The Documented
Record

A two-page reference card covering our position, how to respond to common arguments, who is behind Flock Safety, what their own patent reveals, and the Flock Nova platform. Print it out and bring it to city council meetings, neighborhood meetups, or any conversation about surveillance in Corona.

Covers: Common talking points and rebuttals · Flock investor network (a16z, Peter Thiel, Founders Fund) · Patent US11416545B1 and what it actually describes · Flock Nova "Google-like search" platform · Links to primary sources.

Flock Safety markets itself as a simple license plate reader. Their own 2022 patent — US11416545B1 — tells a very different story. The patent describes a "System and Method for Object Based Query of Video Content Captured by a Dynamic Surveillance Network" that uses neural networks to identify and classify people by race, gender, height, weight, and clothing. This data is stored in searchable databases queryable across the entire national network — without a warrant.

Figure 5A of the patent specifically shows the neural network's object classification architecture — not just plates and vehicles, but humans, animals, and physical attributes. This is the diagram Flock does not include in their sales brochures or city council presentations.

What this means for Corona: The hardware already deployed on Corona's streets is capable of far more than reading license plates. These capabilities can be unlocked via a software update — no new cameras required. No Corona ordinance currently prohibits this expansion. Residents approved nothing of the sort.

Flock Nova is the company's "public safety data platform" — already in active use by law enforcement as of May 2025. Nova combines ALPR data with jail records, arrest records, public records, and OSINT into a single searchable interface. In Flock's own words, it provides a "Google-like search experience" — type a name, plate, phone number, or address and instantly pull everything connected across jurisdictions. No warrant. No judge. No oversight.

After 404 Media broke the story, Flock removed the commercial data broker and data-breach components from Nova. They kept everything else. The EFF described it as a "dystopian panopticon." The ACLU called it "authoritarian tracking infrastructure."

What this means for Corona: Every Corona Flock camera is already part of the network Nova searches. No city opt-in is required. Your plate data — every trip, every timestamp — can become part of a cross-jurisdictional dossier assembled without any judicial oversight. No Corona policy currently prohibits this.

Flock Safety is a $7.5 billion company with over 100,000 cameras in 49 states, scanning more than 20 billion vehicles per month. Understanding who owns and funds Flock is essential to understanding its agenda.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is the primary investor in Flock. Co-founder Marc Andreessen has publicly stated: "Democracy is fake." This is the firm writing the checks that put cameras on every road into and out of Corona.

Peter Thiel / Founders Fund invested in Flock's $275 million funding round. Thiel co-founded Palantir — the government data-analytics firm holding contracts with ICE, the NSA, and the Department of Defense. Flock data feeds directly into Palantir's platform. The connection between your daily commute and federal surveillance infrastructure runs directly through Thiel's investment portfolio.

These are not passive financial backers. They are ideologically motivated actors who have built a vertically integrated surveillance ecosystem — cameras on the street, data in the cloud, analytics for the feds — and Corona is paying a subscription fee to be part of it.

The San Francisco Police Department allowed out-of-state police agencies to conduct over 1.6 million searches of its Flock Safety license plate reader database. Public records reviewed by 404 Media showed the SFPD's data was searched at least 19 times specifically for "ICE Fugitive," "Assist ICE," or specific ICE detention case numbers.

The agencies making these searches included the Franklin County Sheriff's Office in Georgia, the Dallas Police Department, and the California Highway Patrol. This occurred despite San Francisco's status as a sanctuary city — where local law enforcement is explicitly restricted from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.

Why this matters for Corona: This demonstrates that even cities with explicit sanctuary protections had their Flock data used for immigration enforcement through the "national network" feature. Corona has no such protections, and no published policy preventing the same from happening here.

The Mountain View Police Chief discovered through an internal audit that Flock Safety had switched on the "national lookup" feature for one of the city's cameras — without the city's knowledge or authorization. Multiple federal agencies had accessed the camera data before anyone at the city realized it was happening.

The agencies that accessed Mountain View's data included the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Langley Air Force Base, and the U.S. Office of Inspector General. The city's official statement read: "This setting was enabled without MVPD's permission or knowledge."

This incident is especially significant because it shows that Flock's own technical infrastructure — not just misuse by individual officers — can expose a city's camera data to federal access without any local authorization. Corona has no evidence this hasn't happened here.

Through Flock's national network, Border Patrol had access to at least 1,600 license plate readers across 22 states — including California. Some California counties reported running plate lookups on behalf of Border Patrol agents.

California's Values Act (SB 54) restricts state and local law enforcement agencies from using resources to assist with federal immigration enforcement. Using Flock's database to run lookups on behalf of CBP or Border Patrol may constitute a violation of this statute — but because the activity occurs through a private corporate database rather than a direct government-to-government data share, enforcement is murky.

Corona is in Riverside County. There is no public record of whether Corona's Flock database has been queried on behalf of Border Patrol. That information should be demanded through a CPRA request.

Oakland's police department was found to have used Flock Safety data to assist in an ICE investigation — a direct violation of California's SB 34, which explicitly prohibits ALPR data from being used for immigration enforcement purposes.

