Flock's CEO calls DeFlock terroristic for mapping his cameras

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for surfacing this one, because it tells you everything about how Flock Safety wants this conversation to go. When a company's chief executive reaches for a word like "terroristic" to describe volunteers jotting down GPS coordinates of equipment installed on public roads, that's not a rebuttal — it's a tell. You don't call something terrorism unless you're hoping nobody asks a follow-up question.

Let's be clear about what DeFlock actually is: a crowdsourced map built by ordinary people noting the location of surveillance hardware that is, by design, out in the open, reading every plate that passes. There's no hacking, no trespassing, no sabotage. Just observation and documentation — the same basic civic function journalists, researchers, and neighborhood watch groups have performed forever. If cataloging visible government-adjacent infrastructure is "terroristic," then so is every local news story that points a camera at one of these poles.

The real story here isn't DeFlock's volunteers — it's a surveillance company that would rather smear its critics than explain why a nationwide network of plate-reading cameras, feeding data to police departments and private databases, deserves zero public scrutiny. If Flock's business model can't survive people knowing where the cameras are, that's a Flock problem, not a DeFlock problem. Check the map in your own town, and if you want to push back locally, see take action.