Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras

Hacker News · Feb 20, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Silicon Valley is tightening its ties with Trumpworld, the surveillance state is rapidly expanding, and big tech’s AI data center buildout is booming. Civilians are pushing back. In today’s edition of Blood in the Machine:Across the nation, people are dismantling and destroying Flock cameras that conduct warrantless vehicle surveillance, and whose data is shared with ICE.An Oklahoma man airing his concerns about a local data center project at a public hearing is arrested after he exceeded his allotted time by a couple seconds.Uber and Lyft drivers deliver a petition signed by 10,000 gig workers demanding that stolen wages be returned to them.PLUS: A climate researcher has a new report that unravels the ‘AI will solve climate change’ mythos, Tesla’s Robotaxis are crashing 4 times as often as humans, and AI-generated public comments helped kill a vote on air quality.A brief note that this reporting, research, and writing takes a lot of time, resources, and energy. I can only do it thanks to the paid subscribers who chip in a few bucks each month; if you’re able, and you find value in this work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription so I can continue on. Many thanks, hammers up, and onwards.Last week, in La Mesa, a small city just east of San Diego, California, observers happened upon a pair of destroyed Flock cameras. One had been smashed and left on the median, the other had key parts removed. The destruction was obviously intentional, and appears perhaps even staged to leave a message: It came just weeks after the city decided, in the face of public protest, to continue its contracts with the surveillance company.Flock cameras are typically mounted on 8 to 12 foot poles and powered by a solar panel. The smashed remains of all of the above in La Mesa are the latest examples of a widening anti-Flock backlash. In recent months, people have been smashing and dismantling the surveillance devices, in incidents reported in at least five states, from coast to coast. Photos by Bill Paul of SD Slackers, used with permission.Bill Paul, who runs the local news outlet San Diego Slackers, and who first reported on the smashed Flock equipment, tells me that the sabotage comes just a month or two after San Diego held a raucous city council meeting over whether to keep operating the Flock cameras. A clear majority of public attendees present were in favor of shutting them down. There was “a huge turnout against them,” he tells me, “but the council approved continuation of the contract.”Photos by Bill Paul, SD Slackers.The tenor of the meeting reflects a growing anger and concern over the surveillance technology that’s gone nationwide: Flock, which is based in Atlanta and is currently valued at $7.5 billion, operates automatic license plate readers (ALPR) that have now been installed in some 6,000 US communities. They gather not just license plate images, but other identifying data used to ‘fingerprint’ vehicles, their owners, and their movements. This data can be collected, stored, and accessed without a warrant, making it a popular workaround for law enforcement. Perhaps most controversially, Flock’s vehicle data is routinely accessed by ICE. If you’ve heard Flock’s name come up recently, it’s likely as a result of their now-canceled partnership with Ring, made instantly famous by a particularly dystopian Super Bowl ad that promised to turn regular neighborhoods into a surveillance dragnet.Meanwhile, abuses have been prevalent. A Georgia police chief was arrested and charged with using Flock data to stalk and harass private citizens. Flock data has been used to track citizens who cross state lines for abortions when the procedure is illegal in their state. And municipalities have found that federal agencies have accessed local flock data without their knowledge or consent. Critics claim that this warrantless data collection is Orwellian and unconstitutional; a violation of the 4th amendment. As a result, civilians from Oregon to Virginia to California and beyond are pushing their governments to abandon Flock contracts. In some cases, they’re succeeding. Cities like Santa Cruz, CA, and Eugene, OR, have cancelled their contracts with Flock. In Oregon’s case, the public outcry was accompanied by a campaign of destruction against the surveillance devices: Last year, at least six Flock license plate readers mounted on poles located in Eugene and Springfield were cut down and destroyed, according to the Lookout Eugene-Springfield. A note reading “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks” was attached to one of the destroyed poles, and somewhat incredibly, broadcast on the local news. In Greenview, Illinois, a Flock camera pole was severed at the base and the device destroyed. In Lisbon, Connecticut, police are investigating another smashed Flock camera.In Virginia, last December, a man was arrested for dismantling and destroying 13 Flock cameras