Cherokee County shares your location with 2,004 organizations

This month, we filed an open records request for a list of who the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office shares its Flock data with. It is 118 pages long, and consists of 2,004 organizations across 43 states (PDF).

Aside from its staggering scope, much of the list looks like what you'd expect: police departments and sheriff's offices spread across the country. Keep scrolling, and you'll see less of typical law enforcement: the Illinois Attorney General, the University of Illinois Springfield, the Louisville airport police, a drug task force in Alabama. And four federal organizations: the US Postal Inspection Service, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the FBI, and the police force of the Natchez Trace Parkway, a scenic road that runs from Nashville to Natchez, Mississippi.

It isn't particularly obvious why a parkway ranger in Mississippi needs a collection of photographs of your car on 92. Nor is it obvious to us why Cherokee County, Canton, and Woodstock all opted in to this nationwide sharing policy, exposing a comprehensive log of all of our movements to a shockingly unsecured, sprawling surveillance network.

Canton's Flock network: 1 million external searches

The City of Canton answered a similar open records request by giving us an audit log covering 31 days, from July 14th to August 13th, 2026. It records every search run against a camera that Canton owns. Outside agencies ran 1,010,793 of them. That is 32,606 searches a day in a city of about 35,000 people, from 3,145 different agencies.

The Houston Police Department, 800 miles away, searched Canton's cameras 73,687 times. California Highway Patrol searched them 50,854 times. In the same time period, the Canton Police Department itself ran a total of 523 searches. Every single one of them carried a case number; 47.6% of outside searches contained none.

Of these external searches, 318 listed "Immigration" as the reason, with 19 naming ICE directly in the notes. Despite Flock's insistence that ICE doesn't have access to their network, police departments in Florida, Indiana, and Arizona are more than happy to run searches on their behalf.

Police misuse is bigger than four deputies

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  Chris Bryant

  Lieutenant

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  Mike Creeden

  Sergeant

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  Cynthia Jodesty

  Deputy

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  Jerry Shellhouse

  Deputy

As you may know, four employees of the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office were recently fired and arrested for searching this database without any law enforcement reason. The most recently caught offender, Deputy Jerry Shellhouse of Waleska, ran such unauthorized searches over the course of two years. (The county refuses to tell us any further details, citing an "ongoing investigation.")

Sheriff Frank Reynolds responded to Shellhouse's arrest by declaring: "The actions taken in this case, along with the three arrests earlier this year, make our position unmistakably clear: misuse of this technology will not be tolerated."

We take the Sheriff at his word that he genuinely cares about misuse, and wants to see his police department free from it. Yet it's naive of him to declare that it "won't be tolerated" when 2,004 separate organizations across the country have free access to the county's Flock network. Every one of those organizations has administrators, contractors, former employees, and password habits that Cherokee County has never audited and has no authority to audit.

In Georgia alone, at least twenty officials have already been arrested for misusing Flock, and new arrests are being reported every day. Five former Albany officers, booked into the Dougherty County jail in July. Three Bibb County deputies, one of them also charged with stalking. A Milledgeville major, released on a $10,000 bond. A Habersham deputy who used the system to track someone he had a "personal relationship" with. A former Dallas 911 director. An Athens-Clarke County employee, who tracked his ex-wife over several months. Every single one of them had a valid Flock login.

Flock gets an F in cybersecurity

And what of the bad actors who don't bother with such formalities as "getting a job with local law enforcement"? It turns out, the easiest way to stalk with Flock doesn't involve joining an official agency at all.

Last December, our neighbor Benn Jordan in Cobb County and 404 Media found 60 Flock cameras streaming to the open internet with no password. No account, no audit entry, nothing for a judge to sign, nothing for an internal review to catch. Researcher Jon Gaines found that a simple button sequence on the back of a Flock camera opens a wireless access point. Working Flock logins have turned up for sale on Russian cybercrime forums and the dark web.

Any cybersecurity professional can tell you that a network is only as secure as its least secure member. Cherokee County does not know who that is. It can't know; the roster is 118 pages long. And the potential for unofficial misuse is vast: if any one of these agencies allows a login to be leaked, whichever unscrupulous hacker finds it now has access to comprehensive location data of every Cherokee County resident with a license plate. At such an enormous national scale, it is a statistical inevitability that hackers currently have access to your vehicle's whereabouts. And if you've recently been for a walk in a public park in Canton, who's to say one of their 21 movement-tracking video cameras hasn't been compromised, too?

This is not reformable

The usual counterargument we hear is that we just need a warrant requirement, or some tighter policy, or more audits. And yet, we have watched every single rule applied to these cameras fail to prevent abuse, and prove completely unenforceable due to just how far the data travels.

Georgia law already makes it a misdemeanor to query plate data for any purpose other than law enforcement. Four Cherokee deputies were charged under that exact statute anyway. It's unlikely they're the only misusers in Cherokee County, and absolutely impossible they're the only ones who have misused Cherokee's cameras with a Flock login from one of 2,004 organizations across the nation.

Every safeguard is written by one agency and applies to one agency, while the data moves across thousands. You can regulate your own department into a model of restraint and it will change nothing about what ICE does when Houston gives it access to your plate, or what happens when someone in a country you have never heard of uses a password they bought on the dark web.

There is no acceptable manifestation of mass surveillance. Warrant requirements, tighter policies, and more audits don't change what Flock is: an effectively permanent, searchable record of where every car in Cherokee County has been, held on a private company's servers, reachable by over 2,000 organizations, and, increasingly, by people with no permission at all. The record itself is the problem. The only thing that fixes it is the cameras coming down.

Join Us

We're a local group of concerned residents fighting against mass surveillance in Cherokee County. Our full website has even more details, alongside pages for each and every jurisdiction so that you can see which surveillance technologies are used near you. Interested in joining or getting in touch? Email us.

If you'd like to see any of the documents from our open records requests, such as Canton's audit log, let us know! (We've omitted it from this page due to the sensitive nature of its "reason" column, which lists the names of many people who were tracked by Flock and never convicted of anything.)