Flock’s Own Patent Proves It Was Never “Just a License Plate Reader”

Every time a sheriff or a vendor tells a county board these are “just license plate readers,” the same document contradicts them. It is not a leaked memo or an activist’s interpretation. It is Flock’s own patent, filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and signed by the company’s founders.

U.S. Patent 11,416,545 B1 — “System and method for object based query of video content captured by a dynamic surveillance network” — was granted August 16, 2022. Its named inventors are Garrett Langley, Flock’s CEO, and Matt Feury, a Flock co-founder. In it, the company describes the system behind its entire product line: a method for pulling video from many separate, unrelated cameras — neighborhood-watch cameras, home security systems, commercial cameras, traffic cameras, even, in the patent’s own words, “a bystander’s smartphone” — and combining them into one searchable network.

What the patent says it is built to do

Track a named person, in real time. The patent describes the system recognizing a specific individual and alerting a subscriber. Its own example is a subscriber’s teenage daughter:

“…alert triggering module 158 may recognize that a person detected in a video segment… is statistically similar to the teenage daughter of a subscriber to the DSOQ system and, in response, may cause an alert signal (e.g., an SMS communication) to be transmitted… to a smartphone associated with the subscriber.”
— U.S. Patent 11,416,545 B1

Search for a face across unrelated networks. The patent describes querying by “face recognition data points” to find a specific person’s face across multiple, independently owned camera systems at once — stitching a traffic camera, a store’s security footage, and a network of home cameras into a single timeline.

Map who travels with whom. Flock’s newer marketing makes the rest explicit. Its LPR Pro line is sold with “Convoy” search, built to identify vehicles that repeatedly travel together — what the company calls “organized activity, accomplices, and patterns” — plus multi-jurisdiction and image-based search. None of that requires a crime. It requires only that a vehicle, and whoever is driving it, passed enough cameras enough times.

A single license-plate photo is a standalone event. A year of photos of the same vehicle, cross-referenced against every other vehicle it was ever near, searchable by plain language and viewable across county and state lines, is not. That capability — not the plate photo — is the product.

Read it yourself

We publish the patent in full so no one has to take our word, or Flock’s. It is a public U.S. government record.

U.S. Patent 11,416,545 B1, mirrored by DeFlockILM at the Internet Archive. If the viewer above doesn’t load on your device, use the download button.

Why this matters for your county

When New Hanover County’s sheriff described the program to commissioners, he called it “License Plate Reader technology.” When the Onslow, Brunswick, and Surf City boards take it up, they will hear some version of the same phrase. The patent is the answer to it: the vendor itself describes a system built to track vehicles, their associations, and eventually people — accessible without a warrant or any suspicion that a crime occurred. (See what these cameras actually do, next to the county’s own records.)

Credit where it’s due. This patent came to our attention through the reporting of Joshua Allen at Clay News & Views, whose investigation of Clay County, Florida’s Flock contracts — “Flock Says It Doesn’t Track You, But Its Patents and Products Say Otherwise” — laid the patent alongside the county’s own purchase records. We featured that piece on our news page. The reporting is theirs; the patent, and the words in it, are Flock’s own.