Header image by Jacob Richards.
The growing grassroots movement against Flock cameras has entered a new phase. As citizens’ concerns have gone largely unheard by local governments, the people have begun taking action on their own: disabling, destroying, stealing and vandalizing Flock cameras. And if social media is any indication, it is inspiring the people.
Just in the past month, Flock cameras have been destroyed or disabled across 23 states, including Mesa County, Durango and Avon, CO. These, of course, are the ones that have actually been reported on, surely many more have gone unreported.
When it does make the media, it breaks up the internet. A recent post by the Avon Police Department seeking information about destroyed and stolen Flock cameras received 17,000 comments mostly in favor of destroying the cameras. Avon has a population of just over 6000 people.
The methods vary. They have been shot, smashed with baseball bats, poles cut down, paint-bombed, blinded with cheap laser pointers, and covered with stickers, spray-paint, and trashbags.
It’s not even a fringe position to be in favor of direct action against Flock Cameras.
The centrist, never-Trump Republican organization, The Lincoln Project, recently put out a video in which co-founder Rick Wilson, tongue in cheek, said, “No one should buy those easily available … super inexpensive green laser pointers and shine them on Flock cameras to destroy their lenses. That would be absolutely wrong and I condemn it.”
A recent Pro-Flock article published by the dark money funded, Colorado-based right-wing news site, The Rocky Mountain Voice, was destroyed by their conservative readers in the comments on Facebook.
“I’m MAGA Red and back the blue, but the surveillance state is going too far.” wrote one reader.
“[R]ocky [M]ountain [V]oice has lost another reader. I will not in any way advocate for more mass surveillance and especially not AI. Liberty is dangerous and I won’t trade it for any false safety. Wrong hill to die on guys,” wrote another.
“Clearly against our 4th Amendment rights. If cops can’t solve crimes without breaking more laws, then they aren’t very good at their jobs,” added another.
Attacks on these cameras have been going on for months, but have gone viral in the past couple of weeks.
It has gotten to the point where Flock has quietly introduced an insurance plan for law enforcement agencies, to offset growing costs associated with replacing damaged and stolen cameras.
A July 14 blog post on the Flock Safety website reads in full:
“Recent incidents have prompted questions about damaged public safety cameras. Agencies can add Flock’s Camera Protection Plan for predictable annual coverage that helps quickly repair or replace covered cameras and avoid unexpected repair costs.”
Without the protection plan, departments are on the hook for $800 per each replacement camera. Clearly, the direct actions against Flock cameras are working, making it harder and harder for cash-strapped law enforcement agencies to justify staying in the program.
The trade publication IVPM speculated that this solution might have unintended consequences, as people realize that their local law-enforcement agencies are no longer on the hook financially for replacement cameras. Rather, Flock is.
The movement is being tracked by the federal government. Journalist Dan Boguslaw published intelligence bulletins from DOJ fusion centers in multiple states illustrating ongoing surveillance of activists attempting to de-Flock their communities. The bulletins recommended increased patrols around automated license plate readers (ALPR), reporting “unusual inquiries about ALPRs,” and to “report all ALPR vandalism, disruption, or sabotage to your respective fusion center.”
What’s unique is that many well-known right-wing personalities are backing these actions. Joe Hoft of the MAGA-aligned site The Gateway Pundit recently republished an article which branded the resistance to Flock as a “21st Century Boston Tea Party.” (Editor’s note: The Gateway Pundit was demonetized by Google in 2021 for repeatedly publishing misinformation on vaccines and elections.)
Tucker Carlson has jumped into the fray. While not condoning vandalism, he says he sympathizes with “people who don’t feel they have any other recourse,” and calls them patriots. Carlson even donated $1,000 dollars to a GoFundMe for Jeff Sovern’s legal defense fund. Sovern is accused of destroying 13 flock cameras around Suffolk, VA.
All of which tracks. Many of the reported cases of sabotage against Flock cameras have been in rural and conservative areas.
Free State Colorado, a far-right libertarian podcast based in Colorado Springs, noticed the sea change and warned Republicans in a recent Facebook post that “Republicans especially need to push back on law enforcement and DAs who are telling them we need cameras and drones on every corner.”
Even Lauren Boebert, the controversial MAGA loyalist and Congresswoman in Colorado’s CD4, has introduced legislation to limit and provide accountability on Flock and similar camera systems.
“For years, the federal government has treated the Fourth Amendment like a suggestion. They’ve built a massive surveillance machine that tracks, scans, and spies on law-abiding Americans without a warrant, without probable cause, and without any accountability. Enough is enough,” said Boebert, in a press release.
In an unlikely turn of events, conservatives like Boebert are joined in this fight by progressives and leftists concerned with just how Flock data has been used: police using the cameras to track protest attendance and women crossing state lines for reproductive care, along with some jealous cops tracking their ex-romantic partners. Additional concerns have risen around ICE access to Flock data, hacking vulnerabilities, and accountability.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley clearly views the growing resistance to Flock as a war. In December, Langley sent out an email to local law enforcement agencies across the country that read:
“Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack. The attacks aren’t new. You’ve been dealing with this for forever, and we’ve been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness … They’re also trying to turn a public records process into a weapon against you and against us. Make no mistake, we’re fighting this fight for you, and, I hope, with you.”
