Americans Are Cheering for the People Taking Down Flock Cameras

Americans have turned on Flock cameras. They have protested them, damaged them and destroyed them — and the public response has been broadly approving.

The automated licence-plate readers, installed by police departments and homeowners' associations across the country, have become a flashpoint in a bipartisan backlash against the surveillance industry.

Why it is hard to stop

The protests are spontaneous and decentralised, with no uniform method. People have unplugged, smashed, stolen and spray-painted the devices; others have taken less destructive routes, physically blocking a camera's view for hours at a time.

Some of those responsible have been caught. It has not visibly deterred anyone else.

"Nonviolent direct action is a recognized and established tactic, and it's unsurprising that we are seeing some people are resorting to that," one advocate observed.

The coalition

What distinguishes this from earlier privacy fights is who is in it. Last week a sheriff in Lumpkin County, Georgia added his voice to the criticism — and the opposition draws from constituencies that agree on very little else, uniting concerns about policing overreach with concerns about government tracking.

That breadth is the political problem for the vendors. A camera network is deployed municipality by municipality, in decisions made at council meetings, and objections that cross party lines are far harder to route around than objections from a single side.