Flock Cams, Surveillance Drones, and the Civil Disobedience Field Manual

Part of Start Here

Last updated: June 26, 2026 Current threat level: SEVERE

Mass surveillance in the United States is no longer hypothetical. It is not a future risk, a conspiracy theory, or a paranoid fantasy. It is a $7.5 billion industry with 90,000 cameras on American roads, 1,500+ police drone programs in the sky, and a court system that has not yet decided whether any of it is constitutional.

This is the field manual for living inside that system without surrendering to it.

It covers what has been built, what the courts have and have not said, what tools exist for seeing it, evading it, and dismantling it, and what the American tradition of civil disobedience has to say about resisting systems the law has not yet caught up to.

The position of this article is simple: mass surveillance infrastructure is unconstitutional regardless of whether current laws technically permit it. Carpenter v. United States (2018) established that pervasive location tracking is a search. The fact that lower courts have not yet applied that holding to ALPRs and drones does not make those networks constitutional. It makes the courts slow.

You do not have 10 years to wait for the Supreme Court to catch up.

What Has Been Built

Flock Safety: The Private Company Running a National Panopticon

Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based startup founded in 2017. As of June 2026, it has raised approximately $950 million in venture funding, most recently a $275 million round in March 2025 led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $7.5 billion valuation. Its 2024 revenue was $300 million in ARR. It employs roughly 1,500 people. Its CEO is Garrett Langley. (Reuters, March 2025; CNBC Disruptor 50, June 2025)

The company operates approximately 90,000 cameras across approximately 7,000 networks in 49 states, scanning vehicle license plates an estimated 20 billion times per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies are under contract. (ACLU of Massachusetts, October 2025)

That is the public-safety side. Flock also sells to private customers: HOAs, apartment complexes, 7 of the 10 largest U.S. shopping malls, 10 of the 40 largest U.S. healthcare providers, and more than 100 public school systems. In June 2025, Flock launched "Business Network" allowing private companies to share data and add vehicles to hotlists collaboratively. (Flock Safety blog, June 2025)

The Hardware

Flock’s product line, as of 2026:

• Falcon, fixed ALPR camera. Solar-powered, cellular-connected. Captures plate, make, model, color, and "vehicle fingerprint" attributes (bumper stickers, dents, mismatched colors, paper plates) up to 75 feet away at speeds up to 100 mph, day or night via infrared.
• Sparrow, compact ALPR.
• Condor, pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera with AI face tracking. Records high-resolution video with a 30-day archive. This is not a license plate reader. It is a continuous people-tracker.
• Raven, audio sensor marketed as gunfire detection. Records audio in 5-second increments. After EFF reporting in December 2025, Flock was forced to amend marketing materials suggesting Raven would also listen for "human distress", meaning screaming.
• Aerodome, Flock’s drone division. The company acquired drone manufacturer Aerodome in October 2024 and announced a 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Atlanta.

A single Flock nationwide search can query 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks in seconds. A Texas deputy ran such a search for a woman who had a self-administered abortion; the search reason field read, verbatim: "had an abortion, search for female." (EFF, October 2025)

The ICE Pipeline

Flock does not have a direct contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It does not need one. Local police perform Flock searches on ICE’s behalf through what 404 Media called a "side-door."

In May 2025, 404 Media published a bombshell investigation based on a leaked trove of Danville, IL police search logs. It documented more than 4,000 nationwide lookups by local and state police conducted at the behest of the federal government or for immigration reasons. Officers wrote "immigration," "ICE," "ICE+ERO," "ICE WARRANT" in the reason field. Every search listing "immigration" as the reason occurred after Trump’s inauguration. (404 Media, May 2025)

In February 2026, The 74 and The Guardian revealed that police nationwide use school district Flock cameras for immigration enforcement. Alvin Independent School District in Texas had 733,000+ searches by 3,100+ agencies in one month, including 620 immigration-related searches by 30 different agencies. An administrative assistant at Huffman ISD gave U.S. Border Patrol direct access to district cameras. (The 74, February 2026)

Flock’s own disclosure in January 2026 confirmed that before public exposure, the company ran pilot programs with the FBI (2021, 2023), National Park Service, ATF (Nashville and Louisville), NCIS, Homeland Security Investigations (March, May 2025), and Customs and Border Protection (May, August 2025). CEO Garrett Langley had previously denied having federal contracts. (NPR, February 2026)

The Drone Stack

The cameras on poles are one half of the surveillance network. The cameras in the sky are the other.

