 billion scans monthly. Civil liberties organizations have documented that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have accessed Flock data without warrants for immigration enforcement. With Condor's people-tracking capabilities layered on top, Flock's infrastructure now functions as a de facto nationwide tracking system—one operating without public consent or awareness.
- Company training materials explicitly teach police cross-location suspect tracking using Condor—a practice Flock publicly denies the system can perform
Editorial Opinion
This investigation exposes a troubling pattern of corporate deception in the surveillance industry: a company making public commitments to privacy while simultaneously engineering technology specifically designed to track individuals without consent. Flock Safety's false denials—delivered directly to reporters and stored on video—represent a fundamental breach of public trust that demands regulatory scrutiny. As AI-powered surveillance becomes increasingly invasive and ubiquitous, transparency and honesty from vendors must become non-negotiable prerequisites for deployment in public spaces. This case demonstrates what happens when those guardrails fail.
