In such divided times, any issue on which the public can reach a relative accord is an achievement worth celebrating. Pretty much everyone (95%) agrees we’re in an affordability crisis. The share of Americans who believe ICE has “gone too far” has climbed to 65%. And then there’s the rapid shift in public opinion to abject hatred of AI and data centers. Who among us has not felt a swell of patriotic pride watching communities around the nation set aside their differences to ban data centers from their towns and punish the unscrupulous local politicians who attempted to surreptitiously approve their construction? Another such area of consensus seems to be percolating—one that’s in direct defiance of the tech oligarchs and politicians attempting to shape our world into a panopticon hellscape.
Backlash against the $7.5 billion startup Flock Safety—the maker of AI-powered, license plate-scanning, pole-mounted surveillance cameras—has gone from brewing to boiling over in recent weeks, much to the chagrin of the police state and its Silicon Valley boosters. Following significant pushback from activist groups, the LAPD announced this week that it would allow its three-year contract with Flock to expire. Similar decisions to end contracts and take down existing cameras are coming from city councils elsewhere around the nation.
Privacy advocates like the EFF and ACLU warn that Flock and its competitors’ automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) are tools of mass surveillance that offer access to a trove of illicitly gleaned data to any government agency with a contract, with few safeguards in place to prevent abuse. Though Flock alleges it doesn’t share its data with ICE, many fear the cameras can and will be used to aid Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Given that ICE is just one of the many federal agencies being used to carry out that agenda, local PDs have been tripping over themselves to assist those federal efforts, and side-door access to the data in the software is well-documented, Flock’s reassurance is little more than cold comfort.
Where local governments are failing to read the room and forging ahead to build a panopticon against the will of their constituents, a new breed of vigilante vandal has emerged to quite literally take matters into their own hands. These activists have taken to the streets to proactively destroy their local Flock camera poles, rather than wait for the slow pace of government to close the prying eyes at some indeterminate date in the future. Utilizing the open-source site deflock.org, which has already mapped out over 116,000 ALPRs, they pull up to the offending cameras armed with portable saws to cut through metal poles and high-powered green lasers (532 nm wavelength) to destroy camera sensors.
The anti-Flock activist’s nighttime demo missions echo the feats of the loom-smashing Luddites two centuries ago. But our vandals live in the digital age, so many of their exploits have been captured on smartphone cameras and posted to social media. Some of these clips, like this destruction montage posted on X, have gone viral.
Accordingly, the atomized anti-Flock activists have gradually coalesced into something of a community, with the 437,000 subscriber-strong subreddit r/FlockSurveillance serving as their quasi HQ. There, they fawn over fresh videos of camera wreckage, share strategies and resources, donate to defense fund GoFundMes for nabbed comrades, and of course, post memes.
But while Flock haters yuk it up over critically damaged surveillance tech on Reddit, Signal groups, and Discord servers, not everyone’s laughing. In a November 2025 interview with Forbes, Flock CEO Garrett Langley described the vandal activists and Deflock as a “terrorist organization” whose “primary motivation is chaos.” Unfortunately for Langley, another laugh soon joined the chorus mocking him and his company as Tom Brewster, the reporter interviewing him, broke into a chuckle and suggested Deflock might take umbrage at Langley’s melodramatic label.
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