(By Douglas MacMillan, Drew Harwell & Aaron Schaffer, WaPo, October 21, 2026)

From The Washington Post:

Cops left the force. They kept tracking people with a powerful camera network.

Police kept access to Flock’s vast surveillance system long after they left the force. Some used it to track the locations of romantic partners.

Today at 5:00 a.m. EDT

(Illustration by Joan Wong/For The Washington Post; iStock; AP)

16 min

By Douglas MacMillan

, 

Drew Harwell

 and 

Aaron Schaffer

When Andrae Wright left his job as an investigator at the Effingham County Sheriff’s Office in 2021, he handed in his gun and badge. But he kept something powerful: his log-in credentials for Flock, a police tool he used to search a vast network of roadside cameras tracking the locations of passing cars.