Free Republic

We have met the enemy — and it is watching us. There’s a growing backlash against Flock cameras, the automated license plate readers that have become ubiquitous across the country. The cameras take images of license plates and store them in a searchable database that police departments can query in the course of their investigations. Opponents of the cameras consider them an instrument of Big Brother, who’s not only watching, but constantly recording and tracking. Vandals have disabled and stolen the Flock cameras, and even shot them. There’s a movement to get jurisdictions to cancel their contracts with Flock (the...

A man dressed as the iconic “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader on Wednesday appeared to defend the use of Flock cameras before the San Diego City Council, assuring that “this is what the emperor needs.” The man approached the podium to address the Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee meeting, with the character’s signature breathing audible to the council chamber’s microphone. The council addressed him as “Darth Vader.” “This is what the emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and the hidden base on Hoth,” the man said, referring to the ice planet from “The Empire...

Darth Vader comes out in favor of Flock cameras ...

Big brother is watching your open house. Homeowners associations across the country are quietly signing up for Flock Safety’s license plate cameras, and the backlash is now strong enough to blow up home sales, kill signed contracts and land cities in court, with New York at the center of the fight. Nowhere is the backlash more raw than in the Adirondacks, where the fight has already toppled a signed contract and sparked open revolt inside a gated community. In Saranac Lake, a resident living behind a gate who protested the cameras in his own neighborhood said the issue isn’t security...

If you’ve been wondering whether Flock cameras are tracking your movements, there’s a way to find out. Wonder if you’ve been Flocked? Wonder if your neighborhood has been Flocked? What the Flock am I talking about? Flock cameras are those new, souped-up Big Brother “traffic” cameras that have been breeding like ants all over the country. They are very good at capturing your license plate and other identifying information: SNIP You may be wondering where these Flock cameras are in your neighborhood and whether they’ve captured you. Happily, there are very easy ways to check. First, the map. Below is...

🚨 BREAKING NEWS: Florida man just casually walked away with a full Flock surveillance camera… still bolted to a 12-foot pole… while draped in the American flag 🇺🇸 Security followed him like lost puppies. This is either the most based thing You’ll see all year or pure chaos. Is this what peak freedom looks like in 2026? Would you have the balls to do this? Hero… or criminal?

From wrongful arrests to officers stalking exes, license plate cameras keep exposing police failures.On October 4, 2025, Joaquin Deno attended his granddaughter's birthday party in Sanford, Florida. At the end of the night, he headed to his daughter's house. Eight miles down Interstate 4, a speeding car swerved across multiple lanes at over 100 mph. It swiped Deno's motorcycle, then hit a Ford Focus, causing a pileup, before driving away. Deno died at the scene, as did a county official and his wife. Witnesses said the speeding car was a Dodge Durango. Police found that a Flock camera—a type of...

This is crazy! I hope someone knows how to post transcribed video.

Across the country, opposition to the license plate cameras created by Flock Safety is mounting. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., is vowing to pursue legislation in Congress to rein in the proliferation of Flock cameras by law enforcement after he experienced his own traffic stop aided by the controversial license plate readers. “I just don't like where we're going with Flock cameras. I think that it's invasive, as you said. It's too big government,” Stutzman told the Just the News, No Noise television show on Friday night. “You know the law enforcement folks would argue that they can use these as...

In a terrifying legal saga out of Volusia County, Florida, a 23-year-old woman spent 13 miserable days in jail for a fatal hit-and-run she had absolutely nothing to do with. The only crime she committed? Driving a black Dodge Durango on the interstate. On October 4, 2025, a horrific chain-reaction crash on I-4 resulted in the deaths of three people, including Flagler County Deputy Administrator Jorge Salinas, his wife, and a motorcyclist named Joaquin “Deno” Deno. The vehicle that triggered the crash and fled the scene was identified by a witness as a Dodge Durango. Instead of a comprehensive investigation,...

