Melissa Corrigan was witnessing an ICE operation in Norfolk, she said, when an unfamiliar voice called her name over a loudspeaker.
An ICE agent, whom she had never met, somehow recognized her and told her to leave. Corrigan, an activist and Navy veteran, was shocked.
“My heart was pounding,” said Corrigan, who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. “I was scared. ICE mentioned my name out of the blue, and I had no idea how they knew my identity.”
Although she is unsure exactly how the agent knew her name, Corrigan worried Norfolk’s widespread domestic surveillance technology may have played a role. She later learned that over just three days in February, Flock had logged her vehicle in the city more than 100 times.
In March, Corrigan stepped up to the dais before Norfolk City Council and told her story. She asked the city to remove Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and their AI-powered surveillance network.
“This is technology that we saw being developed in the Middle East when we were over there, and now they're using it on us,” she told the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.
Similar pushback against Flock cameras is growing across Virginia in municipalities like Fairfax, Richmond, Alexandria and Bridgewater. Residents like Corrigan write letters, appear at city council meetings, force officials to hold public hearings and even put up posters to demand Flock cameras be taken down.
Advocates, including the Institute for Justice, argue that Flock cameras and other automatic license plate readers amount to mass surveillance. They say the systems track people’s daily movements without a warrant and that the data they collect should not be routinely searched without judicial approval.
The protests are yielding results too.
Staunton took its Flock cameras offline in December 2025, the same month the Charlottesville City Council voted to discontinue its own contract with the company. Harrisonburg City Council decided on July 14, 2026, that it would end its contract with Flock. A few days later, the town council of Elkton in the Shenandoah Valley bowed to pressure from local advocates and voted unanimously to cut ties with Flock. Floyd County said its Flock cameras would be deactivated when its current contract expires in August. All these municipalities took action after citizens spoke up against the use of the cameras.
Across the country, 95 municipalities have rejected or cancelled contracts with Flock, according to DeFlock, an anti-surveillance volunteer group. But it still pales in comparison to how fast the surveillance system is growing across the U.S. More than 6,000 communities and over 1,000 businesses now use Flock automatic license plate readers, according to Flock Safety.
In Virginia, Flock Safety has about 3,000 cameras across highways, roads, and parking lots in over 150 municipalities, according to data from FlockHopper.
Virginia communities protest in small towns and huge counties
A few months ago, Zachary Caudle knew nothing about Flock Safety, even though his hometown, Elkton, had installed three of its cameras two years earlier.
The town, home to about 3,000 residents, spans just 3.2 square miles west of Shenandoah National Park.
When Caudle noticed Flock cameras in his town, he wondered how the cameras were put up without residents knowing about it. His curiosity prompted him to file multiple public records requests to find out about the town’s Flock contract.
Caudle said he would file a Freedom of Information Act request, “get an answer to two questions and five more would pop up, then it's another FOIA request.”
He started organizing. He built a website to provide information to residents about Flock cameras in the area. He even put up signs to challenge surveillance in the area. The signs were torn down by the police within 24 hours, he said.
“The Elkton Police Department selectively enforced a weak town ordinance on signs,” Caudle said.
In response to VCIJ’s inquiries, Elkton Police Chief Michael King confirmed that the department removed the signs after they received complaints from a resident.
King said Caudle did not have a permit to place signs in a public right-of-way.
Ultimately, Caudle organized more than 70 residents to show up to the July 20 town council meeting and pressure the council to put Flock Safety on the agenda. After hearing the residents' arguments, the town voted in favor of taking down the cameras.
The fight against the cameras, Caudle said, had nothing to do with whether residents had anything to hide from law enforcement. Caudle, a cloud and network engineer, said his main concern is access and control of their personal data.
Caudle has extensive experience with Amazon Web Services, the same cloud service Flock Safety uses to store data captured by its cameras nationwide. AWS gives clients on-demand access to virtual computers, storage, and databases. Flock Safety confirms on its website that camera data is secured behind encryption keys, and says it limits who has access to these keys.
“I have no problem going past the cameras,” he said. “But that is not the point. One of the first things that you’re taught in cloud basics is if you don’t hold the encryption keys, or the access to the infrastructure, you do not own the data that resides within it.”
He’s concerned about the system’s transparency, and whether anyone audits Flock Safety or the company’s cloud infrastructure to be sure data is erased after 21 days, as required by Virginia law.
A Norfolk woman discovered that Flock cameras captured images and details of her vehicle more than 100 times over three days in February.
Flock Safety spokesperson Holly Beilin declined to comment.
Flock’s Chief Information Security Officer, Chris Castaldo, said in a video on the company website that customers own their complete data and that the company deletes data by default after 30 days.
