About 40 Georgia Tech students gathered on Tech Green last Wednesday and marched to every gunshot detector and automated license plate reader camera on campus, demanding that Flock Safety's surveillance technology be removed for good. The demonstration, organized by Georgia Tech Students for a Democratic Society, came as students across multiple states have pushed back against the growing footprint of the Atlanta-based company's camera network on public university campuses.
According to Fight Back! News, SDS led the Oct. 7 march with chants including “What do we want? Flock off campus! When do we want it? Now!” and “From Palestine to USA, mass surveillance go away!” SDS member Andrew Sarphie said the group wants Flock and any other AI surveillance removed from Georgia Tech's campus permanently, and that the organization will keep up the pressure until every camera is gone.
A Campus With Ties to Flock's Founders
The protest carries extra local weight because Flock, which is headquartered in Atlanta, was co-founded by Georgia Tech alumni. CEO and founder Garrett Langley, along with co-founders Matt Feury and Paige Todd, all graduated from the Institute, according to the same report. Sarphie also said Georgia Tech was the first university in Georgia to use Flock's drone first responder program, a distinction he raised during the march to underscore the campus's early and continuing relationship with the company.
Sarphie told the crowd that police officers have abused Flock technology to stalk and harass community members, and said Flock technology has aided ICE kidnappings. He also said agencies conducted millions of searches using the cameras last year, with the number of agencies with access now topping 4,000 — and that Flock cameras collect data whose access remains unknown to Georgia Tech students.
What Flock's Network Actually Captures
Those concerns track with reporting on how Flock's system functions elsewhere. The cameras capture data on every passing vehicle, including plate numbers, make, model, color and even dents and bumper stickers, per the Chicago Sun-Times. That data can be searched not just by campus police but by outside law-enforcement agencies to piece together where a vehicle and its driver have been and when, the paper reported. At three University of Illinois campuses, outside agencies searched Flock data more than 650,000 times over a single 30-day stretch this summer.
WIRED's reporting on Alpharetta found that Flock data from that single Atlanta suburb is accessible to more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, airports and government agencies nationwide. The company's Nationwide lookup tool, introduced in 2021 and available to customers who opt in, lets any participating agency query any other Flock customer in the country using a specific plate. Since June 2025, the number of entities receiving data from Alpharetta police has grown by about 42 percent, while the number of entities sending data to the city has grown by about 125 percent, according to the outlet.
Misuse Cases Already Surfaced in Georgia
Georgia Tech's own surveillance policy requires that video devices be used consistently with the U.S. Constitution, federal and state law, and Atlanta ordinances, and limits access to employees and faculty with a legitimate business reason, according to the Georgia Tech Policy Library. Installation of any camera must be coordinated with GTPD's Physical Security Specialist or the Georgia Tech Research Institute's Research Security Department, and the policy warns that violations can bring administrative sanctions or civil and criminal liability.
Those safeguards haven't stopped misuse at other Georgia institutions. The University of Georgia Police Department suspended and demoted an IT employee last year after an investigation found the worker had accessed the school's Flock system twice in 2025 to look into off-campus incidents, CBS News Atlanta reported. UGA Police has since changed its rules to require that all Flock searches be authorized by a supervisor at the rank of sergeant or above. A separate 30-day audit in White County recorded 472,120 Flock search records, with 472,015 of them — nearly all — originating from outside organizations, per Now Georgia, which also found more than 320,000 of those entries came from searches that simultaneously reached more than 5,000 Flock networks at once.
Palestine Solidarity and a National Pattern
A speaker from Jackets for Palestine told the march that Palestinians have endured relentless surveillance and what they described as inhuman study by Israel, arguing that Palestinian suffering has been used to develop surveillance technologies and raise their market value. The speaker said developed algorithms and refined data are sold to the highest bidder, and that the surveillance technology was tested before reaching the U.S., with its producers aware of its capabilities, according to Fight Back! News.
Georgia Tech's protest is part of a wider pattern of student pushback. About 20 University of Florida students protested Flock cameras on campus and around Gainesville on Sept. 9, chanting “Big brother, we don't want you,” according to The Independent Florida Alligator. Gainesville police suspended their own Flock use after Florida's transportation department banned automated plate readers from state roads, but UF kept using the cameras on campus. Five of Illinois' 12 public universities still use Flock technology, having spent more than $450,000 on the company's services since 2021, including a two-year, $110,300 contract at the University of Illinois Chicago for 15 cameras.
Municipal leaders have split on how to respond. In Dunwoody, residents demanded an end to the city's Flock contract, but the city council deferred renewal rather than canceling it outright, according to The Guardian, which noted that some cities are shutting down cameras and ripping them off lightpoles while others sign new contracts. Santa Cruz and Denver are among the cities canceling Flock contracts entirely over surveillance and misuse concerns, per Grady Newsource.
YDSA Pushes Separate Track on Privacy
Alongside the SDS march, Georgia Tech's Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter called for students to attend the campus police department's “Ask the Chief” event, aiming to increase pressure on the Institute to protect students' privacy rights. Georgia Tech campus police have responded with what Sarphie characterized as a vague promise that Flock technology increases campus safety, according to Fight Back! News.
For its part, Flock has said customers control how their data is shared and used, and that every search is logged and reviewable, according to the company's own product materials. But the exact scope of who can access Georgia Tech's specific camera data remains a central question for organizers, who say they will keep demanding removal until every camera is gone.
