Knox County to cover Flock cameras with privacy shields
The short version: Knox County's mayor is shrouding Flock ALPR cameras with privacy shields ahead of their removal, a small but telling win for pushback against mass surveillance.
Our Take
Credit to WBIR Channel 10 for catching this one: Knox County Mayor Betsy Henderson says privacy shields are going over the county's Flock cameras until they're pulled out entirely. Whatever the political backstory, the optics matter — a local government publicly conceding that these cameras needed to be blinded, even temporarily, is a rare admission that the surveillance apparatus wasn't as uncontroversial as Flock's sales pitch suggests.
We'd love more detail on what forced this decision, and we'll be watching to see if "shielded" quietly turns into "permanent" or if the cameras actually come down as promised. Half-measures have a way of becoming the new status quo if nobody keeps score.
If you want to know whether Flock gear is watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a mayor to act, our take-action page has steps for pushing your own county to follow Knox's lead.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WBIR Channel 10, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.