“Many locales that try Flock cameras end up pulling them down,” I wrote in July. “None should ever begin to use them.”
A month later, I called the Flock camera/a.i. system a big move towards a “total roadway surveillance state,” and noted the hypocrisy of employees of Flock Safety (the company that sells the scheme to local governments) objecting to being surveilled by citizen activists: “While we say that ‘it’s only a conspiracy if they do it in secret,’ what is it when the people who seek to destroy the last vestiges of our privacy demand their own privacy even as they plot against us?”
On Sunday, the story received a major update: A court in Oklahoma ruled against the use of Flock cameras by the police on the grounds of the Fourth Amendment.
Meanwhile, the monkey-wrenching by disgruntled citizens of the spy cameras is real, geographically dispersed, and increasingly resulting in arrests and felony charges — while simultaneously being celebrated in some online communities.
One hates to see law-breaking and property damage, but governments that choose to defy the American tradition against unreasonable searches should expect some Tea
And then there is the aptly named Will Freeman, a Colorado-based software engineer and privacy advocate. He founded DeFlock in October 2024. Freeman had noticed cameras on his drive from Washington to Huntsville, Alabama, and started mapping them himself. Leveraging open-source mapping technology, his effort expanded nationally and then globally. It’s become huge. And has expanded beyond Freeman’s own control.
You can get a good idea of the state of the resistance by going to deflock.org and deflocktheusa.com.
I am not telling you to do anything illegal. I merely note that finding out where the cameras are in your driving range gives
Like knowing to which government you should direct
And avoiding being spied upon.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Nano Banana
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