The One Thing Everyone Agrees On—Flock Is Bad
Flock's automatic license-plate readers have managed something Washington almost never does. They've united the right and the left, both of which have decided they don't much care for having their movements logged without a warrant.
Conservatives object to the cameras as exactly the kind of "big government" overreach they usually rail against, while the left raises mass-surveillance concerns of its own — particularly whether vehicle tracking could deter undocumented immigrants from driving to work or seeking essential services, out of fear their data ends up with ICE. Different starting points, same conclusion.
The Numbers Are Piling Up
The open-source tracking site DeFlock has counted more than 90 jurisdictions that either canceled or declined to renew their Flock contracts between January 2025 and August 2026. Los Angeles walked away this July after the cameras produced 161 false reports of stolen vehicles in just two months, per DeFlock's tally. That's not a rounding error. That's a system flagging law-abiding drivers as criminals at a clip fast enough that the nation's second-largest city decided it wasn't worth renewing.
Strange Bedfellows
Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania Republican often filed under "ultra-right wing," has taken a hard line. On Facebook he wrote that "Flock and Flock-like cameras track where law-abiding people go, who they visit, and how they live — all without a warrant." He tried to kill the technology with an amendment that failed in committee, adding, "that's not the end of this, though. The mass surveillance of the American People must end."
Meet him at the other end of the spectrum: Marc McGovern, a Democrat on the Cambridge, Massachusetts City Council. McGovern helped lead the charge to cancel his city's Flock deployment, calling the technology "terribly dangerous." Cambridge pulled the plug in December 2025. The fact that Flock reportedly set up cameras behind the city's back may have helped seal the decision.
When a MAGA-adjacent congressman and a New England city councilor are singing the same tune, something has clearly gone sideways.
The Catch Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here's where the good-news narrative falls apart. Ditching Flock doesn't mean these jurisdictions have sworn off vehicle surveillance. There's evidence that at least some are simply swapping Flock hardware for cameras made by Axon, a rival that shows no greater enthusiasm for personal privacy.
Axon isn't stopping at license plates, either. The company claims it operates millions of closed-circuit TV cameras across the United States that can use AI to "recognize critical activity in live videos." Layer that on top of new tools funneling body-cam footage into what Axon calls the "Axon Ecosystem," and the picture gets bigger than a plate reader on a highway sign.
So the political consensus, satisfying as it is, may be aimed at the wrong target. Killing a Flock contract feels like a win. Replacing it with a vendor that wants to run AI over live video from millions of cameras is a lateral move at best.
The bipartisan revolt against Flock is real, and the 90-plus canceled contracts are a genuine signal that voters across the spectrum have limits. Whether that translates into less surveillance, or just a different logo on the camera housing, is the question nobody's answered yet.
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The 2020s. The Golden Age of the Creep.
We are at the global nexus of car and identity and this is the milktoast trifle TTAC submits?