Flock CEO Garrett Langley has said the company made its first license plate cameras in his Atlanta home, permanently scratching his dining table with drill marks. A decade later, where the company assembles its signature—and fiercely debated—product has become more of a mystery.
For years, Flock touted publicly that its devices were produced in the United States. But more recent marketing materials from the company reviewed by WIRED no longer specify where its cameras come from. One US manufacturer that previously identified Flock as a customer quietly removed a mention of the company from its website earlier this year as public backlash against the company’s surveillance technology grew.
The startup has become the subject of a nationwide protest movement that has prompted dozens of local governments to abruptly stop using its cameras. Congress is also considering legislation that would cut federal funding to states that fail to limit use of Flock and other license plate readers. While police have argued the cameras are crucial tools for deterring and solving crime, activists have criticized Flock for enabling officers to track the cars of their exes, share footage with immigration authorities, and follow the movements of pedestrians.
But Flock’s manufacturing supply chain has received scant attention, even though where its hardware is produced could have implications for US national security. WIRED spoke with current and former Flock employees and supply chain analysts, reviewed data from US import records, and watched past marketing videos featuring Langley to piece together the first account of how its hardware pipeline has evolved.
Flock’s cameras largely rely on suppliers around the world that provide non-custom parts, which are also used in products from other companies. “Our value is in the aggregation and the packaging of all of these things … in a nice waterproof, consumer-friendly device,” Langley said in one marketing video from 2021.
Import records collected by ImportGenius show the company has been increasingly bringing “commodity” cameras, radar systems, and other components over from Primax Electronics in Thailand. Primax is based in Taiwan, but has manufacturing facilities in China, Thailand, and elsewhere.
“My understanding is that these are components, but it looks like Primax manufactures whole security camera solutions,” ImportGenius’ analyst Lynn Hughes says. “Quite a few shipments include ‘Radar’ in the product description which might be related to the radar sensor pods they’re attaching to their cameras.”
Flock didn’t respond to most of the detailed questions WIRED asked for this story, though it did provide some general information. “All products that Flock builds are National Defense Authorization Act compliant,” Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel said in an email, referring to a US law that effectively bars government contractors from using parts made by a handful of Chinese tech companies over security concerns.
Cris van Pelt, creator of the anti-Flock advocacy project Have I Been Flocked, says that while where the cameras are made may have relatively minor implications for US communities, the lack of transparency about their origins underscores a broader problem.
“It all speaks to the fact that there is no real oversight, and that tens of thousands of literal and figurative black boxes are being installed on American roads,” van Pelt says. “If any part of the supply chain is compromised, we would never know. That’s a much bigger problem than where the final product is assembled.”
“Aggregation”
The earliest Flock prototypes were made using cameras ripped out of Android phones bought on Alibaba, which were then attached to batteries and soldered onto a solar panel, Langley recalled in one video. The goal was to prove that a useful device could be created from parts collectively costing between $200 to $300. (WIRED reported earlier this week that Flock’s cameras continue to use smartphone-style processors and leave significant data unencrypted.)
As Flock began securing contracts with homeowners associations, it shifted into a corporate office that also doubled as an assembly line. Langley described the setup as fun, but also unprofessional and arduous—pallets of parts shipped in from China had to be dragged a quarter of a mile through the building multiple times a week.