Why Americans Are Unplugging Flock’s New Wave Of Surveillance

We all know we are being watched all the time.

The cellphone in our pocket tracks our every movement. The CCTV at Starbucks captures my coffee order. The “For You” feed on my social media knows exactly which posts will keep me lingering a bit too long. But fears about the use and misuse of personal data have become the raison d’être for sweeping opposition to a new wave of surveillance technology. And the growing intolerance for Flock Safety cameras has excited the libertarian heart of populists across the country.

“Flock off” and “De-flock now” have become the rallying cry of opponents – or, in glass-half full world, proponents of personal privacy – with new websites popping up that assist in locating Automated License Plate Recognition or Readers (ALPR) which have undoubtedly led to numerous incidents of vandalism: “This unprecedented spying is terrifying,” reads the ACLU campaign webpage, which includes a “local advocacy toolkit” so anyone can “join the movement to tell Flock and other ALPR companies: ‘Get The Flock Out!’”

Reports from 2019 estimated there would be more than 85 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. by 2021; Flock, in 2026, has somewhere around 120,000. Then there’s also a whole host of competitors. And even though 10 million Americans have installed an Amazon-owned Ring video doorbell system, those watchful eyes come courtesy of the free market.

Of course, politicians, who much too often rely on public polling for decision making, are getting nervous. Even popular red-state governors, like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, have pledged to crack down on cameras lining city streets. And mayors and city councils in major metros continue to pass measures to prohibit Flock and similar ALPRs from being a part of their law enforcement’s private-and-public camera network.

Flock CEO Garrett Langley has attempted to run cover and reframe the opposition, hoping this can “lead to fruitful debates” about his company: “we don’t let a loud minority dictate us moving toward a less safe society.”

Public outcry over surveillance cameras is hardly a novel concept, as the voyeuristic nature of our modern technological state has a long history.

There was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society project, which proposed a federally controlled data center called the National Data Bank in 1965. That idea fell by the wayside after public backlash eventually killed the plan. With the September 11 terrorist attacks came another moment when the security state shifted posture through the Patriot Act, which produced a steady stream of congressionally approved legislation that blurred the line between what could be normally considered private information and what the state could claim a right to know.

Then there was the COVID regime. There were “contact tracing” apps downloaded on phones without permission and consent, and a widespread censorship crackdown on speech because it questioned “the science.” Local, state, and federal authorities sacrificed any notions of 4^th Amendment rights all in the name of “public health.”

In this case, there hasn’t been that inciting incident. ALPRs have seemed to spring out of nowhere.

It’s now assumed that engaging in society means engaging in systems of surveillance. Your smartwatch vibrates exactly when you have been idle for too long. Your favorite streaming service knows the exact right genre of movie to serve you on a lonely Friday night. Your doorbell camera sends you a push notification every time your Amazon package arrives; and that Amazon order was an algorithmically induced purchase made under the illusion of unabated free will.

All your information is monitored, stored, and used by technology giants. But alongside the “opt-ins” and “accept all cookies” arrangements with websites, there has been a haphazard understanding of what was actually being done with all that personal information.

And with Flock cameras, this new tech has definitely “struck a nerve,” as my Texas Public Policy Foundation colleague David Dunmoyer noted.

So, what distinguishes the Flock fallout from previous surveillance technology?

In a political climate where trust in government is at record lows and social trust has slid into the red (77% of people in pre-1960s America to just 35% now say “most people can be trusted”), individuals find themselves in a double-bind of ontological suspicion.

This convergence of distrust sustains the pathological division already present.

“Predictability is the foundation of trust,” Mark Mortensen and Heidi Gardner wrote in the Harvard Business Review all the way back in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns. “We’re willing to be vulnerable — to expose ourselves to potential risk — when we have reason to believe that someone will not take advantage of us or disappoint us.”

In a Hobbesian state of nature, fear of a life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” drove men to seek sovereign protection. With the creation of the liberal democratic state, America’s Founders marshaled a political order that secured the rights of man that preceded government itself. Technology now upends that bargain.

The road out of our civil strife concerning the growing surveillance state is trust. The proliferation of a law enforcement surveillance system like Flock is a symptom of growing distrust between government and the citizenry. The expanding network of privately purchased Ring cameras is a natural outgrowth of a loss of social trust among individuals.

The question of Flock cameras is truly about our social contract, one in which tension between freedom and attachment, liberty and autonomy, cannot be resolved unless we consider our rapidly evolving technological world. A society that no longer trusts its government or its neighbors will eventually demand more surveillance, whether it be from the state above or the camera next door.

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Cameron Abrams is a policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.