Americans Are Cutting Down Flock Cameras. The Company Calls Them Terrorists.
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This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database.
Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.”
Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check.
A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas.
She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head.
A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April.
The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount.
And the cameras keep falling.
Three or four wrecked in Conway, Arkansas, this week, one with its wires cut and carried off. Somebody worked through Volusia County, Florida, and took four: two poles cut, one bent, and one camera hooded with a plastic bag. Two poles down in Pageland, South Carolina, a town of twenty-five hundred people. Six down in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, where somebody left a sticker under one of the cuts. “hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks.”
Red states and blue states. A city of two million and a town of twenty-five hundred. No coordination anyone has been able to find.
The Man Who Sells the Poles
Garrett Langley knelt on a footbridge in the Georgia sun last summer, hands clasped, a drone the size of a card table parked on the boards beside him, and let a photographer from Forbes take his picture. His company had just announced that it would be flying these, too.
He is thirty-eight. He grew up in Atlanta and went to Georgia Tech and sold two companies before he turned thirty, and when he started the third one he kept it in Georgia because leaving would have felt disingenuous to him. Flock Safety has annexed more than six thousand cities across forty-nine states, with a hundred thousand cameras in the ground reading twenty billion plates a month and a valuation of eight and a half billion dollars. The idea came to him after a crew broke into cars in his neighborhood and the police told him they had nothing to work with. Framed on his office wall is the email he sent his co-founders.
Growing up with modest means, he never once felt unsafe, and the people who disagree with him, he has noticed, grew up the same way.
Of the volunteers who built a website mapping where his cameras are, he told Forbes they are a terroristic organization whose primary motivation is chaos. Closer to Antifa, he said, than anything else. The ACLU he respects. They use the courts. He told Forbes that in under ten years his cameras will eradicate almost all crime in the United States.
And of Burleson, sitting with a Forbes reporter, he said this. When I look at this, I go, this is everything’s working as it should be. A family was concerned for a family member. They used Flock to help find her. She was physically okay, which is great. But due to the political climate, this was really good clickbait.
He reads about ancient Egypt because it gives him a sense of time, thousands of years of it, the first pharaoh and the evolution into pharaohs and how they came to be treated as god-like figures. A hundred thousand of them stand in the ground now, and he is right that this is a story about how a thing becomes a god. He has the direction backward. Pharaohs did not become gods. Men decided to call them gods, and men can stop.
Rebecca
In May of 1839 a crowd took apart a new tollgate on the lime road in west Wales and went home. The Whitland Turnpike Trust rebuilt it. In June the crowd came back and took it apart again.
The road was private property. A turnpike trust bought the right to a stretch of highway, planted a gate across it, set the rate, and charged you to pass. Hauling lime to his fields and animals to market, a farmer paid four and five times a day, at every gate. Eleven of them ringed one market town alone. No farmer in Wales had ever voted on a single one.
They came at night in white shirts and nightgowns, their faces blackened, and called the man on horseback Mother. They brought pickaxes for the tollhouse and saws for the gate. They took the name from Genesis, from a verse everyone in Wales knew by heart, where Rebekah is blessed and told that her seed shall possess the gate of those that hate them.
Two hundred and fifty tollhouses and gatehouses came down.
The government sent troops. John Hughes was twenty-four, a farmer’s son, and the neighbors called him after his house: Jac Tŷ Isha. He picked the gate himself and planned the attack himself. Somebody told the police first. They were waiting in the dark on the sixth of September, and it became the only pitched battle of the four years, and they took him with six others. His trial ran seven weeks. The judge heard the pleas for mercy and gave him twenty years. Across the world went Jac Tŷ Isha, to Van Diemen’s Land, where Britain was making room by clearing the island of the people already on it and filling the space with men like him. He wrote home for the rest of his life. He never saw Wales again.
Then in 1844 Parliament consolidated the trusts, simplified the rates, and cut the hated lime toll in half.
They shipped the men across the world and gave the men what they wanted. Both.
No farmer in Wales had ever voted on a single gate.
Go Run for Office
Try to find the vote.
A free trial and a pitch about stolen cars and a chief who signs, and sometimes a council approves it on the consent agenda, between the sewer bond and the parade permit.
Houston residents did better. They filled the commissioners’ court and asked Harris County to let the contract die. Please do not renew the Flock contract, one of them said. Protect us, not surveillance. Safety is streetlights that work, said another. Safety is water that drains. Safety is officers who know our names. Voting that same day unanimously, the commissioners amended the contract so the cameras would be available countywide. The county had already renewed through June 2027, at just under $869,000. Within days the cameras started coming down.
What Dayton found in its own logs was more than seven thousand searches run for immigration enforcement, all of them by agencies outside Dayton, all of them forbidden by a Dayton policy that had never bound anybody but Dayton. It could not get out of the contract. So last month city workers went up on ladders and hooded seventy-two cameras in black trash bags and left them blank-faced on the poles the city had paid to install.
A trash bag is what surrender looks like when the paperwork wins.