throughout the state over the course of the year. He’s apparently already admitted to doing so, according to local news: Jefferey S. Sovern, 41, was arrested in October after detectives say he “intentionally destroyed” 13 Flock Safety cameras between April and October of this year. He was charged with 13 counts of destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny and six counts of possession of burglary tools.Sovern admitted to the crimes, according to a criminal complaint filed in Suffolk General District Court, going as far as to say he used vice grips to help him disassemble the tow-piece polls. He also admitted to keeping some of the wiring, batteries and solar panels taken from the cameras. Some of the items were recovered by police after they searched the property.After his arrest, Sovern created a GoFundMe to help cover his legal costs, in which he sheds a little light on his intentions:My name is Jeff and I appreciate my privacy. I appreciate everyone's right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment. With the local news outlets finding my legal issues and creating a story that is starting to grow, there has been community support for me that I humbly welcome.(I reached out to Sovern, who is out on bail, for comment, and will update or follow up if I hear back.) Sovern points his GoFundMe contributors to DeFlock, a website aimed at tracking and countering the rise of Flock cameras in US communities. It counts 46 cities that have officially rejected Flock and other ALPRs since its campaign began.In fact, it’s hard to think of a tech product or project this side of generative AI that is more roundly opposed and reviled, on a bipartisan level, than Flock, and resistance takes many forms and stripes. Here’s the YouTuber Benn Jordan, showing his viewers how to Flock-proof their license plates and render their vehicles illegible to the company’s data ingestion systems:In response to such Flock counter-tactics, Florida passed a law last year making it illegal to cover or alter your license plate.In his GoFundMe, Sovern also mentioned the support for him he’d seen on forums online, so I went over to Reddit to get a sense for how his actions were being received online. Here was the page that shared news of his arrest for destroying the Flock cameras:There was, in other words, nearly universal support for Sovern’s Flock dismantling campaign. Bear in mind that this is r/Norfolk, and while it’s still reddit users we’re talking about, it’s not like this is r/anarchism here: The San Diego reddit threads carrying news of the destroyed Flock equipment told a similar story:There were plenty of outright endorsements of the sabotage:Off the message boards and in real civic life, Bill Paul, the reporter with the San Diego Slacker, says anger is boiling over, too. He points again to that heated December 2025 city council meeting, in which public outrage was left unaddressed. The city, perhaps aware of the stigma Flock now carries, apparently tried to highlight that their focus was on the “smart streetlights” made by another company, while downplaying the fact that those streetlights run on Flock software. “San Diego gets to hide behind a slight facade in that their contract is with Ubicquia,” the smart streetlight manufacturer, Paul says, “but the software layer is Flock. You can easily see Flock hardware on retail properties, looking at the same citizens, with zero oversight, and SDPD can claim they have clean hands.” Weeks later, pieces of smashed Flock cameras littered the ground.Across the country, in other words, municipal governments are overriding public will to make deals with a profiteering tech company to surveil their citizens and to collaborate with federal agencies like ICE. It might be taken as a sign of the times that in states and cities across the US, thousands of miles apart, those opposed to the technology are refusing to countenance what they view as violations of privacy and civil liberty, and are instead taking up vice grips and metal cutters. And in many cases, they’re getting hailed by their peers as heroes. If you’ve heard stories of smashed Flock cameras or dismantled surveillance equipment in your neighborhood, please share—drop a link in the comments, or contact me on Signal or at briancmerchant@proton.me. Thanks to Lilly Irani for the tip on the smashed Flock cams in San Diego.In case you missed it, I shared my five takeaways on the most recent round of ultraheated AI discourse here:Five takeaways from an unhinged AI discourse ·Feb 18The AI discourse has been particularly, let’s say, “heated” lately. It’s hitting a lot of the beats we’ve heard before—people are not ready for what’s coming, critics are too dismissive, and at everyone’s peril, “the left” is getting AI all wrong, etc—but delivered at a fever pitch.The exchange was filmed and recorded on YouTube:Matthew Gault at 404 Media reports the details: Police in Claremore, Oklahoma arrested a local man after he went slightly over his time giving public remarks during a city council meeting opposing a pro