An Illinois college covered Flock surveillance cameras after the company refused requests to remove the devices. Mysterious workers kept uncovering them.
Six Flock security cameras were placed at Elgin Community College in April 2025 with the goal of “enhancing the safety and security of students,” according to school president Peggy Heinrich.
Rather than ‘enhancing safety,’ the cameras made students afraid
They were meant to help locate missing persons and stolen vehicles. However, after just five months of operation, the school’s administration began to worry that Flock was sharing its collected data with outsiders.
The school believed that camera feeds were not adequately protected and that law enforcement and the company itself were misusing their access to the data. Heinrich, in particular, became concerned when she learned that data captured by Flock cameras in Illinois was being shared with Customs and Border Protection.
That concern was heightened even further when an Elgin Community College student was taken into custody in a campus parking lot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in September 2025.
According to a Chicago Sun-Times report, more than half of Elgin Community College students identify as Latino. Heinrich said that after installing the Flock cameras, enrollment declined and students were afraid to attend class. College officials concluded that the cameras had to be removed.
“We’re just doing everything we can here to be sure this feels like a safe place for our students to come,” Heinrich said. “We want them to come here and to be able to focus on learning.”
Her concerns about the cameras being misused were not misplaced
Data recorded by Flock cameras at other Illinois public campuses, such as Joliet Junior College, the University of Illinois Chicago, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was searched numerous times last year in relation to immigration enforcement, according to public records obtained by a surveillance researcher and WBEZ News.
Additionally, the Illinois Secretary of State discovered that last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection violated state law by searching Flock data in the state.
The school asked for the camera to be removed, Flock wouldn’t do it
So, “out of an abundance of caution for our students,” Heinrich says college officials asked Flock to remove the surveillance cameras. They wouldn’t.
Flock denied the request and refused to uninstall the cameras, claiming they had not breached their contract. School officials say they contacted Flock again in December, offered to cover the remaining five months of the agreement, and insisted that the cameras be taken down. They received no response.
Things got even weirder, and darker
According to Peggy Heinrich, after Flock told the school it would not remove the cameras, Elgin Community College employees began covering the cameras with zip ties and black trash bags to prevent them from recording. However, people in an unmarked car that Heinrich believed belonged to Flock kept removing the coverings.
“We were kind of in a back and forth for a bit where we’d cover, and then when they’d come to service, they’d remove,” Heinrich said. “Then we’d cover and then they’d remove.”
This went on until Elgin Community College’s contract with Flock expired in April this year and the company finally removed the cameras.
Flock’s mode of operation appears to be ‘do as we say, not as we do’
According to one recent report, there are currently 300,000 Flock surveillance devices spread across the country, tracking the movements and locations of millions of Americans.
The creator of the Flock Surveillance Map, which plots each Flock device on a map and color-codes it by model, revealed last week that a security company filed a trademark case against him the day after the map was made public. The company also asked that the website be removed, claiming it was acting on Flock’s behalf.
In an even more ironic occurrence, a Canadian software programmer named Anthony Sistilli turned surveillance technology on law enforcement by building a Flock-style camera to track police cars. That led police officers to visit his home and ask why he was tracking them.
They were worried that repeated observations might reveal their patterns. In other words, for the very reason why so many Americans are fighting back against Flock. Especially when the cameras have led to so many false-positive alerts and even been used to send people to jail who are completely innocent.