‘F**k Flock’: Is the backlash to surveillance cameras winning?
The short version: CNN's look at Winona's destroyed Flock cameras and masked activist NoMark shows the backlash to ALPR surveillance is real, spreading, and forcing companies to respond.
Our Take
When a national outlet like CNN sits down with a masked activist and visits a city that literally tore its Flock cameras out of the ground, you know this isn't a fringe complaint anymore. The Winona story is the headline here: a police department deciding not to replace destroyed cameras is a rare, concrete win in a fight that usually feels one-sided, with departments and vendors holding all the cards.
What's telling is the sequence CNN lays out — public anger, physical destruction of hardware, a city council grappling with what AI-powered tracking actually means for a small town, and only then Flock rolling out 'safeguards' and an apology. That's not a company getting ahead of the problem. That's a company reacting to pressure after the fact, which should tell every other city council considering a Flock contract exactly how much weight to give the sales pitch versus the backlash.
Credit to CNN's Meena Duerson for getting a police chief, a council member, and a self-described vandal-activist all in the same piece — it captures how messy and real this fight is on the ground, not just in op-eds. If you want to see whether your own neighborhood is being logged plate-by-plate, check our map, and if Winona's example makes you want to push your own city council, our take-action page has a place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of CNN, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.