NANUET, N.Y. — Tae-eun Hartley stood near the corner of a busy suburban intersection, pointed her finger toward the sky and shouted an ominous warning to drivers passing through.
“The’re watching you,” Hartley, a military veteran and local activist, shouted into a bullhorn.
Known locally as a designated free speech zone, this particular intersection has been a premier community protest spot since the post-9/11 War on Terror. But last weekend, the protest wasn’t about a war in a far-off land. It was about a battle playing out in communities nationwide. It was about the surveillance camera pointed at the drivers passing through the intersection.
“Recently, the local government tried to close it down and stop us from protesting here,” Hartley told Straight Arrow. “Now they’ve put up a Flock camera to watch us and get all of the data from every car that passes by here and every protester who stands here.”
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Point phone camera here
Over the next week, scenes like this one in the New York City suburbs will unfold in hundreds of communities nationwide. The protest was part of a nationwide campaign against Flock Safety, an $8.4 billion surveillance technology company that operates more than 130,000 automated license plate readers for police departments, private corporations and even schools across the U.S.
Last year, Flock’s critics largely consisted of privacy advocates and left-wing activists concerned about how police were feeding Flock data to federal immigration officials as the Trump administration ramped up a crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
But in a polarized America, Flock Safety has inadvertently found a way to bring people together.
Criticism of its AI-powered surveillance cameras has grown into a sprawling, bipartisan revolt. These days, everybody and their mother-in-law is up in arms about the nationwide network of surveillance cameras. The intersection of American politics, at least for the time being, has converged at literal intersections.
In the last few months, the anti-Flock coalition has gone viral on social media and now encompasses libertarians, MAGA populists, gun-rights activists and far-right Freedom Caucus lawmakers who warn the country is looking more and more like George Orwell’s “1984.”
Among the vocal critics is Chris Anders, a Republican state legislator from West Virginia and chair of its Freedom Caucus, who is leading an effort to ban Flock cameras in his state. He told Straight Arrow that Flock’s pervasive monitoring flies in the face of the Constitution, which protects people from unreasonable government searches and seizures.
“The Fourth Amendment says get a damn warrant,” he said. “These things have no right to exist.”
But they do exist, and they’re everywhere, from sprawling cities to rural enclaves, from Home Depot parking lots to schools and children’s playgrounds. Among them is the camera at the Nanuet intersection outside a Verizon store, where protesters gathered to warn people they’re being recorded.
The cameras are pitched as a community safety tool that allows local police to track license plate numbers in criminal investigations. But, as Hartley explained, the data collected by the cameras aren’t limited to license plate numbers — and it’s all fed into a database accessible by police officers nationwide, all without a warrant.
“It also does make and model of the car, it does faces, it does stickers, it does color, it does everything,” Hartley said. “And it can effectively track you everywhere you go.”
‘Technology vendors against everybody else’
Chad Marlow, an attorney focused on privacy issues at the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union, has been sounding the alarm about automated license plate readers and other surveillance technology for more than a decade. For much of that time, he acknowledged, public interest in the subject “was not particularly high.”
Last week, he was late for an interview for a reason he may have never predicted: He couldn’t get off the phone. Just about everybody, from the daily newspaper in Tampa, Florida, to Fox News, was asking him to share his perspective on Flock. He’s not quite an internet celebrity, Marlow told Straight Arrow, but he’s getting close.
The ACLU’s internal analytics back him up. The ACLU’s “Get the Flock Out” campaign has found a massive and growing audience on social media. From June to July, social media mentions of the campaign surged by 274%, Marlow said. During the same window, news mentions of the ACLU advocacy campaign spiked by more than 2,000%.
Not in his “wildest dreams,” Marlow said, did he think automated license plate readers would become a leading political issue, putting Flock Safety alongside a burgeoning populist revolt against data centers and, more broadly, the power and influence now wielded by leading technology companies.
“The amount of social media content on this issue is literally exploding my head,” Marlow said. “At first I thought, ‘OK, maybe it’s just the algorithm pushing all this to me because I work on it.’ But I have friends who are nowhere near me on this issue and they’re seeing all this content on it.”
