'Protecting' Flock Cameras from lazers

Our Take

Credit to the Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency channel for flagging this one: Flock Safety reportedly building in countermeasures against lasers and other DIY tampering methods people have used to disable ALPR cameras. It's a telling move. Instead of treating community resistance as feedback that these cameras shouldn't be there in the first place, the response is to armor the hardware and keep the surveillance net running no matter what residents think.

This is the pattern with every mass surveillance rollout: deploy first, harden against objections second, and never actually ask the public whether they want a camera logging every car that passes their house. Flock's growth has outpaced the public debate about who gets access to this data, how long it's kept, and what happens when it's wrong. Hardening the cameras against lasers does nothing to address any of that — it just makes the system more durable against the only pushback some people feel they have left.

If you'd rather fight this with sunlight than lasers, start by finding out how many of these cameras are already watching your own neighborhood on our camera map, and then check our take-action guide for ways to push back through city council meetings, public records requests, and local organizing — tactics that actually hold up in daylight.