He’s on a mission to destroy every Flock camera
The short version: The Guardian's Stateside Podcast profiles "Nomark," a vigilante destroying Flock ALPR cameras, spotlighting how surveillance sprawl is pushing some Americans toward property destruction as a form of protest.
Our Take
Credit to Carter Sherman and Sanya Mansoor for getting a camera-destroying vigilante on record. Whatever you think of the tactic, the fact that someone feels driven to angle-grind cameras off poles in the dead of night tells you something about how fast this network grew and how little consent communities were asked to give. 120,000+ cameras in 6,000 towns didn't happen through robust public debate — it happened through vendor sales pitches to police chiefs and city councils who rarely put it to a real public vote.
We don't endorse vandalism, and we're not going to pretend it's a scalable answer to mass surveillance. Destroyed cameras get replaced, sometimes with backend upgrades that make the network harder to defeat. The durable fight is public: pull the contract, kill the funding, force disclosure of who's querying the database and why. Vigilante action makes headlines; local ordinances and open-records requests make change stick.
Flock's line that this isn't "mass surveillance" doesn't survive contact with how the system actually works — networked plate reads, historical location data, and access shared across agencies with little audit trail. If a camera's already watching your street, check our map to confirm it, then use our take-action guide to push your city council on oversight before someone in your town reaches for a grinder instead of a public-comment mic.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Stateside Podcast, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.