The Surveillance Machine Tracking Us Right Now - And What We Can Do To Stop It
A Follow the Money Investigation into the Surveillance State
You drove past one today and never noticed. A small black box on a pole, angled at the road. It read your license plate, logged the time, and noted the make, color and shape of your car. On its own, that is a parking-lot detail. The company that runs the box is only one piece of something larger, a set of separate-looking businesses that, followed back to their funding, start to look less like a competitive market and more like one machine wearing several logos.
This is a follow the money investigation that connects a much larger and much more nefarious network. Not the cameras alone, which have been well covered, but the system: what it can actually see, how the pieces fit, and, the part that has gone mostly untold, who paid to build it.
At the end, I give tips on how we can fight this because we are not powerless. The single most important fact in this whole story is that more than 80 cities have already killed or suspended their Flock contracts since 2025, and almost every one of them did it the same way: ordinary people showed up locally. Here is what actually moves the needle, roughly in order of impact.
The Cameras Are Not the Bad Guy - Their Accessories Are
The dominant maker of these cameras is Flock Safety, an Atlanta company with more than 80,000 license-plate readers across over 5,000 communities. The cameras themselves are almost dumb. The intelligence lives in a product Flock unveiled in early 2025 called Nova, and Nova is where a car becomes a person.
Flock describes Nova as a way to unify its camera data with police records so investigators can solve cases faster. The blunter description came from inside the company. In leaked internal audio reported by 404 Media, a Flock employee said the tool lets users “jump from LPR to person” and link that person to others “through marriage or through gang affiliation,” adding, “there’s very powerful linking.” Internal messages said Nova draws on about 20 toggleable data sources. So a single camera hit becomes a seed: your name, your address, your relatives, your phone, the people you live with, mapped automatically, in seconds, with no warrant.
Plate readers tell you where a car has been. Nova tells you who the person is, who they know, and how to reach them.
There is an unresolved and serious dispute about how far Nova’s data reaches. Flock published a rebuttal in May 2025 insisting Nova would never supply data from hacked breaches. But in December 2025, a security researcher analyzing Nova’s own front-end code reported a live data source labeled “Dark Data,” with fields for Social Security numbers, credit cards and crypto wallets, the vocabulary of breach archives, and said routine phone searches auto-called it. One note: that finding rests on one researcher’s code analysis, has not been independently reproduced, and Flock denies it. It is exactly what Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have been asked to resolve.
What the system can already do is not theoretical. In May 2025 a Texas sheriff’s official ran a nationwide search, reason field reading “had an abortion, search for female,” that reached more than 83,000 cameras across the country, including in states where abortion is legal. The woman had broken no law. Separately, federal immigration agents have run searches through local Flock networks thousands of times, often through cooperating local police, in towns that never agreed to it. These are not rogue cases, they are the system working as designed by the people in power.
One Surveillance Apparatus Begins to Form
Now widen the lens. Flock is one layer. Stack it with the others and you can see almost everything about a single human being.
Flock knows your car and your identity. Flock’s drones, from its Aerodome acquisition, read plates from the sky and can launch themselves to an incident. Carbyne, a 911 company, can open your phone’s live camera, microphone and GPS when you call for help. Toka, an Israeli firm, makes tools that, according to reporting in Haaretz drawn from the company’s own documents, can hack into security cameras and alter the footage, live feeds and old recordings alike. And a fifth layer, from the Italian defense company Leonardo, tracks the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi from the phone, earbuds and watch in your pocket. One finds you, one watches from above, one taps your phone, one can rewrite what the cameras saw, one follows the gadgets on your body.
Follow the money
Here is where most coverage stops, because each of these companies has been reported on in isolation. 404 Media broke Nova. Haaretz exposed Toka. Al Jazeera documented the people behind Carbyne. What has gone largely unsaid is what happens when you line up who funded them, and that’s where I come in. The companies look like competitors from the outside, but their cap tables tell a different story.
Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture firms on earth, funded Flock, the plate readers, and led the money into Toka, the camera hacker. The company that finds you and the company that can fake the footage share a backer. Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s firm, also funded Flock, and funded Carbyne, the company that can turn your phone into a bug. Look at Flock in the middle: it is funded by both. The two biggest names in surveillance capital sit in the same company, then each reaches out and takes a different piece of the rest.
This is not a coincidence of portfolio. Andreessen Horowitz runs an explicit investment thesis it calls American Dynamism, a deliberate bet on companies that sell surveillance, defense and policing to the government. The cross-wiring is the strategy, not an accident.
