He Shot a Flock Camera to Win Your Vote | Wacky Wednesday
The short version: A Montana Senate hopeful shot a Flock camera for a campaign ad, and Chad Law's 'Wacky Wednesday' rightly asks whether the stunt actually helps the anti-surveillance case.
Our Take
Credit to Chad Law for flagging this one — a candidate blasting a Flock Safety camera on video is exactly the kind of viral moment that gets clicks, but as Common Sense with Chad Law points out, it's a shaky way to make a serious argument. Destroying hardware doesn't touch the real problem: the data-sharing pipelines, the retention policies, and the fact that these cameras are quietly logging every car that passes, whether or not the unit itself survives to see November.
We get why people are angry. Flock's network has expanded into thousands of communities with little public debate, and plenty of residents only learn a camera went up after it's already feeding plate reads into a searchable database. But theatrics like this hand skeptics an easy dismissal — 'vandalism,' not policy — and let local officials avoid the harder questions about audits, access logs, and whether any of this actually reduces crime. The opposition's argument, as the title notes, basically writes itself.
The more durable fight is procedural: public records requests, city council pressure, and knowing exactly what's watching your street. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and if you want to push back the right way, our take-action page has real steps that outlast a campaign ad cycle.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Common Sense with Chad Law, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.