And there is a clause in many of these contracts covering replacement of damaged equipment. The town pays for the pole it lost. Which means the people cutting them down are buying them back, with their own money, whether the vote went their way or whether there was ever a vote at all.
Not Today
Lee Schmidt’s car was photographed four hundred and seventy-five times in four months in Norfolk, Virginia. He was not suspected of anything. He sued. On January 27 a federal judge ruled the cameras could stay, because a hundred and seventy-six of them across seventy-five clusters did not capture enough of his life to count. Writing for the court, the judge added that as the cameras grow in number and capability, the constitutional balancing could conceivably tip the other way. Norfolk has been adding cameras since. Schmidt appealed.
In four hundred and seventy-five photographs, no crime. In Burleson, a district attorney who said there was nothing to charge her with, and 83,345 cameras that went looking anyway. Legal, all of it.
We were told to go run for office. There was no office. No ballot line, no initiative, no referendum, no notice in the mail, no hearing anybody knew to attend, in six thousand cities across forty-nine states. The camera went up on a Tuesday while we were at work, and the first we heard of it was when it was already looking at the house.
None of this is old. A hundred thousand cameras is not the weather and it is not the price of living in a country this size. Every pole went into the ground because somebody signed a piece of paper, and a thing that gets signed can get unsigned.
The farmers heard the same thing from the men who owned the road. Their gates were not the weather either. Rebecca’s daughters answered with pickaxes and got Van Diemen’s Land and got their tolls cut in half. Dayton answered with trash bags. Houston answered with a flag.
Go and stand at the base of one. It is a steel tube in a patch of grass by the road, eight or ten feet of it, bolted in two pieces so a truck can carry it. On top there is a black box the size of a loaf of bread, and a small solar panel angled at the sun that keeps it fed and awake and watching whether or not anybody is asking it to. In Suffolk, Virginia, the police put a price on one: eight hundred dollars for the camera, five hundred for the pole, three hundred fifty for the panel. Thirteen hundred dollars, and it stands there in the weeds outside a subdivision, and it knows where you were on Tuesday.
Bolted to poles on public streets, the cameras are visible to anyone. A hundred thousand eyes that may look at you, and you may not look back, and the looking back is the felony.
In Suffolk, thirteen of them came off their poles. Whoever did it worked the two-piece mounts with vice grips, cut some poles at the base, threw some of the cameras onto an interstate, and kept the wires, the batteries, and the solar panels.
Jeffrey Sovern is forty-one, an engineer and a mechanic in the U.S. Air Force. Passing a Flock camera that had started to malfunction, his gray pickup tripped a traffic camera. Detectives got a warrant and put a GPS tracker on his truck and followed him for three months. That is how they found the man who was cutting down the trackers. He faces thirteen felony counts of destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny, six counts of possession of burglary tools. He has pleaded not guilty. On his GoFundMe he wrote that he appreciates a quiet life and is not looking forward to this. He wrote that maybe it becomes a catalyst.
All thirteen cameras have been replaced. Suffolk paid.
Why attack the pole instead of the contract? Because the contract was never on offer. What was on offer was the pole.
We are building historical literacy here. The ability to see the pattern as it is being written in real time is what makes you harder to lie to, at a moment when the lies are coming faster than most people can track.
Each of these pieces takes eight to twelve hours, all of it mine, down to the footnotes. So much is locked behind paywalls now, and I want to keep this open. The readers who pay are what keep it free for everyone else.
If this made the pattern clearer, become a paid subscriber at $8 a month or $80 a year. That is what keeps it here.
Notes & Sources
Opening
Two Houston cameras cut in half and spray-painted at Washington Avenue and Westcott, one with an American flag on it, reported to police the morning of July 4.
https://abc13.com/post/houston-flock-cameras-vandalized-cut-down-spray-painted-washington-avenue-police-say/19459797/The Rutherfordton police post, the twenty thousand comments, and the responses to it.
https://wlos.com/news/local/damaged-flock-camera-rutherfordton-north-carolina-town-wnc-sparks-online-debate-surveillance-technology-ai-artificial-intelligence-vandalism-vandalized-deviceThe death investigation, the district attorney’s finding that the state could not charge her, the two searches logged “had an abortion, search for female,” her account of the assault, and the detective’s affidavit.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas-sheriff-claimed-license-plate-search-was-missing-person-itThe original disclosure of the 83,345-camera search.
https://www.404media.co/police-said-they-surveilled-woman-who-had-an-abortion-for-her-safety-court-records-show-they-considered-charging-her-with-a-crime/The hits placing her in Dallas.
