Several dozen Alpharetta cameras write permissions for 2,000 outside organizations

A geographic auto-approve rule is a standing grant evaluated against the requester, not against the case. Alpharetta approves law-enforcement requests from inside 500 miles automatically, and agencies outside that ring have to ask individually, Lieutenant Jason Hiott told WIRED ^[8]. Draw the circle: pi times 500 squared is roughly 785,000 square miles of standing eligibility, set by one control in an admin panel ^[1]. The check does not look at the offense or the date range; it looks at where the requester sits.

Then the graph. Taking the three reported counts at face value, 2,000 outbound relationships plus 1,300 inbound, measured against 2,300 distinct nodes, puts about 1,000 organizations on both sides of Alpharetta's network ^[2]. Reciprocity is the product. Flock's value rises as customers connect deployments, because a plate read in one jurisdiction lets an investigator follow a vehicle into the next county or state ^[15]. Every edge accepted for that reason is also an edge somebody else reads from.

The detail worth putting on the review slide is that Hiott could not say how long the 500-mile setting had been active, or whether the department had ever changed Flock's default configuration ^[9], a bigger gap than the 2,000 figure itself. A permission system without a durable, queryable change history cannot answer the question that arrives with the first complaint: who was eligible to see this plate on this date. Flock says sharing is off by default for new and onboarding customers, and would not say whether that had always been the default ^[10]. The current default therefore tells you nothing about the configuration an older account is still running.

Treat 2,000 the way you would treat someone else's benchmark table. It is a property of Alpharetta's settings and of how many Flock customers sit within 500 miles of north Georgia. For the number to transfer to your city, your radius scope and your neighbour density both have to resemble theirs. It also counts permission rather than queries: WIRED did not establish how many outside organizations searched records captured in Alpharetta, how often, or what investigations prompted any search ^[5]. Converting a permission count into an exposure count needs per-requester query logs, and none were reported. Access itself arrives in three shapes, automatic under an administrator's settings, individually approved, or a standing right to ask ^[6], and one headline figure flattens all three.

Which is where the purchasing conversation goes. Flock's pricing page publishes no standard price, and quotes vary by sensor count, technology, software package and coverage area ^[14]. Hardware was the cheap part from the beginning: Langley found existing readers priced at about $25,000 per camera and prototyped with an Android phone in a waterproof box ^[12]. What a city buys now is a permissions engine with cameras attached, so the line items worth arguing over are radius scope, video restrictions, request limits and log retention, all of which the admin console already exposes ^[7]. Runtimewire's reading is that access controls, offense filters and audit systems are core infrastructure here rather than compliance add-ons ^[16], and the unanswerable question about the 500-mile setting is the evidence for it.