FRANKLIN COUNTY, Pa. (WHP) — Pennsylvania State Police are still working to identify whoever has been cutting down Flock cameras throughout Franklin County this summer as a protest against the cameras is just days away. One of the cameras, located near the Lowes off Lincoln Way E. in Chambersburg, was cut down July 4 and replaced with an American flag. Then, sometime overnight Sunday into Monday, troopers said another Flock camera was cut down off Moly Pitcher Highway in Antrim Township. READ MORE | Cameras cut down, replaced with American flag amid Flock debate in Franklin County Pennsylvania State Police...

Flock cameras are in thousands of communities across the country and often hide in plain sight. A Flock camera is an automated license plate reader, or ALPR, made by the public-safety technology company Flock Safety. The cameras are commonly installed along roads, at intersections, near neighborhood entrances, and around businesses or other private properties.

Winona police are investigating after all eight of the city’s Flock cameras were cut down and stolen. It’s the latest city in the state to experience Flock camera theft or vandalism; cameras have been reported stolen or damaged in Duluth, Plymouth, Faribault, Edina and Anoka County. Winona police say officers initiated an investigation on Saturday night when law enforcement realized there had been no recent camera activity. Officers searched the locations of the Flock cameras and found the camera poles cut down near the base and discarded in the weeds, according to Winona police. The cameras were removed.

Axon Lightpost is a fixed, infrastructure-mounted intelligent ALPR camera designed to transform existing streetlights and outdoor infrastructure into real-time vehicle intelligence tools. Lightpost delivers automated license plate recognition (ALPR), vehicle attribute recognition (VAR), and livestreaming video seamlessly into the Axon public safety ecosystem with minimal physical footprint. Built in collaboration with Ubicquia, Axon Lightpost installs quickly on existing light poles without trenching or new pole infrastructure, dramatically reducing deployment complexity and cost. Once powered and network-connected, Axon Lightpost begins autonomous operation with no daily user interaction, providing continuous detection and secure data upload to Axon Evidenceand Axon Fusus. SNIP

There is probably a camera on a pole at the entrance to your neighborhood. You’ve probably stopped noticing it. It is small, solar-powered, unremarkable, and it photographs every car that passes: yours, your neighbor’s, your teenager’s. And it reads the license plate, logs the time, and files the record in a national database. The company that owns it is called Flock Safety. Founded in 2017, valued at $7.5 billion, it now operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states, and its network scans roughly 20 billion vehicles a month. Twenty billion. Each month. For perspective, there are about...

Typically I report the news, but sometimes, rarely, I am the news. That time just came. Millions of people saw the story about my wife and I getting surrounded by the police after errors made by law enforcement and Flock Safety’s systems led authorities to believe I had performed grand theft auto with a $155,000 Range Rover. The body cam footage of the situation went viral. It was just weeks before my encounter with the law that we had an episode of The Drivecast featuring security expert and Ent.AI CISO Matt Hurewitz talking about how license plate cameras are tracking...

The damage comes as questions continue over the growing use of this surveillance technology in public spaces.

New Gallup data show that people are growing increasingly distrustful of major technology companies such as Meta, Apple, and Google, as well as a newer player in the surveillance industry, Flock Safety. Some people are even taking matters into their own hands by destroying the AI-powered surveillance cameras appearing in communities across the country. Flock Safety, a private surveillance technology company founded in 2017, has been earning a reputation as a herald of the much-feared Orwellian “surveillance state.” Although a private company, Flock’s business model operates by selling AI-powered camera and audio detection systems to local and state governments for...

An innocent driver is stopped by a gun-waving police officer who sics a dog on him and he ends up in jail for hours, or even days. It’s happening more and more in America, a new study confirms, and it’s all because the technology for machines to read license plate numbers, and report them, fails. The results are from a study by the Institute for Justice, which confirmed such cases coming up over and over. The list, large already, is growing: A Colorado driver was repeatedly pulled over after officers mistakenly put his license plate number on a Flock hotlist....

A Milwaukee police officer resigned after investigators found he had used automated license plate reader technology to track a woman he was dating nearly 180 times in the span of two months. The Institute for Justice points to a Kansas police chief who allegedly ran an ex-girlfriend's plate more than 200 times. In Kentucky, another officer reportedly tracked an ex hundreds of times over a two-month period. In each instance, the searches were entered into the systems as investigative activity, which means databases built for legitimate criminal work were allegedly repurposed for deeply personal surveillance.