Technology

‘Get the Flock Out’: The Revolt Against America’s License-Plate Cameras Splits Into Three Fronts

Severed camera poles, unanimous council votes, and a crowdsourced map of the surveillance state — the backlash against Flock Safety has hardened into a movement, and the company is calling it a coordinated attack.

By Joe Lyman ·

Editorial illustration: a lone figure swings an axe at the base of one of many surveillance-camera poles scattered across a vast empty plain under a dusk sky.

The black poles went up quietly, one intersection at a time: a camera, a solar panel, a cellular modem, scanning every license plate that passed. By mid-2026, Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers (ALPRs) blanketed more than 6,000 American communities, and the company crossed 100,000 cameras nationwide. Then, almost as quietly, Americans began fighting back — with spray paint, with city-council microphones, and with an open-source map.

The accelerant was immigration. As reporting revealed that local plate data was flowing to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies — often against a city’s own policies — a diffuse unease curdled into organized revolt. It now runs on three fronts at once, and none of them looks like the others.

What the poles collect

Stripped to what is actually captured, a Flock installation gathers a widening set of data types:

Flock stresses that its searches are based on vehicle characteristics, not identity, and says it does not use facial recognition. Even so, the combined record amounts to a map of where a person goes and who they move with.

A note on names. Not every sensor bolted to these poles is Flock’s own — SignalTrace is Leonardo’s, and some mounts carry cameras, radios, or detectors from other vendors entirely. But “Flock” has become the public shorthand for the whole apparatus, the way “Xerox” once meant any photocopier: Flock built the dominant network, the poles look identical from the sidewalk, and residents fighting “Flock cameras” generally mean the entire roadside-surveillance stack, whoever supplies each part.

The vandals

The most visceral front is also the least organized. Across the country, people have simply started destroying the hardware. In Oregon, six plate-scanning cameras were cut down from their poles and at least one was spray-painted; a note left at the base read, “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks.” In Suffolk, Virginia, police arrested a 41-year-old man in December who they said had “intentionally destroyed” 13 Flock cameras. In Oakland, an anonymous vandal has spent months paint-bombing lenses across the city.

Chronicled in part by journalist Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine, the attacks have stretched from California and Connecticut to Illinois and Virginia — a leaderless campaign its participants frame as sabotage against mass surveillance. It is, by any measure, illegal, and prosecutors have charged it as vandalism and destruction of property. But it has also made the cameras — usually invisible street furniture — impossible to ignore.

The councils

The second front is slower, quieter, and far more consequential. Between August 2021 and May 2026, at least 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states, and the pace has only accelerated as the ICE revelations spread. The trigger, again and again, is the same: a city discovers its data has left town.

In June 2026, San Francisco’s police chief disclosed that a compliance audit had found roughly 299 improper queries of the city’s Flock network on behalf of federal and out-of-state agencies over about a year; a separate class action alleges federal agencies queried the city’s cameras more than 1.6 million times in seven months — a potential violation of California’s ALPR Privacy Act, which bars sharing plate data across state lines without case-by-case authorization. One by one, councils pulled the plug: South Pasadena declined to renew, Mountain View voted unanimously to cut ties after learning federal agencies had accessed its data, Santa Clara County’s supervisors ended access 3–2, and Windsor, Connecticut switched its cameras off after Flock could not guarantee federal agents weren’t watching. Oshkosh, Wisconsin reversed its approval so fast it may have set a record.

The mappers

The third front is quietly building the map the other two lacked. DeFlock, launched in October 2024 by software engineer Will Freeman after he noticed strange camera poles on a cross-country move, lets anyone report an ALPR’s location — and the direction it faces — onto an OpenStreetMap-based atlas. By mid-2026 the project, now backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had mapped more than 107,000 cameras, roughly half of Flock’s entire network.

What began as awareness-raising has become a tool. DeFlock now offers privacy-optimized routing: enter a start and destination, pick an avoidance buffer, and it plots a path that dodges the cameras. Alongside the ACLU’s “Get the Flock Out” campaign, it has given the revolt something the vandals and the councils could not — a shared, searchable picture of exactly where the surveillance state stands.

Where things stand

Flock, for its part, rejects the premise. The company insists its cameras capture only point-in-time images from public roads, that most are never accessed, and that data is deleted after a retention window; it published a blog post flatly titled “Does Flock Share Data With ICE? No.” CEO Garrett Langley has dismissed the cancellation wave as “coordinated attacks.” And the numbers remain lopsided: even as dozens of cities defect, Flock’s network keeps growing, and in Stockton, California, the council recently voted to add six camera-equipped drones despite public objections. The revolt has cost Flock contracts, cameras, and headlines. Whether it has cost the company its trajectory is, for now, an open question.