Over the last few weeks, discussions about Flock have routinely trended on X and across other social media platforms, often featuring criticism of the surveillance company, which is backed by more than $1 billion in funding from venture capitalists.
Hartley, the New York activist, said social media was her route to the anti-Flock movement. A YouTube video posted by a progressive media outlet raised awareness about how a Flock camera in a small town in Colorado was sending data to law enforcement officers far from the state’s borders.
“They did a story about how those Flock cameras were gathering data of people moving across the country and how that data was getting sent back to the federal government, specifically ICE,” Hartley said.
Now, Marlow said, it’s a debate that pits “some police departments and some technology vendors against everybody else.”
“I was on ‘Democracy Now!,’” the progressive news show, “and a clip from that got repurposed in a positive light by Alex Jones,” the far-right conspiracy theorist, Marlow said. “Tucker Carlson’s talking about it, they’re talking about it on MS Now, and they’re talking about it on Fox News.”
Just a few years ago, Republicans largely rejected the Black Lives Matter movement, centered on police use-of-force, but now find themselves in lockstep with those same activists in opposition to the police state.
Anders, the West Virginia lawmaker who spoke to Straight Arrow after a stop at a local gun range, now finds himself in the peculiar position of agreeing with the ACLU and progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
“Even an old blind sow finds an acorn every once in a while,” Anders said. “I’ve seen very few people outside of the big-government hacks supporting these things.”
That social media activity has led to policy changes in the real world. This year, city councils in 23 municipalities big and small have voted to sever ties with Flock, according to a recent analysis by The Washington Times. In July, the police department in Los Angeles, California, let its Flock contract expire after an audit found the license plate readers were incorrectly flagging vehicles as stolen. In January, city officials in Staunton, Virginia, cut ties with Flock after vocal opposition from residents in the 25,000-person city.
Flock abuse ‘is unacceptable’
Flock Safety maintains that its surveillance cameras are effective crime-fighting tools, despite a lack of independent evidence to back up the company’s claims.
Flock Safety didn’t respond to emails from Straight Arrow seeking comment for this story. But the company maintains its technology keeps people safe. More than 6,000 communities nationwide have contracts with Flock, which records about 20 billion license plate scans each month — roughly 57 scans per American.
Some police departments say the tools are invaluable. In one frequently cited instance, police credited Flock cameras for helping them solve a child abduction case involving a 1-year-old who was taken from his mother at gunpoint in Georgia. Flock was also given credit for helping police track down a man later convicted of attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump on one of his golf courses in Florida.
But dozens of law enforcement officials have been accused or convicted of using Flock for stalking. In one high-profile case, a Texas police officer was accused of leveraging Flock to surveil a woman suspected of self-administering an abortion.
“Abuse of Flock technology, at any level, is unacceptable,” the company said in a blog post last week. The company announced several changes, including to its data collection practices, that it hopes could quiet the critics and prevent misuse.
But ultimately, the company said, individual law enforcement agencies own the data collected by their Flock cameras and can do with it as they see fit.
Defending Flock
Amid the scrutiny, several pundits — primarily those aligned with technology companies and tough-on-crime policies — have become the company’s most vocal defenders.
In a post on X, a reporter with the right-leaning news outlet The Free Press, Maya Sulkin, blasted anti-Flock activists for using “electric saws and cans of spray paint on tools used by law enforcement to keep us all safe.”
“To be blunt,” Sulkin said, Flock cameras are “not interested in you — unless you’re a kidnapper, a thief or someone who intends to do harm.”
The social media post featuring Sulkin was slapped with a community note from X users: “Flock cameras log plates of all vehicles, creating mass surveillance databases accessible without warrants.”
Sulkin did not respond to emails seeking comment from Straight Arrow.
In the left-leaning magazine The Atlantic, a pundit with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute argued the pushback is an overreaction and that Flock keeps companies safe.