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-police-cameras-used-in-murder-investigation-after-abortion-40604138/The sheriff’s seven hundred searches of his wife’s plate, each labeled “test.”
https://www.kmvt.com/2026/03/31/jerome-county-sheriff-used-flock-cameras-search-wifes-vehicle-documents-show/His retirement and the attorney general’s finding of nothing chargeable.
https://www.kivitv.com/jerome/jerome-county-names-gary-taylor-as-new-sheriff-after-oppedyke-resigns-over-flock-camera-data-misuseAt least twenty-two officers who used license plate readers to track romantic interests, almost certainly an undercount.
https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-romantic-interests-at-least-14-times-in-recent-years/Three or four Conway cameras damaged in two weeks, one with its wires cut and stolen.
https://www.fox16.com/news/local-news/conway-police-say-flock-cameras-targeted-by-vandals/Four Volusia County cameras vandalized: two poles cut, one bent, one bagged.
https://mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2026/07/15/volusia-sheriff-defends-flock-cameras-after-orlando-rallyTwo Pageland, South Carolina poles cut down over the Fourth of July weekend.
https://www.wbtv.com/2026/07/06/2-flock-cameras-intentionally-cut-down-south-carolina-town-amid-nationwide-camera-controversy/The Eugene teardowns and the sticker left on a metal stump.
https://newrepublic.com/article/206992/flock-safety-cameras-alpr-deflock-resistance-nationwideSix cameras severed in Eugene and Springfield.
https://cybernews.com/news/flock-cameras-data-vandalism-police/
The Man Who Sells the Poles
Flock’s valuation, its hundred thousand cameras across six thousand communities in forty-nine states, and its twenty billion monthly plate scans.
https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-safety-cancel-wave-30-cities-alpr-surveillance-contracts-2026/Langley calling the map a terroristic organization closer to Antifa than anything else, and his prediction that his cameras will eradicate almost all crime within a decade.
https://truthout.org/articles/a-vast-camera-system-now-feeds-information-to-police-on-drivers-across-the-us/Langley’s Forbes remarks on the Burleson case, including “everything’s working as it should be.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas-sheriff-claimed-license-plate-search-was-missing-person-it
Rebecca
The May 1839 destruction of the Efailwen gate, the Whitland Turnpike Trust’s rebuilding of it, and its second destruction in June.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/rebecca-riots/The turnpike trusts, the lime tolls, the eleven gates ringing Carmarthen, and the two hundred fifty tollhouses destroyed.
https://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/2023-12-01-why-men-in-19th-century-wales-dressed-as-women-to-protest-taxationJohn Hughes at twenty-four, the September 1843 clash, the seven prisoners and the seven-week trial.
https://www.swansea.ac.uk/library/richard-burton-archives/interesting-items/rebecca-riots/The judge’s rejection of the pleas for mercy and the twenty-year sentence of transportation.
https://research.bangor.ac.uk/en/publications/hughes-john-jac-ty-isha-1819-1905/Hughes’s letters home from Tasmania, including one from 1864.
https://archives.library.wales/index.php/letter-from-john-hughes-jac-ty-isha-transported-to-tasmaniaThe 1844 consolidation of the trusts and the halving of the lime toll.
https://www.peoplescollection.wales/content/rebecca-riots
Go Run for Office
Residents asking Harris County commissioners to cancel the contract, and the unanimous vote to amend it for countywide use.
https://abc13.com/post/abc13-discovers-more-flock-cameras-cut-down-houston-day-residents-express-concerns/19482517/Harris County’s renewal through June 2027 at just under $869,000.
https://abc13.com/post/more-flock-cameras-cut-down-houston-amid-privacy-concerns/19471780/Dayton’s seven thousand immigration searches by outside agencies, the audit, and the bagging of all seventy-two cameras.
https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/the-covering-of-dayton-s-flock-cameras-has-begun/article_01aa7687-f68e-5443-b102-d98dd38ed9b6.htmlDayton’s inability to exit its contract, and Evanston’s identical bagging.
https://www.404media.co/cities-are-covering-flock-cameras-with-trash-bags/
Not Today
Lee Schmidt’s four hundred seventy-five photographs and the January 27, 2026 ruling.
https://courthousenews.com/judge-holds-norfolks-license-plate-reader-use-constitutional/The judge’s warning that the constitutional balancing could conceivably tip the other way, and Norfolk’s growth in cameras since.
https://www.whro.org/business-growth/2026-02-11/a-federal-judge-ruled-norfolks-flock-surveillance-cameras-dont-invade-peoples-privacy-yetSchmidt’s appeal.
https://therecord.media/judge-dismisses-flock-caseSovern, the traffic camera that caught his truck, the warranted GPS tracker, and the charges.
https://www.military.com/air-force-engineer-accused-of-cutting-down-13-police-cameras-says-they-are-unconstitutionalHis admission that he used vice grips and kept the wiring, batteries, and solar panels.
https://www.wavy.com/news/local-news/suffolk/suffolk-man-charged-with-destroying-13-flock-cameras/Suffolk police’s cost breakdown and the replacement of all thirteen cameras.
https://www.slashgear.com/2216366/air-force-engineer-flock-camera-vandalism-charges/Sovern’s not-guilty plea and his GoFundMe.
https://wegotthiscovered.com/news/virginia-air-force-engineer-allegedly-cut-down-13-flock-cameras-argues-theyre-unconstitutional-an-unhealthy-surveillance-state/
Good information. Now I know what to look for. I'm surprised and dismayed at the level of surveillance our laws permit.
Thanks from radical Eugene-Springfield Oregon. Thorough and thoughtful and thought provoking as usual.