Have you ever wondered where all of the police and government data from Flock and other surveillance tech is being stored? All data points to Virginia and Ohio. Likely some in Oregon, too.
Flock cameras are used by the government to track your license plate, but also you and all of that information is routed to the government so they can track where you are in real time. This has been abused by ICE using the governments data to target immigrants despite not having a contract with the organization — to a Texas sheriff using it to track a woman who had an abortion.
Flock isn’t the only people collecting surveillance data for the United States government. You also have to consider Palantir, Giant Oak Technology, Thomson Reuters, Clearview AI, Airlines Reporting Corporation, Ventel, Babel Street, and more.
According to their website, Flock Safety stores all government contracted recordings and metadata—both state and federal—on a Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud servers.
Amazon has two GovCloud server regions — West & East — with facilities in Virginia, Oregon and Ohio. These are cloud servers, and the cloud works by pulling data from the two regions into one massive dataset. These servers hold a large amount of data from the every government agency, including all 18 intelligence agencies.
According to public records, Amazon has directly made a whopping $424.2 million tax-payer dollars across 332 contracts by allowing the government to store their data on their servers.
These locations are few compared to Amazon’s massive portfolio of 900 data centers across 50 countries. They store data for everyone from the U.S. government to Palantir.
The Top-Secret Virginia Data Centers
There is a ‘top-secret’ AWS GovCloud campus based in Ashburn, Loudoun County, Virginia — just 30 miles from Langley, the Pentagon, and NSA headquarters — and it’s there that AWS operates three data centers at 21263, 21267, and 21271 Smith Switch Road. One of those is a 350 megawatt facility, and 150 megawatts of that is walled off for classified government data. Only US citizens can work there, and it meets the strictest federal security standards (FedRAMP High and DoD IL5/IL6).
Ironically, Flock was founded in 2017 by someone named George Langley (among others)
That data comes from the More Than Just Parks data center tracker, which pulls directly from power grid filings. The campus uses 1.1 million gallons of water a day.
Construction of these three sister data centers began in 2013. They were built through the company COPT — a federal government and defense contractor. The data centers were completed and functional by the end of 2015.
The year the construction of this campus started (2013) is the same year Amazon/AWS landed a $600 million contract to host data for the entire US Intelligence Community.
The CIA ran the procurement, but the deal wasn’t limited to CIA data. It served as the shared cloud for all 18 intelligence agencies where the CIA and all the other 17 members of the intelligence community were given a place to feed their data.
As they collected more data on us, the need for storage grew. So in 2020 the contract expanded. Amazon kept holding intelligence secrets, but now the 18 intelligence agencies were using Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM, too. AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and even Oracle have or had data centers in the state of Virginia.
CIA. NSA. FBI. DEA. Navy. Coast Guard. Army. The Department of State.
All of these places are storing personal data from Flock, among everything else collected, in the cloud servers of Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Google.
Back in 2014, Waging Nonviolence first discovered AWS job listings in Ashburn, VA requiring Top Secret/SCI clearance. And in 2017, Flock Safety was incorporated. The same year that Teresa Carlson, the VP of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, announced Amazon would be creating a second GovCloud region to open on the East Coast in 2018. Specifically, the Ohio region.
But we know from above that they already had an entire region dedicated to GovCloud servers on the East Coast — in Virginia — dating back to 2013.
AWS didn’t say that they were expanding. They announced this as a brand new thing, completely obscuring the CIA and intelligence agencies storing a massive amount of data in the data centers of VA.
Something tells me they didn’t want the to bring light to these data center campuses.
Flash forward to 2026, there are now AWS jobs just like this all over Virginia, from Warrington to Fredericksburg. Each of them requires prospective hires to undergo a lie-detector test polygraph for federal clearance.
These top-secret-clearance data center jobs do not end in Virginia. They may have started in the Ashburn corridor, but they’ve since stretched from the Loudoun County server farms to the Wexner-planned corporate campuses of New Albany, Ohio.
The Top-Secret Ohio Data Centers
Amazon opened its first data center in Ohio in October 2016, and since then they have continued to expand across the state. The state also has servers from intelligence contractors Microsoft and Google living between the cornfields.
Columbus AWS job listings today require Top Secret and SCI clearances, and one is explicitly titled Sr. Physical Security Engineer for GovCloud.
Based on the job top-secret status, you can infer that government and military data storage is happening at the following Ohio AWS Data Centers:
Hilliard: located at 5113 Hayden Run Rd, Hilliard, OH 43026.
They are offering Engineering Operations Technicians up-to $60 an hour — as long as they’re a U.S. citizen and they currently possess and maintain an active top-secret security clearance with SCI eligibility.
New Albany: Amazon has a massive sprawling complex of several data centers on Beech Road SW in New Albany. There are eight total job top-secret job postings in New Albany, and at least one requires you to take a lie detector test.
Dublin: located at 5895 Houchard Road, Dublin, OH, USA. As of right now, there is only one top-secret data center job available in Dublin, Ohio.
Plain City: there are three AWS data centers in Plain City, Ohio. And much like in New Albany, these are clustered with no more than 3 miles between them. There are fifteen job postings between them:
8619 Industrial Parkway, Plain City, OH 43064
8567 Warner Road, Plain City, OH 43064
6685 Crosby Court, Plain City, OH 43064
What People Can Do
Not long ago, the CEO of Flock Safety publicly condemned Americans as terrorists for pushing back against their surveillance cameras. He’s trying to walk it back now, but I think it’s important we keep fighting and don’t forget what he said.
And here are some ways you can do that:
Use the ACLU’s ‘Get the Flock Out’ Toolkit.
Find out information about Flock cameras—as well as others like it—in your community by using the free and interactive de-flock map.
Go to your city council meetings. Especially if Flock is on the agenda, because these are the people that make the decision to put Flock in your city.
If it hasn’t already happened, sooner or later a senator, rep, or city council near you is going to hold a meeting about Flock. It is important that you show up. If you can hit more than one in your area, even better. Prepared speech and pointed questions? Awesome. Just a warm body in a chair? Also important.
What counts is that you’re in the room. We need our city councils to cancel these contracts with Flock. Numbers move these things, and you have every right to be there. Never forget the power that you have. There are more of us than there are of them, and I’m sick and tired of corporations thinking they have more power than the people because of the wads of cash that line their pockets.
Speaking out, showing up, and holding them accountable works. We’ve already seen dozens of block contracts be canceled. Let’s keep it up.
My local city council meeting on Flock is coming up, and I’ll be there.
Expect footage and reporting from that meeting once it wraps. I’m staying on Flock, the whole surveillance machine behind it, and how it squeezes regular Americans like you and me.
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This should be required reading for every American.
The end of our 250 year experiment came with IBM and “computing” in the 19th century. Prove it wrong ‼️