SB 34 is unambiguous: license plate reader data collected in California cannot be used for immigration enforcement. Oakland PD used it for exactly that purpose. This demonstrates that even with explicit state law prohibitions in place, Flock data flows to ICE when officers choose to share it — and the private corporate database structure makes that sharing difficult to detect or prevent.

Why this matters for Corona: California law already prohibits what Oakland did. Corona residents have no way of knowing whether Corona PD has made similar queries on behalf of federal immigration agencies. A CPRA request for all Flock query logs is the only way to find out.

An internal audit of the Berkeley Police Department revealed that external agencies had searched the statewide ALPR database — which includes Berkeley's Flock data — using the terms "ICE" and "CBP" in the search engine's reason field.

The chair of Berkeley's Police Accountability Board, Joshua Cayetano, wrote in a letter dated November 10, 2025: "BPD did not mention that it had identified a potential policy violation of Policy 1305 or Berkeley's sanctuary city resolution." Berkeley police discovered the searches, determined they may have violated sanctuary city policy, and chose not to tell the City Council or the public.

This is the precise pattern that makes Flock so dangerous: the data flows, the violations occur, the police know, and the public never finds out. Berkeley has an active Police Accountability Board and still this happened. Corona has no such safeguard.

In Denver, Chrisanna Elser was told by police that she had been caught on camera stealing a package. When she denied the charge, local police sergeant Jamie Milliman told her: "You know, we have cameras in that town. You can't get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing."

The person in the video was not Elser. Flock's AI-powered footage had led the department to wrongly identify her as the suspect, reported by the Colorado Sun. This illustrates two compounding problems: Flock's AI makes identification errors with real consequences for innocent people, and the existence of these cameras breeds a surveillance-state mindset in the officers who wield them.

The sergeant's remark — that residents cannot move freely without being tracked — was not a warning. He said it as a point of pride. That is the culture these cameras create.

ICE has no official contract with Flock Safety. Despite this, data reviewed by 404 Media found that ICE officials asked state and local law enforcement to run over 4,000 Flock database lookups on their behalf — giving federal immigration enforcement a "side door" into civilian movement data with no formal accountability, no contract, and no public record.

This arrangement means ICE can obtain the travel history of any vehicle in any participating city's network simply by asking a local officer to run the query — without triggering any of the oversight requirements that would apply to a direct federal database access.

This is the definition of a surveillance end-run. And it was happening at scale before anyone was publicly reporting it.

Through Flock alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had access to at least 1,600 license plate readers spread across 22 states — a surveillance network that includes California. This access existed before most of the cities involved had any knowledge of it or had agreed to it.

The sheer scale of this access — obtained through the private Flock network rather than formal government channels — illustrates how a single contract between a city and a private surveillance vendor can quietly plug that city's residents into a national federal tracking infrastructure.

In 2025, Flock Safety's CEO Garrett Langley publicly admitted that the company had been running a secret pilot program with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — after previously and explicitly denying that Flock had any federal government contracts.

Langley's admission, in his own words: "We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn't create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users."

This is not an ambiguous statement. The CEO of Flock Safety admitted that the company lied about its federal relationships, and that it failed to build the technical safeguards that would have prevented federal agencies from accessing local city data. This is not a company that can be trusted as a partner in community safety.

For cities like Corona that have signed contracts with Flock: you were not told the truth about who would have access to your residents' data.

In a CNBC interview on March 12, 2026, Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp made an extraordinary statement about his company's technology and political intentions:

"This technology disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic — voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters."

Karp also acknowledged the technology is "dangerous societally", justifying it only by arguing that adversaries would build it if Palantir didn't. This is the reasoning of a company that has already decided to deploy technology it acknowledges as dangerous — and is now using it to pursue explicit political outcomes.

Palantir is an investor in Flock Safety and a primary integration partner. When you see a Flock camera in Corona, you are looking at a node in infrastructure owned and operated by a company whose CEO openly describes it as a tool for reshaping American political power.

Palantir Technologies holds a $30 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to develop a system consolidating sensitive personal data — including biometrics, geolocation, and personal identifiers from multiple federal agencies — for near real-time immigration enforcement tracking.

Palantir's platform is designed to ingest any dataset: license plates, 911 call records, utility bills, financial records, and biometrics. When a police department uses both Flock and Palantir, the daily movement data captured on Corona's streets can flow directly into the same system being used to track people for immigration enforcement — with no additional warrant, no notification, and no local oversight.

Flock captures where you go. Palantir connects the dots. ICE acts on the results. This is not a hypothetical chain. Every link in it is documented and operational.

Since early 2025, at least 30 localities across the United States have deactivated Flock cameras or canceled their contracts with the company. Cities that have taken action include Flagstaff, Arizona; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Eugene, Oregon; and Santa Cruz, California.

The stated reasons across these cities consistently include: unauthorized federal access to local camera data, lack of transparency about how data is stored and who can access it, the absence of community oversight mechanisms, and Flock's admitted failure to prevent federal agency access without local knowledge or consent.

These are not fringe cities. They are communities that reviewed the same evidence available to Corona — the same documented incidents of ICE access, the same Mountain View audit, the same Flock CEO admission — and decided the cameras had to go.

Corona has made no such decision. Our cameras are still up. Our data is still flowing. We don't know who has queried it.