Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
Flock dropped the made-in-America line from its camera marketing
For years Flock said its license plate cameras were produced in the United States. WIRED found that claim gone from the newer materials while import records show cameras and radar parts arriving from Primax in Thailand.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Flock spent years telling the public its devices were produced in the United States, and the newer marketing materials WIRED reviewed do not specify where the cameras come from.
- A US manufacturer that had listed Flock as a customer quietly removed the mention from its website earlier this year, as public backlash against the company's surveillance cameras grew.
- Import records collected by ImportGenius show Flock increasingly bringing commodity cameras, radar systems and other components in from Primax Electronics in Thailand.
- A nationwide protest movement has prompted dozens of local governments to abruptly stop using Flock cameras.
- Congress is weighing legislation that would cut federal funding to states that fail to limit the use of Flock and other license plate readers.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision The next renewal is where this gets settled: a buyer either gets assembly disclosure written into the contract or signs for a claim it cannot check.
- constraint Tracing a camera's origin means auditing suppliers Flock does not control, and a city would have to buy that auditing capacity somewhere other than a camera subscription.
- contradiction ImportGenius's own analyst says the shipments are components while noting Primax builds complete camera systems, so the import paperwork leaves open whether finished cameras arrive from Thailand.
- exposure Any compromise in the parts chain lands on the cities hosting the poles, and by van Pelt's account no oversight mechanism exists that would surface it.
A procurement officer who wants a current answer about where these cameras are assembled has one sentence to work with. "All products that Flock builds are National Defense Authorization Act compliant," Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel said in an email to WIRED [5]. The law that phrase points to effectively bars government contractors from using parts made by a handful of Chinese tech companies over security concerns [6]. It is a pass/fail test against a short vendor list, and the building where the unit was screwed together falls outside it. Flock did not respond to most of the detailed questions WIRED asked [7]. The manufacturer that took Flock off its website goes unnamed in WIRED's account [4].
Flock has been fairly plain about what the product is. "Our value is in the aggregation and the packaging of all of these things ... in a nice waterproof, consumer-friendly device," CEO Garrett Langley said in a 2021 marketing video [8]. The cameras largely rely on suppliers around the world that provide non-custom parts, the same parts that go into other companies' products [9]. The earliest prototypes used cameras ripped out of Android phones bought on Alibaba, attached to batteries and soldered onto a solar panel, to prove a useful device could be built from $200 to $300 of parts [10].
Once the homeowners association contracts started coming in, Flock's corporate office doubled as the assembly line, and pallets of parts shipped in from China had to be dragged a quarter of a mile through the building multiple times a week, Langley said in a video [11]. Assembly moved to a warehouse facility in Atlanta around 2020 [12].
Primax is based in Taiwan and has manufacturing facilities in China, Thailand and elsewhere [14]. What is actually in the boxes is a question the paperwork leaves open. "My understanding is that these are components, but it looks like Primax manufactures whole security camera solutions," ImportGenius analyst Lynn Hughes said [15]. "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," Hughes said [16].
Cris van Pelt, who created the advocacy project Have I Been Flocked, said the assembly question matters less for US communities than the opacity around it [17]. "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 said [18]. "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," he said [19]. WIRED reported earlier this week that Flock's cameras continue to use smartphone-style processors and leave significant data unencrypted [20].
One line of brochure copy was carrying two different buyer questions. The first is provenance: which entity assembled the unit, in which country, and whether anyone owes the city notice when that changes. The second is integrity: who inspects the firmware and the parts list, and what a city is allowed to see for itself. A country-of-origin claim is a poor answer to the first question and no answer to the second, and it can be edited out of a PDF between renewals. A contract term has to be renegotiated, with a counterparty who has to sign it.
What to watch
- Whether Flock states an assembly location in response to the congressional funding bill or in a procurement document.
- Whether later import records describe finished camera units from Primax instead of components.
- Whether any city writes an assembly-site disclosure and change-notice clause into a Flock renewal.