As of 2026, more than 1,500 U.S. law enforcement agencies operate drone programs, a number that jumped sharply after a 2025 FAA rule change. (State of Surveillance Atlas, 2026)

The dominant programs:

• Chula Vista, CA Police Department launched the first "Drone as First Responder" (DFR) program in October 2018. As of May 2026, it has flown more than 25,000 missions, using DJI Matrice M300 RTK and M350 RTK aircraft on Motorola/Cape software. Four launch sites, two full-time pilots, 24 collateral-duty pilots. (Chula Vista PD UAS Program; DroneXL, May 2026)
• Las Vegas Metro Police runs a Skydio X10-based DFR program with a dedicated drone operations center unveiled January 9, 2026. ShotSpotter gunshot detection is integrated into the DFR dashboard.
• NYPD launched a citywide Drone First Responder program in November 2024 across three boroughs. The NYPD UAS Impact and Use Policy was finalized February 4, 2026. Per the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, NYPD drones are used for "patrol", not just emergencies. (NYPD UAS Policy, February 2026)

The federal side: Anduril Industries operates more than 200 Sentry towers along the U.S., Mexico border on Lattice command-and-control software under a $25M CBP contract. CBP flies General Atomics MQ-9 Predator B aircraft. ICE has confirmed use of small drones for protest surveillance. During the January 2026 federal immigration surge in Minneapolis, residents reported widespread low-flying drone activity at night; Minneapolis PD and Minnesota State Patrol denied operating them; DHS refused to comment. (Washington Post, January 2026; MPR News, March 2026; ACLU, March 2026)

The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 (Public Law 118-63) created a performance-based BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) pathway at 49 U.S.C. § 44811 and barred federal procurement of drones from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba. The FAA published the Part 108 BVLOS NPRM on August 7, 2025 (Federal Register Doc. 2025-14992). The final rule has not yet been issued as of June 2026. When it lands, police drone flights will become dramatically more frequent, because Part 108 removes the line-of-sight pilot requirement that currently constrains missions.

The Surveillance Payloads

The hardware mounted on those airframes is not just cameras:

• Electro-optical and thermal imaging (FLIR)
• License plate readers (ALPRs in the sky)
• Face recognition (accuracy from altitude is contested but improving)
• ShotSpotter / acoustic gunshot detection integrated into the DFR dashboard
• Cell-site simulators (Stingrays), the same devices the FBI used over Ferguson in 2014 and over D.C. in 2020
• "Spotlight" surveillance payloads
• In at least one LVMPD configuration, window-busting payload delivery and IR

Kyllo v. United States (2001) held that using thermal imaging to look into a home is a search under the Fourth Amendment. That holding has not yet been applied to drone thermal imaging of homes at scale. It should be.

The Constitutional Case (Quick Primer)

The Supreme Court has been moving, slowly, toward recognizing that pervasive digital surveillance is a search under the Fourth Amendment.

The foundational cases:

• **United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012)**, attaching a GPS tracker to a car is a trespass-based search. Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence flagged that "awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms."
• **Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014)**, searching a phone requires a warrant. Digital data accumulation is categorically different from physical searches.
• **Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018)**, collecting seven days of Historical Cell Site Location Information is a search. Justice Roberts wrote: "When the Government tracks a person’s movements over an extended period of time, the extensive nature of the data collected makes the surveillance a search." The third-party doctrine (your data held by a phone company loses Fourth Amendment protection) does not survive Carpenter for pervasive location tracking.
• **Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001)**, thermal imaging of a home is a search. Novel surveillance technology aimed at constitutionally protected spaces is presumptively a search.
• **Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989), naked-eye observation from a helicopter in navigable airspace (400+ feet) is not a search. Caveat:** plurality opinion. Lower courts have increasingly limited Riley as drone technology has proliferated.

ALPRs are location tracking. Drone surveillance is location tracking. Flock’s 90,000-camera network is, by Carpenter‘s logic, a system of pervasive location tracking at scale.

The live federal cases:

Sources: ACLU Schmidt case page; EFF SIREN case page; KTVU Javorsky; IJ case page; EFF Bell amicus

The federal courts are split. The Fourth Circuit will decide Schmidt. EFF and ACLU are fighting in California. Until these cases are resolved, the constitutionality of the entire ALPR network is an open question. Open questions do not stop the cameras from running.

The Resistance Toolkit

This is the part where the surveillance industry wants you to feel powerless. You are not.