The Israeli thread, and Jeffrey Epstein
Follow Toka and Carbyne back another step and they meet at a person: Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, who co-founded Toka, founded and chaired Carbyne, and co-founded a third surveillance firm, the spyware maker Paragon. Barak is the human bridge across the Israeli side of this map, and the founders around him come heavily from Israel’s Unit 8200, the military signals-intelligence corps that has seeded a remarkable share of the global surveillance industry, from NSO Group to Cellebrite.
And inside Carbyne, the money gets darker. Part of Barak’s seed stake was held through a partnership whose backers included Jeffrey Epstein. A 2025 leak of Epstein’s emails, reported by Al Jazeera and others, documents a relationship with Barak spanning more than a decade, including Epstein’s claim that Barak had paid him millions, a Manhattan apartment Epstein provided, and a years-long joint effort to market Israeli surveillance technology abroad. Epstein also turns up on the American side: he was a limited partner in one of Thiel’s funds, confirmed by Thiel’s own spokesman. The dollar figures come largely from Epstein’s own emails rather than verified records, and Barak says he did nothing illegal. But the money sits where it sits.
The buyer: Axon
If venture money built the pieces, one company is now assembling them into a single product. Axon, the Taser and body-camera giant that serves roughly 18,000 law-enforcement agencies, was an early investor in Flock. Then it cut Flock off and went shopping. It invested $90 million in the Israeli phone-cracking firm Cellebrite. It bought a real-time crime-center company and a drone company. And in November 2025 it agreed to buy Carbyne, the 911 phone-tapper, for $625 million. The result is one corporation that can own the entire chain of a police encounter: the 911 call with your live camera and location, the officers who respond, the body camera, the phone forensics, and the evidence file. Top to bottom, one owner.
Where Leonardo fits
Leonardo, the Italian defense company whose SignalTrace product tracks the devices in your pocket, is a real and alarming surveillance escalation. But it is a competitor of Flock, not a relative. It is roughly 30 percent owned by the Italian government, and it sits entirely outside the venture-capital web above. It belongs in the apparatus by what it does, not by who funds it.
A few more guardrails. Flock’s founder is a Georgia Tech engineer with no intelligence background; Flock’s significance is the money around it, not its origins. Palantir, often lumped in, publicly denies any data relationship with Flock, and Thiel is not on Flock’s board; the only real link there is that Founders Fund holds equity in both. The Chinese camera giants Hikvision and Dahua are their own separate, sanctioned story.
The “so what”
Each company here has been reported in isolation. The piece that has gone untold is the connective tissue of capital: that the same two venture firms, Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, sit behind both the American plate-reader empire (Flock) and the Israeli intelligence-tech cluster built by Ehud Barak (Toka, Carbyne), with Jeffrey Epstein’s money inside the edges of both, while Axon quietly consolidates the layers into one stack.
The point is not that one villain owns everything. It is the opposite, and worse: a small, overlapping circle of investors has quietly financed nearly every layer of a surveillance system that can locate you, identify your network, tap your phone, and even alter what the cameras recorded, and they sold it to the public as a dozen unrelated startups competing in a free market. It was never really competition. It is one apparatus, and the same names keep signing the checks.
Why it should bother you
Plate readers alone mostly tell you where a car has been. The apparatus tells you who a person is, who they love, where they are right now, and, if the disputed parts hold, their Social Security number and leaked passwords, all queryable in seconds, with the limits set by toggles and corporate policy rather than by law. The abortion search, the immigration sweeps, the cameras left streaming on the open internet: these are what happens when that is the only thing standing between a license plate and a person.
The companies will tell you, accurately, that they have no single contract that proves a conspiracy. That misses the point. You do not need a conspiracy when you have a thesis, the capital to fund it, and the absence of a law to stop it. The cameras are already on the poles. The drones are already in the sky. The money has already changed hands. The only thing missing was if and how it all connected.
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What we can do about it
You’re not powerless. The single most important fact in this whole story is that more than 80 cities have already killed or suspended their Flock contracts since 2025, and almost every one of them did it the same way: ordinary people showed up locally. Here is what actually moves the needle, roughly in order of impact.
Hit it where it’s weakest: your city council
This is the highest-leverage thing on the list, because these are local contracts paid with local tax money.
Go to a city council or county commission meeting and use public comment. Ask three specific questions: Do we have Flock or any ALPR cameras? Who can search our data, including out-of-state and federal agencies? Where is the public usage audit? Vague answers are themselves the story.
Push for a CCOPS ordinance (Community Control Over Police Surveillance). This is the structural fix. It requires city council approval and a public hearing before police can acquire or use any surveillance tech, with annual audits. Around two dozen cities have passed one. The ACLU has model language you can hand your council member.