That assurance was not enough to stop residents in Fairfax County from writing a series of letters to their officials, pushing for answers on the county’s Flock cameras, according to public records obtained by VCIJ.
One resident, Harold Smith III, wrote to the county board of supervisors, asking why the cameras were deployed in their community without a serious public hearing.
“Decisions of this magnitude – affecting the privacy and civil liberties of hundreds of thousands of residents – demand robust public engagement, transparent deliberation, and democratic accountability,” Smith said.
In November last year, Fairfax resident Dan Carney sent a series of emails refusing to accept the explanation of the county’s board chairman, Jeffrey C. McKay, about safeguards within Virginia’s ALPR law, enacted in 2025.
“Federal agencies requesting LPR data from Virginia agencies must go through a legal process which includes obtaining a search warrant, as stated in the new law,” McKay wrote in reply to Carney.
Carney said he believed that the federal government would use the ALPR against the public no matter what the county’s intent was when they were installed.
In an interview with VCIJ, Major Hudson Bull, Commander of the Fairfax County Police Department's Real Time Crime Center, said the county is using the cameras “responsibly and with a ton of oversight.” The department audits all searches conducted on the ALPR system.
“We use AI tools that help us bring out anomalies in searches to help detect searches that might not fit our specific criteria,” Bull said.
He added that the county does not share its ALPR data with federal authorities, including ICE.
Last year, VCIJ reported that data from Bridgewater’s five Flock cameras had been accessed more than 7 million times by law enforcement agencies across the country. When resident Anna Cubbage read the story, she sprang into action.
She had heard of Flock cameras before, but she didn’t know what they looked like or that they were already operating in Bridgewater.
She contacted privacy advocates, including a group that successfully pushed for the removal of Flock cameras in Staunton. Cubbage then formed a local branch of DeFlock.
Cubbage, who previously led opposition to a $96 million expansion of the Middle River Regional Jail, pushed Bridgewater officials to hold a public meeting.
“It's a question about whether or not we get to have a say, and it's also a question as to whether our local government respects us enough to involve us,” she said.
Cubbage and about 25 residents met with Bridgewater’s police chief and asked why the town did not hold a public hearing before the surveillance system was installed.
While that meeting did not force the city to take down its cameras, DeFlock members have grown in the community, Cubbage said.
“I have high hopes that our town council can be persuaded to end the contract,” Cubbage said, crediting VCIJ reporting with instigating community awareness. “I will campaign harder than anybody has campaigned to get these cameras taken down.”
Surveillance concerns grow in Hampton Roads
Flock Safety has also spread to Virginia’s college campuses, including Norfolk State University, Virginia Tech, Old Dominion University, George Mason University, and the College of William & Mary. Students, too, have begun protesting its unblinking surveillance.
In March, William & Mary students held a referendum to demand the college’s 10 Flock cameras be taken down. Nearly 90% of the students voted to have the cameras removed, but the school has kept the system in place.
Deadly shootings and attacks at Virginia universities have made security a major concern for administrators.
“With the violence we are seeing in our country and around the world, the task of safeguarding a university campus has become at once more urgent and more challenging, “ William & Mary President Katherine Rowe said in a statement after the referendum.
In Norfolk, Corrigan stopped going to document ICE arrests. “I have kids that live here,” she said. “My elderly disabled mother lives with me. I am sufficiently spooked.”
But she, like others, continues to protest against the use of Flock cameras.
The day she addressed the city council, five other residents also spoke against the city’s use of Flock cameras.
City council members did not comment on the residents’ concerns. This week, the council voted to limit public discussion on comments considered repetitive, and mentioned the regular appearance of DeFlock members speaking against the surveillance system.
Corrigan learned through a public records request that information about her vehicle, including her license plate, was captured and logged more than 100 times between February 16 and 18 by Flock cameras in Norfolk.
In response to her request, Corrigan received more than 100 high‑resolution photos of her vehicle, each clearly showing her license plate at different locations. She also obtained the metadata Flock’s system generated about her car, including its color, make, roof rack, window stickers, and license plate, along with the GPS coordinates for every location where the cameras captured an image of her vehicle.
Every time she passed by a camera, it logged her movement down to the second she was at each location.
“I asked if the searches were specifically for my license plate, they said they weren’t,” she said. “But it was enough to freak me out.”
For Corrigan, the pushback feels like a responsibility rather than an act of protest. Veterans, she said, “took an oath to the Constitution, and that's the oath that keeps coming up for a lot of us.”
Reach Kunle Falayi at kunle.falayi@vcij.org
