There’s a surveillance company you’ve probably never thought about that now operates what amounts to one of the largest vehicle-tracking networks in the United States. Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based startup valued at $7.5 billion, has quietly planted somewhere between 80,000 and 110,000 automated license plate reader cameras across the United States, used by roughly a third of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies. Most people had no idea any of this existed until TikTok got involved. Now a video with 11.8 million views is teaching people how to destroy them, and the cameras are losing.
The physical pushback has moved well past online venting. Incidents of camera sabotage have ranged from residents in upstate New York using electric saws to cut the devices down, to paint being thrown at cameras in Oakland, to someone ramming a truck directly into one in Idaho, according to CNN.
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