Demand a ban on privately funded surveillance. A big red flag in this story was a venture capitalist personally funding a police department’s purchases through a foundation to skip normal procurement. Insist every surveillance buy goes through public budgeting and a council vote.
Specific contract demands that have worked elsewhere: no national or out-of-state data sharing, no federal access, mandatory case numbers and audited reason fields, short retention windows, and a public audit log.
Get the receipts: public records
File a public records request (FOIA or your state equivalent) for your local agency’s Flock search audit logs. They list who searched, the reason entered, and the scope. This is exactly how the immigration and abortion searches were exposed. Templates exist from EFF and MuckRock.
Map the cameras. DeFlock.org is a crowdsourced map of ALPR locations. Add yours. Visibility is power.
Check HaveIBeenFlocked and similar tools that surface released audit data.
Back the people already fighting it
You don’t have to start from scratch. Support, volunteer with, or donate to the groups doing the litigation and research:
EFF and the ACLU (lawsuits, audits, model laws)
The Institute for Justice (the Fourth Amendment cases)
S.T.O.P., the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project
Fight for the Future (organizing and campaigns)
Local investigative journalists and outlets like 404 Media, whose reporting drove most of this. Subscriptions literally fund the next exposé.
Use your vote on the right offices
Sheriffs and district attorneys are elected, and they control how this gets used. The abortion search was run by a sheriff’s office. These down-ballot races decide whether the tools get pointed at people.
State legislators matter most here. Several states have already passed ALPR warrant requirements, retention limits, and laws blocking ICE access to this data. Ask your state rep where they stand and point to those existing laws as the model.
Support a federal warrant requirement for ALPR and data-broker searches, and back the existing congressional and FTC scrutiny of Flock by telling your members of Congress you’re watching.
Protect yourself (this isn’t legal advice so don’t try and sue me ;) )
Against plate readers specifically, personal tech tricks do almost nothing, because your plate is visible in public and that’s legal. Don’t let anyone sell you a gadget that “beats” them. Where individual steps do help is the newer device-tracking layer (the SignalTrace style):
Turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when you’re not using them, since those are what device-trackers grab.
Make sure your phone’s Wi-Fi MAC randomization is on (it is by default on modern iPhones and Androids).
For sensitive situations, a Faraday pouch for your phone genuinely blocks the signals.
Use encrypted messaging, since the spyware layer in this story targets exactly that.
I have heard that green lasers pointed at the cameras destroy them, so whatever you do, DON’T DO THAT :)
These are marginal at the individual level. The real defense is collective and political, so we don’t have to protect ourselves like this.
The mindset that actually wins
Don’t doomscroll this into despair, which is exactly the reaction that keeps the system in place. The lesson of the 80 cities is that this stuff loses in daylight. It depends on nobody noticing, nobody asking, and contracts auto-renewing in silence. The most powerful thing you can do is make it visible and make someone with a vote answer for it.
Sources
404 Media, “Flock is building a massive people-lookup tool, leak shows,” May 14 2025 — link
Flock Safety, “Correcting the Record: Flock Nova Will Not Supply Dark Web Data,” May 30 2025 — link
Nexanet, code analysis of Nova “Dark Data,” Dec 11 2025 (single researcher; disputed) — link
EFF, Texas abortion license-plate search, Oct 2025 — link
VCIJ/WHRO, ~3,000 immigration searches on Virginia’s Flock network, Sept 24 2025 — link
TechCrunch, Flock $275M at $7.5B, a16z led, Mar 13 2025 — link
Globes, a16z led Toka’s seed, Jul 2018 — link
Haaretz (via Truthout), Toka can alter camera footage, Dec 2022 — link
Calcalist, Barak’s business network and the Epstein-funded Carbyne stake, Jul 2019 — link
Al Jazeera, Barak and Epstein relationship, emails reveal, Dec 9 2025 — link
Byline Times, Epstein was an LP in Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Feb 4 2026 — link
Axon to acquire Carbyne for $625M, Nov 4 2025 — link
Flock blog, Axon plans to sever APIs with Flock (Axon was an early investor) — link
404 Media, Leonardo SignalTrace tracks phones/AirPods, Jun 8 2026 — link
House Oversight (Krishnamoorthi & Garcia) demand accountability from Flock, Aug 6 2025 — link
— Leah
Brilliant report, thank you Leah, this is frightening stuff.
TL;DR: Big Brother is here. And no, people of influence and authority are not going to let any law or court stop the projects they want done.