KVIG Informative

A quiet, decentralized backlash against a license-plate-tracking company has turned into one of the most visible acts of civil disobedience against surveillance technology in years — camera by camera, pole by pole.

Flock Safety cameras, automated license plate readers used by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide, have been vandalized, disabled or stolen in at least 36 states, according to an NPR review of local news reports.

People have sawed the cameras off their poles, crashed vehicles into them, covered them in paint and stickers, and shot at them. In Winona, Minnesota, someone removed all eight of the city’s Flock cameras in a coordinated overnight operation police valued at roughly $24,000; two more cameras on a nearby county bridge were taken the same way.

The American Civil Liberties Union has tracked a parallel, legal campaign pushing cities to cancel their Flock contracts outright. The group’s advocacy has contributed to contract cancellations or non-renewals in cities including Santa Cruz, Mountain View and El Cerrito, California, and Chandler, Arizona, according to the ACLU’s own campaign tracker.

More than 130,000 AI-powered license plate readers now operate on American streets, according to DeFlock, an advocacy group that maps the devices. Flock’s cameras capture billions of license plates monthly, along with vehicle make, model and color, building a searchable record of where a car has traveled over time.

Much of the recent backlash centers on immigration enforcement. Critics say Flock’s networked database gives federal agencies indirect access to local license-plate data, raising concerns that a tool marketed to local police for solving property crimes is being used to help track people for deportation.

State fusion centers, the federal-local intelligence-sharing hubs created after September 11 to track terrorism threats, have circulated bulletins this summer directing officers to monitor anti-Flock advocacy and organizing, according to documents obtained by journalist Dan Boguslaw and reported in his newsletter.

Flock Safety held its annual company conference this week under the weight of that backlash. The company has not said how it plans to respond to the vandalism, but the volume and geographic spread of the incidents — 36 states and rising — suggest the resistance isn’t limited to any single political constituency or region.