See It First: Map the Network

You cannot resist what you cannot see. Three projects have done the cartography for you:

• DeFlock (deflock.org), open-source crowdsourced ALPR map. As of June 2026, 107,128 license plate readers mapped, more than a third of them Flock devices. Run by Will Freeman. In early 2025, Flock sent Freeman a cease-and-desist letter claiming trademark dilution. He refused. EFF backed him. Flock backed down. The map is still up. (EFF, February 2025)
• EFF Atlas of Surveillance (atlasofsurveillance.org), 15,071+ datapoints on law enforcement surveillance technology across the U.S., including ALPRs, drones, face recognition, and predictive policing systems.
• HaveIBeenFlocked.com, searchable index of Flock audit logs obtained via public records requests. Built by Chris van Pelt. Shows whether your plate has been searched, and by which agency.
• ALPR Watch (alprwatch.org), companion app for navigation, with a suspected-location feature added December 2025.

Print the maps for your city. Bring them to city council meetings. Bring them to your HOA. The cameras are not invisible. The industry just relies on you not looking.

License Plate Countermeasures

A healthy pile of products exist for making your plate harder to read by ALPR. Their effectiveness against modern Flock cameras is partial, not absolute. None of them is a magic cloak. All of them carry some legal risk depending on your state.

Verified vendors and 2026 pricing:

Products removed from this guide after vendor verification (June 2026):

• Project KOVR, dormant since 2023, no current sales
• DroneWatch.org, domain does not resolve
• iR Invisi-Plate (RadarBusters), product page 404, likely discontinued

State legality, the short version:

Specific anti-cover statutes are on the books in 8 states + DC. In other states, general anti-obstruction laws still apply.

In the other 42 states: assume the safest interpretation is that clear covers are generally tolerated; tinted or reflective covers can be cited under general anti-obstruction statutes; and the legality of any specific product should be verified against your state DMV’s current guidance. (NCSL License Plate Policy)

The constitutional framing of this article is civil disobedience: the legality of plate-cover laws is itself constitutionally suspect under Carpenter, because the government is asserting a right to photograph and track your car continuously while simultaneously criminalizing your attempt to opt out. You will not win that argument at a traffic stop. You might win it in an organized litigation campaign.

Effectiveness reality check: Multiple independent tests have found many plate-countermeasure products partially defeated by modern ALPR systems using IR illumination and high-DPI sensors. Expect partial defeat, not total invisibility. Combine multiple countermeasures for best effect.

Vehicle Route and Movement Countermeasures

The most reliable countermeasure is not giving them your plate to read.

• Route planning, use DeFlock and ALPR Watch to identify camera-dense corridors; vary routes; avoid fixed capture points (gas stations, parking lots, residential driveways, especially HOAs with Flock).
• "Going dark", limit plate visibility only at specific times (a flip-down cover you only deploy in camera zones).
• Ride-share, rental, personal, every option has tradeoffs. Personal vehicles are tied to your name. Rental plates can be tracked to your credit card. Ride-share drivers carry interior-facing cameras (Lyft and Uber both record continuously as of 2025).
• Crowdsourced counter-cartography, ACLU-affiliated local coalitions publish city-specific ALPR maps.

Biometric Countermeasures

If the cameras cannot read your face, they cannot track you by face.

• CV Dazzle makeup (adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle), asymmetric high-contrast makeup designed in 2010 to defeat Viola-Jones face detection. Caveat: 2025 research (arXiv 2412.13507) shows modern deep-learning detectors have largely defeated CV Dazzle. Still works against older camera systems. Combine with other methods. Original patterns are an art project, not a practical defense.
• Cap_able (capable.design), Italian startup, patented adversarial-pattern clothing. Priced €127, €670. CNN, BBC, Wired coverage. Verified active as of June 2026.
• Reflectacles eyewear (reflectacles.com), IR-reflective lenses and frames that overwhelm IR-based cameras. Currently sold out; restocking August 2026.
• IR LEDs in glasses or hoodies, projects IR light at the camera, disrupting IR-based face mapping. Highly effective against IR cameras, useless against RGB. Legal status: IR LED emission is legal in the U.S. (FCC regulates radio frequencies, not IR light).
• Face mask + sunglasses, effective against both human observers and many algorithms.

The mask law reality: 23 states plus D.C. have anti-mask laws on the books as of September 2025 (ICNL database). Most are intent-based (you have to be committing a crime or depriving someone of civil rights). The general-ban states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia) have broader reach but include medical and/or religious exceptions. Anti-mask statutes were mostly passed in the 1940s and 1950s to break the Klan, then re-weaponized after 2020 against left-wing protesters. The constitutional status of forcing protesters to show their faces to face-recognition systems is itself an open question the ACLU is litigating.

Phone and Signal Countermeasures

Your phone is a tracking device that happens to make calls.