Some 90 American cities have, in fact, left the fight, de-Flocking their communities. So far in 2026, 55 communities, notably larger cities like Denver and Los Angeles, have de-Flocked under mounting evidence and public pressure. Even rural communities like Paonia, Colorado have de-Flocked, sparking resignations of a town board member and two administrators.
One of the tools being used in this grassroots resistance to the surveillance state is DeFlock.org. The website crowd sources the known locations of Flock cameras. Though DeFlock.org is engaged in clearly 1st Amendment protected activities, Langley characterized DeFlock.org as a “terroristic organization” motivated by “chaos’ and “closer to Antifa than they are anything else,” in an interview with Forbes.
The resistance against Flock cameras is just part of a larger anti-tech populism opposed to our livelihoods being replaced by AI, data centers raising utility rates and polluting our communities, and big tech more broadly.
Flock and other state and corporate surveillance systems are driving much of the demand for new data centers – linking Flock viscerally, via supply and demand, to the larger anti-AI, anti-data center, anti-big tech movement.
It’s a movement that the feds have already begun to classify as a new category of ideological extremism, like the administration has for other inconvenient dissidents via NSPM-7.
In May, Wired Magazine reported from leaked documents that show both federal and local agencies are viewing anti-tech Americans as potential terrorists. They quote from a New York State report on extremism which reads, in part:
“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity.”
In June and July of this year, the ‘Summer of Ludd,’ a protest against AI, data centers, and big tech, was held in New York City.
Though the name hearkens back to a 19th century working class direct action movement in England where ‘Luddites’ would destroy the industrialized factory looms over concerns over working conditions, child labor, and wages, the NYC event consisted of real-world events like meditations, puppet shows, music, teach-ins, art classes, tea-parties (with actual tea) and real world community building.
This resistance goes far beyond blue states and cities with democratic socialist mayors.
On July 18, a newly formed conservative non-profit Humans First, held over 100 rallies across the nation against what they are calling ‘Big AI.’
Humans First’s leadership has lengthy ties to Trump and far-right movements and organizations. Chairwoman Amy Kremer’s bio includes co-founding the Tea Party, Women for Trump, and Stop the Steal. She pulled the permits for the Jan. 6, March for Trump event in Washington D.C. Cathy Latham also sits on the board, best known for being indicted for attempting to steal the election for Trump in Georgia in 2020. She was pardoned by Trump in 2025. Another board member served under both Mike Pence and Donald Trump during his first administration.
Humans First is advocating for stricter government regulations, of all things – go figure.
The opposition to data centers, like the resistance to AI and surveillance, cuts across established demographics and political ideologies. Since both battles are largely being fought in the local arena (which always makes for unlikely political bed-fellows) it is bringing people together.
“There is something happening out here in middle America.” said Kevin ‘Kevo’ Ballou, Campaigns Organizer with Punch Up. For the past two weeks, Ballou has been on the Punch Up Heartland Caravan, meeting with communities fighting Big Tech and Wall Street money in their backyards.
Punch Up is a grassroots non-partisan organization currently working with rural and working class people to resist private equity’s attempts to buy up power grids across this nation. (Editor’s note: Jacob Richards is a member of Punch Up but has not been involved in organizing the Heartland Caravan or Punch Up’s work in Ohio.)
The Heartland Caravan has made its way from New Mexico, through Texas, Tennessee, and Kentucky to Ohio, where BlackRock, the largest private equity firm in the world, is trying to acquire AES Ohio, in what would be the largest private acquisition of a public utility in history, at $33 billion. The deal would affect 520,000 rate-payers in western Ohio.
“It’s not a red vs. blue issue, it’s a battle between everyday Americans and the bastards at the top,” said Ballou. “Nobody wants this, nobody wants to pay higher rates because Wall Street owns their grid. Nobody wants to run out of water or drink contaminated water because of the data center next door.”
“The people are putting it together. The data centers driving up utilities are running the AI that is taking our jobs, and spying on us,” said Ballou. “We [Punch Up] are trying to take that fight upstream, and cut-off their attempts to control our power– our grids.”
Firms like BlackRock are also major players in the data center bubble, and seek to control the utilities which will power their future data centers.
Polling shows that data centers are deeply unpopular. A May Gallup poll found 70% of Americans oppose new data centers in their area. The issue is creating single issue voters in impacted areas. Such voters were credited with flipping the Virginia state government control from the Republicans to the Democrats in 2025, as well as recent primary upsets in Maryland earlier in July.
Virginia, home to ‘data center alley,’ has been ground zero in the data center boom, and many of the winners in the 2025 elections campaigned almost exclusively on the data center issue. A whopping 89% of Virginians say lawmakers must do more to protect the health and pocketbooks of residents from data center impacts, according to a recent poll.
In early June, New York state voted to impose a first-in-the-nation, one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, in a sign that lawmakers might be starting to sense the ground swelling at their feet.
This new anti-tech populism is drawing from people of all walks of life, and from all political backgrounds and it is growing rapidly. It is a populism that is decentralized, grassroots and willing to take action. So far, this populism has resisted being co-opted or reigned in by either MAGA or Indivisible. It is already redrawing our political landscape and will surely become a bigger force in politics from city hall to the White House in the months and years to come.
“These are the issues that can bring everyday working Americans back together again,” said Ballou, “and we’re (Punch Up) here for it.”
