Communities are Fighting and Winning Against Surveillance Company | #aclu #shorts #privacy | ACLU

Our Take

Credit where it's due: the ACLU is putting its megaphone behind something we've been saying since day one — this fight is winnable. Their short is light on specifics, as shorts tend to be, but the core message lands: Flock's ALPR network isn't some unstoppable force of nature. It's a bunch of cameras bolted to poles, funded by city budgets, approved (or not) by city councils, and every one of those decision points is a place where regular people showed up and said no.

That's the part that gets lost in the doom-and-gloom coverage of mass surveillance. Yes, Flock has blanketed thousands of communities with plate-reading cameras that log where you drive, when, and how often, often with zero public debate before installation. But the flip side is that plenty of towns have also killed contracts, forced audits, or refused renewals once residents started asking hard questions about data sharing, retention, and who gets access to that driving history. Wins like that don't happen by accident. They happen because someone pulled up to a council meeting with facts in hand.

If you want to know whether your own neighborhood is already wired up, check our camera map before assuming it isn't. And if you're ready to do more than watch a short and nod along, our take-action page has the playbook other communities used to actually get these cameras pulled.