• Faraday bags, Mission Darkness, SLNT, and GoDark are all verified active vendors as of June 2026. Put the phone in, wait two minutes, call it from another phone. If it rings, the bag is defective.
• IMSI catcher detection, SnoopSnitch (Android, requires root + Qualcomm chipset) and AIMSICD (Android, open-source, also requires root for full detection) analyze mobile radio data and warn about silent SMS and IMSI catchers. These apps catch Stingrays. They will not run on unrooted phones. (SnoopSnitch on Google Play; AIMSICD on GitHub)
• Burner phone practices, even "burner" SIMs are increasingly traceable through IMSI correlation. The robust answer is cash-purchased, rotated phones with no consistent identity across them. Carry a separate phone for protests, not your daily driver. ACLU-DC’s protest guide: disable face and fingerprint unlock, use a strong passcode, put the phone in airplane mode or a Faraday bag, leave the primary phone at home. (ACLU-DC guide)
• Car key fob relay protection, a Faraday pouch for your key fob prevents relay attacks against your car. Different threat, same physics.

Drone Countermeasures

Civilian drone countermeasures are mostly detection, not interdiction. Active countermeasures are heavily restricted.

Detection apps (legal, civilian):

Critical clarification on "AirGuard": There is no Apple + ACLU drone-detection app. Two different products share the name:

• TU Darmstadt AirGuard, detects Bluetooth tracking devices (AirTags, SmartTags, Tile). Not drones.
• AirSight AirGuard, commercial drone detection software for enterprise and government. Not consumer.

Active countermeasures, the legal reality:

• Jamming any drone is a federal crime for civilians. 47 U.S.C. § 333 makes willful or malicious interference with radio communications a federal offense. The FCC’s maximum penalty per jammer is $112,500, seizure, and possible imprisonment. (FCC Jammer Enforcement; 47 USC §333 full text)
• 18 U.S.C. § 1367 makes intentional or malicious interference with a satellite’s operation punishable by up to 10 years in prison. GPS jamming of a drone falls within this. (Cornell LII)
• Federal agencies with statutory counter-UAS authority: DHS (6 U.S.C. § 124n), DoD (10 U.S.C. § 130i), DOJ, DOE. State and local law enforcement do not have this authority. Neither do you. (DHS C-UAS; DoD 10 USC 130i)
• Civilian legal alternatives: report the drone to local police and the FAA DroneZone at dronezone.faa.gov. Document the sighting, video, photo, time, location, Remote ID broadcast, for later civil liberties complaints or ACLU reports.

If you are tempted to buy a portable drone jammer from a foreign website, understand that U.S. federal prosecutors have obtained convictions for possession and use of jammers, and the FCC has imposed heavy fines. This is not a legal gray zone. This is a federal crime. Whether it is a constitutional crime, given what the drones are doing, is a separate question the courts have not answered. The honest answer is: do not jam.

Physical Direct Action: The Civil Disobedience Tradition

This is the part of the article where the surveillance industry and law enforcement want a disclaimer. Here is the honest version instead.

Property destruction targeted at mass surveillance infrastructure is a crime. It is also part of a long American tradition of principled civil disobedience against state overreach. The Boston Tea Party was property destruction. The Underground Railroad violated federal fugitive slave laws. Draft resistance during Vietnam was federal crime. Suffragettes destroyed property. Civil rights activists destroyed property (sit-ins at segregated lunch counters are property trespass by any legal definition). These were crimes. They were also, in the historical frame, legitimate acts of political resistance against systems the courts had not yet caught up to.

In 2025 and 2026, a sustained wave of direct action targeted Flock cameras specifically. At least 13 documented incidents across the United States:

The pattern: cameras go up. Cameras come down. Cities cancel contracts. The Eugene and Springfield cancellations happened within two months of sustained direct action. The Louisville Metro Police Department responded to destruction by stopping public disclosure of camera locations, an implicit admission that visibility is a vulnerability.

This article is not telling you to cut down cameras. This article is telling you that the historical record shows such tactics work, that they carry serious legal risk (Jeffrey Sovern is facing 13 felony counts), and that the question of whether they are justified is the same question Thoreau asked in 1849: when law and conscience conflict, which do you obey?

What Actually Works: Political and Organizing Pressure

The cameras come down through three overlapping routes:

1. Public records requests. MuckRock has helped journalists and activists file thousands of FOIA requests for ALPR audit logs. Those logs are how 404 Media, EFF, and The 74 documented the ICE pipeline. If you want to know what your local police are doing with Flock, file a request. The data is public.

2. Counter-cartography. DeFlock, the EFF Atlas of Surveillance, and local mapping projects make the network visible. Visibility is the precondition for political action.