Charles Fain Lehman, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and senior editor of the think tank’s media outlet City Journal, argued “the case for Flock is simple,” because they could help the police thwart crime.
Fain Lehman acknowledged that research into the efficacy of automated license plate readers doesn’t yet support his full-throttled support. He did not respond to emails from Straight Arrow seeking comment.
Surveillance cameras reduce crime “through two channels: incapacitating offenders who are caught and convicted, and increasing the certainty of apprehension, which theoretically should deter criminals from offending in the first place,” he wrote. “But is it true in practice? Although the research base is still developing, the answer is ‘probably.’”
On Monday, Fain Lehman announced an initiative to identify instances in which Flock cameras “have helped solve a crime, apprehend an offender, or recover a stolen car or abducted child.” So far, the database includes 700 entries.
John Arnold, a billionaire and former hedge fund manager, has also emerged as a Flock proponent. Arnold, who declined an interview with Straight Arrow, has used social media to defend the surveillance firm.
Putting aside Flock, he wrote on X, surveillance technology is everywhere — and can be used to create safer communities “while preserving constitutional protections for privacy.”
“There are roughly as many Flock license plate readers installed across the entire US (120k) as NYC has video cameras installed just in its transit system, let alone on the streets,” wrote Arnold, the co-chair of philanthropy firm Arnold Ventures. “Do opponents of Flock want those removed, too? Does anyone think that’d be a good idea?”
Asking ‘critical questions’
Flock’s critics have been particularly effective at rallying opposition since the Super Bowl in February. It all began with a pricey commercial for another surveillance company, Amazon-owned Ring, in which a neighborhood’s surveillance cameras were used to find a lost puppy. Some viewers found the ad heartwarming. Others saw it as a depiction of an Orwellian surveillance state.
Ring cut ties with Flock to calm critics and never faced the same degree of public scorn.
Flock is hardly the only, or even the largest, player in the surveillance technology industry. So why has the company grown into a bipartisan anti-surveillance lighting rod? Marlow said it isn’t just about effective advocacy — Flock cameras are easy to spot. And once people started seeing the cameras in their own neighborhoods, they started posting.
A crowdsourced map online, created by the anti-surveillance group DeFlock, now highlights the locations of more than 130,000 Flock cameras in virtually every state. For Ed Vogel, a researcher and national DeFlock organizer, the database is part of a broader effort of leveraging transparency to raise public awareness about the company’s pervasive reach. Vogel has filed public records requests to reveal police misuse of the cameras, which in turn have been used to inform investigative journalism and boots-on-the-ground advocacy.
With all of that visibility, Vogel told Straight Arrow, “the problem is becoming more legible to more people.”
“One aspect of that is just the volume of cameras,” Vogel said. “People are seeing the cameras and they’re starting to ask more critical questions.”
Back in Rockland County, Hartley said she sought help from DeFlock organizers to help craft public records requests designed to shine a light on how the cameras were being used in her own community. The records request was ultimately denied, she told Straight Arrow, on grounds that it was seeking “sensitive police information.”
Hartley said she’s thankful to see the DeFlock campaign garner so much attention online. But getting people to show up for the cause in real life, she said, is a bigger challenge.
She said she began organizing Rockland County’s anti-Flock demonstration about a month ago, and about 50 people RSVP’d. On the day of the event, fewer than a dozen people showed up to the busy suburban intersection.
For the ACLU’s Marlow, the long game is about maintaining policy wins even after his phone stops ringing and the criticism is no longer bolstered by social media algorithms. Viral advocacy campaigns “can cool down as quickly as they get hot,” he said.
Part of that strategy is the argument that Flock’s reach affects everybody equally, said Michael Williams, an activist from Joplin, Missouri, where a police officer was accused of misusing Flock cameras hundreds of times over the course of about a year.
Whether someone is concerned about being tracked on their way to the gun range or objects to all of that data being fed to federal immigration agents, Williams told Straight Arrow, everybody is being watched.
“I would say it’s not political at all,” Williams said of the Flock resistance. “It’s American.”
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