Flock and other automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras continue to give AI data centers a run for their money as the least welcome presence in American communities.
Things are getting so bad that Flock Safety’s CEO, Garrett Langley, came out of the woodwork last week to apologize for his 2025 comments to Forbes where he likened anti-Flock activists and deflock.org, the site that tracks where ALPRs are placed, to “terrorists.” Calling his past remark “a mistake” and throwing some stock we see you, we hear you-type platitudes to his critics, Langley went on to insist he still believes in a world that can be filled with his probing digital eyes—”a world where we can have safety and privacy.”
But a hasty and uninspired defensive PR campaign may not be enough to reverse the momentum clearly building against Flock. Whereas before, the viral videos of kids destroying camera poles could lead some to incorrectly but plausibly dismiss the movement as the project of a few far-left scofflaws, anti-Flock sentiment is now an incontrovertibly bipartisan movement. Professional broken clock Tucker Carlson has even jumped into the fray to lead the flank punching Flock from the right, referring to Langley as the product of a “douchebag factory.”
The winds shifting against Flock’s favor aren’t just giving us uplifting videos of vandalism and catty discourse clips. There have also been several newsworthy on-the-ground policy changes surrounding the increasingly unpopular devices.
As reported by 404 Media, the city of Verona, Wisconsin, could not get Flock to come remove the three cameras it had installed after the city council voted to not renew a contract with the surveillance company. Verona officials were instructed by Flock not to remove the cameras themselves. More concerning, after Verona officials asked for the cameras to at least be remotely disabled while they waited for the company to come collect them, a Flock employee said they were unsure if such a thing was even possible—a claim that, if true, would indicate Flock technology is outdated by a factor of decades. It wasn’t true, of course. Flock later made clear that they “can remotely deactivate [the cameras] at any time.”
But while things were still fuzzy about whether those feeds were live and when Flock actually planned to come collect their gear, Verona took matters into their own hands. The decision was made to cover the cameras with black trash bags while waiting for them to be retrieved on some indeterminate date in the future, an analog privacy hack that is catching on nationwide.
Unfortunately, not every local government is reacting to public outcry over Flock with the same degree of remedial energy. Some lawmakers apparently feel that the problem isn’t the creation of the offending 90,000-plus camera surveillance state network itself, but rather that their constituents are aware of it. Accordingly, there have been increased efforts to camouflage Flock cameras by hiding them in innocuous road speed signs. In a video posted to X, user @OrwellDay shows the back of “an innocent speed reader” that has been modified to stealthily house a working Flock camera that scans each plate going by.
This underhanded move, though a short-term solution to keeping the cameras from meeting untimely ends at the hands of vigilantes, is only likely to breed more mistrust and hypervigilance from the communities they’ve infected. If they’re willing to resort to sneaky tactics to keep collecting data against the wishes of citizens, what else is Flock hiding and getting away with?
As Verona, Wisconsin’s council president Mara Helmke so eloquently put it in the meeting where they voted to deFlock their city, “Flock is not trustworthy, no matter what kind of guarantees they have given you… Flock has assured us that our data is ours, right? But we can’t trust that. We simply can’t.”
Read More: It’s Never Been Cooler to Take Down a Flock Camera
