Fighting back against the growing surveillance state

Garrett Langley, CEO and Founder of Flock Safety made a mistake, or a series of mistakes, when he repeatedly described organizers opposed to his company’s metastization of public surveillance products as terrorists. At least, that’s what he claimed in a recent Twitter post. 

Setting aside questions of the authenticity of his apology, his statement comes as people across the country are pushing back against Flock’s predatory and pervasive technologies—even as San Francisco continues to receive millions of dollars from a billionaire Chris Larsen to beef up its Flock-dependent Real Time Investigation Center.

In mid-July, LAPD announced it was halting its contract with Flock over data sharing concerns. Just this month, 13 municipalities—including El Cerrito and Santa Cruz—have canceled contracts or deactivated their cameras over similar concerns, according to information compiled by anti-surveillance organization DeFlock. With the mounting concerns, the organization is sponsoring a week of action starting August 16.

All this comes as extensive evidence indicates that Flock’s nationwide camera database poses both a safety risk for the public and, in California, a legal risk for the police departments and municipalities that use them. 

“Actual, confirmed harm. OPD itself has been forced to admit data breaches, forced to admit their data has been compromised. And they’ve been sued twice in three years. It’s not just speculative,” Brian Hofer, Chair and Executive Director of Secure Justice, said of the risks to the public.  

Last November, the Oakland Police Department was sued for a third time by Secure Justice for violating a state law prohibiting the sharing of automated license plate (ALPR) data with outside state agencies or federal authorities. 

As reported here before, California state law SB-34 explicitly prohibits the sharing of ALPR data with out-of-state agencies. At this point, there are hundreds of documented cases of out-of-state agencies accessing California’s ALPR data. 

This access is not by accident: Part of Flock’s marketing strategy presented to small police departments, cities, and private associations across the country is access to a nationwide repository.  

“What’s really crucial about that is that when you have a vendor like Flock or Axon or Motorola Solutions, all of these different vendors hype up the fact that they’re part of a nationwide sharing network,” Saira Hussain, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a recent interview. 

In the face of overwhelming evidence of abuse and misuse—and legislative inertia around the issue—people have begun to take matters into their own hands in a variety of ways. Some have removed the hardware themselves, and some have used household items like trash bags to stop the cameras from collecting, even after the contracts have been canceled.

Such was the case in Verona, Wisconsin where the local government voted to stop using the cameras but was told by Flock that the three cameras could not be remotely disabled, and not to remove them. After it was revealed that ALPR data collected in Dayton, Ohio was being used for immigration enforcement, the city council did not renew the Flock contract. But the Flock cameras continued to collect data. Eventually citizens resorted to black bagging the cameras to stop data collection. 

“Flock doesn’t have a gigantic incentive to get the hardware removed even if the contract is canceled, it’s already paid for it’s already installed. It actually costs money to send somebody out to pull down the hardware,” Bob, a volunteer with DeFlock, said in a recent interview. 

Put bluntly, Americans are fed up with Flock. 

This ire is not contained to local residents and organizers. Hardware giant Home Depot faced push back in a shareholder meeting about its use of Flock Safety ALPR cameras, with one institutional investor asking for clarity about “customer privacy and civil rights risks tied to sharing that data with third parties, including law enforcement.” Home Depot and Lowe’s are two of Flock’s primary retail partners. 

Locally, volunteers with DeFlock SF organized an action in late May in front of the Lowe’s on Bayshore Boulevard in response to data sharing concerns. 

“The thing that makes Flock different is the database, compared to Axon or these other providers. Because they share that information so easily … the amount of information that’s being shared and the amount of agencies it’s being shared to is so hard to control.” Zachary Schwartz of DeFlock SF said in a recent interview.

Despite the plethora of local outrage and grassroots organizing against Flock specifically and mass surveillance generally, few actions have translated to actual legal changes. At least not yet. California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a suit against the southern California city El Cajon in early 2026 for refusing to comply with SB-34. That case is ongoing. 

On a federal level, a recent Supreme Court decision could have rippling effects on surveillance companies: Chatrie vs. United States. The late June decision built on previous court decisions around data privacy, specifically with law enforcement’s warrantless use of geofence technology. Geofencing is a practice used by federal and local law enforcement alike to create a kind of virtual perimeter of a suspected crime scene and collect information from all of the devices in a designated area, regardless of suspicion of a crime. 

“In that case, there were these geofence warrants which basically allowed law enforcement to identify all the phones in a certain vicinity within a certain time—and moving on from there, there are subsequent warrant applications once they drill down on who they’re interested in,” Hussain told 48Hills. 

Hussain explained that this is the inverse of traditional law enforcement investigations where officers are expected to use reasonable suspicion to get a warrant, and then follow up with a subsequent search. 

“Normally what happens is law enforcement will send to Google—or another company but it’s almost always Google—basically all the electronic devices in a given area in a given time period, but only when they think a crime has been committed and they launch an investigation. First the investigation, and then the warrants. Here it’s almost the reverse.”

The Chatrie ruling essentially established a legal precedent for a digital expectation of privacy, even in public. Hussain’s organization, EFF, has challenged geofence warrants on a constitutional basis before, but this ruling helps solidify a legal precedent that could challenge Flock and other surveillance operators’ ubiquitous surveillance technology, given the power they have to intimately track unsuspecting citizens.   

“What they’re able to do is when you get access to all of the people who are in a certain vicinity, you’re able to follow what their patterns were,” Hussain said. “While Chatrie didn’t define whether a particular warrant at issue was reasonable or whether good faith doctrine applied, it basically identified that people have an expectation of privacy in regards to data that reveals their movements in the physical world.”

The ruling could provide sufficient legal basis to build an eventual case against Flock and other operators. It also brings up broader questions about the trade off being made when a city government, business improvement, district or homeowner’s association inks a deal with these companies. Whether or not the risk is worth the reward, such that there is one, seems manifestly clear. 

As Bob of DeFlock put it: “How many stolen cars recovered are worth living in a surveillance state? How many dollars a month off of your insurance premium is worth being watched 24/7?”

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