On the morning of July 4, someone in Houston, Texas, cut two surveillance cameras in half and draped an American flag over the wreckage. In New Bern, North Carolina, police asked the public to help identify two men filmed destroying a camera — the public responded with hundreds of tips identifying the suspects as Batman and Robin.
Since April 2025, Americans in at least five states have dismantled these devices from Flock Safety, a $8.4 billion company whose over 100,000 AI-enabled cameras now photograph passing vehicles in more than 6,000 communities.
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Yes, the vandals are committing crimes, and laws apply even when cameras annoy. But a nation’s lawbreaking, like its laws, contains information. For example, Americans defied the 55 mph speed limit so universally that Congress eventually conceded the point and repealed it. Prohibition-era juries often refused to convict bootleggers, sending a clear message about their perception of the law’s injustice.
The camera saboteurs, one of whom, a Virginia engineer facing 25 charges, says he acted for the Fourth Amendment, and the crowds applauding them are conveying information of the same kind: that this surveillance was built without consent. Prudent legislators will receive the message rather than merely prosecute the messengers.
Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, has drawn a different conclusion. In an interview with Forbes, he described the company’s critics as “terrorists” and labeled DeFlock, a volunteer project that merely maps camera locations, a “terroristic organization.” It’s worth asking what kind of worldview lets someone build a system to surveil the public, then call it a crisis the moment the surveillance goes the other way.
The machines deserve the scrutiny they’re getting because calling them a mere “license plate reader” is a soothing mischaracterization. Flock’s cameras catalog each vehicle’s make, color, dents, and bumper stickers into a searchable fingerprint. Its forthcoming Nova product would fuse this with Social Security numbers, along with credit and property ownership data.
Thousands of agencies can query the national network without a warrant, and the query logs read like a parade of horribles: A Texas officer searching 83,000 cameras for a woman who took abortion pills, at least 18 officers using the system to stalk exes and love interests, federal immigration agents running thousands of lookups through jurisdictions whose laws forbade it, and Flock’s own salesmen browsing a Georgia city’s cameras over 1,000 times, including one inside a children’s gymnastics room.
Almost none of this was put to voters. Police chiefs signed contracts, city managers approved line items, and the poles went up. Government by procurement is apparently how a free country acquires the architecture of an unfree one, one purchase order at a time.
Conduct a thought experiment. Suppose a vendor proposed drones patrolling residential streets around the clock, running AI-enhanced video and facial recognition, and feeding data into a national database open to any law enforcement officer without a warrant. Most Americans would recognize the proposal as belonging to Beijing or a dystopian screenplay. Yet Flock already sells camera-equipped drones and gunshot detectors alongside its AI cameras, which have migrated from highways to parks and trails. The question is no longer where the line is. On the evidence, we have crossed it and are debating the matter in the rearview mirror, where objects are closer than they appear.
Langley says he wants Americans kept safe, and doubtless he does. But the promise of safety has been the standing offer of every aspiring authoritarian in history. Americans need no ancient examples; the USA PATRIOT Act was sold as a temporary shield against terrorism and became two decades of warrantless bulk surveillance. This is why the Framers wrote a Constitution that deliberately makes policing inconvenient. Warrants, probable cause, and individualized suspicion of crime are inefficiencies by design. A camera network that presumptively tracks everyone inverts the presumption on which the Fourth Amendment rests: that a citizen minding his business is none of the government’s.
THE CAMERAS ON YOUR CORNER ARE BUILDING A FILE ON YOU
The remedy ultimately belongs to legislators, not saboteurs. Lawmakers should require warrants for database searches, mandate short retention periods and public audit logs, forbid data sharing with outside agencies absent legal process, and, above all, require an affirmative vote of the people’s representatives, after public hearings, before any camera network is deployed or renewed. More than 50 cities have already canceled or rejected Flock contracts after residents were finally consulted, suggesting what the original consultation would have yielded.
Americans are sawing down cameras because their governments installed a surveillance state without asking. The saws are the symptom. The silence of legislatures is the disease, and it is curable by the ordinary, unglamorous act of legislating.
Connor Boyack is a best-selling author of dozens of books that have sold over 7 million copies and the president of Libertas Institute, a think tank advancing legal reforms across multiple policy areas, including privacy.