3. City council pressure. More than 80 cities have canceled or deactivated Flock contracts since early 2025, per NPR and State of Surveillance tracking. A non-exhaustive list of verified cancellations:

EFF published a tactical guide in February 2026: "Effecting Change: Get Flock Out of Our City." The playbook is simple and tested. Show up at council meetings with the maps. Bring the ICE data-sharing reporting. Bring the Bell v. Norfolk ruling. Bring the audit logs. Demand a vote. Win the vote. If the council refuses, run candidates in the next cycle who will.

The Orgs That Do the Work

If you cannot do the organizing yourself, fund the people who can.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), leads ALPR litigation (SIREN v. San Jose is EFF’s case), runs the Atlas of Surveillance, publishes the Surveillance Self-Defense guide at ssd.eff.org.
• ACLU (national + state affiliates), Schmidt v. Norfolk, "Drones for Intimidation" reporting, state-level legislation advocacy.
• EPIC (epic.org), filed amicus briefs in Schmidt v. Norfolk and other ALPR cases.
• Institute for Justice (ij.org), federal lawsuit against San Jose’s ALPR program on Fourth Amendment grounds.
• Fight for the Future (fightforthefuture.org), led the campaign that forced Amazon Ring to cancel its Flock partnership in February 2026.
• MuckRock (muckrock.com), FOIA infrastructure for the public.
• DeFlock (deflock.org), the map.
• Access Now (accessnow.org/help), 24/7 digital security helpline for activists and journalists.

Surveillance Self-Defense Guides (Vetted)

These are the canonical resources. Use them.

• EFF Surveillance Self-Defense, ssd.eff.org. Updated continuously. The "Attending a Protest" module was revised November 12, 2024.
• EFF Tool Guides, ssd.eff.org/module-categories/tool-guides
• ACLU-DC: How to Defend Against Police Surveillance at Protests, acludc.org
• AFSC Digital Security Guidelines for Protests (November 2025), afsc.org
• Access Now Digital Security Helpline (24/7, multilingual, free), accessnow.org/help
• Infosec 101 for Activists (updated April 22, 2026), infosecforactivists.org
• Pratt Institute Informed Protest: Surveillance and Digital Privacy (March 2026), libguides.pratt.edu

Critical Caveats and Honest Risks

This is civil disobedience, not legal advice.

• Evasion tools carry real legal consequences. Plate-cover laws vary by state. Anti-mask laws vary by state. Recording laws vary by state. Know yours.
• Many of the countermeasures above are illegal in some states. Verification per state is required before relying on them.
• Active drone jamming is a federal crime with serious penalties, full stop.
• Physical direct action against surveillance cameras is property destruction and a separate crime. It is civil disobedience in the Thoreau tradition. It carries real prison time. Jeffrey Sovern is facing 13 felony counts.
• Mass surveillance’s constitutionality is an open question the courts have not resolved. Living as though the Constitution already protects you is a bet on the future of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Make that bet with your eyes open.

Copy/Paste This

Three sentences for sharing:

Mass surveillance in America is no longer hypothetical. It is a $7.5 billion industry with 90,000 cameras and 1,500+ police drone programs, and the courts have not yet decided whether any of it is constitutional. This is the field manual for seeing it, evading it, and dismantling it: https://thethriftydev.com/blog/flock-cameras-surveillance-resistance/

X / Twitter:

1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.

90,000 Flock cameras. 20 billion plate scans a month. 1,500+ police drone programs. A $7.5B industry tracking Americans while the courts decide if it’s constitutional.

Field manual for resistance: https://thethriftydev.com/blog/flock-cameras-surveillance-resistance/

Congressional email subject: Support Fourth Amendment protections against ALPR and drone surveillance

Congressional email body:

I am writing to urge you to support legislation limiting warrantless ALPR (automated license plate reader) and drone surveillance of Americans. Companies like Flock Safety operate approximately 90,000 cameras across 49 states, performing an estimated 20 billion vehicle scans per month, with audit logs documenting thousands of immigration-related searches by local police on behalf of federal agencies. The courts have not yet ruled on whether this pervasive surveillance network complies with the Fourth Amendment under Carpenter v. United States (2018). I urge you to:

1. Support federal legislation requiring a warrant for ALPR and drone surveillance data access. 2. Prohibit federal data sharing with state and local agencies that conduct warrantless ALPR surveillance. 3. Prohibit the use of federal funds for the procurement of surveillance technologies that do not include strict data retention limits and audit logging requirements. 4. Support the rights of state and local governments to restrict or ban ALPR and drone surveillance within their jurisdictions.

The Fourth Amendment is not a technicality. Please treat mass surveillance of Americans as the constitutional issue it is.

Frequently asked questions

What are Flock cameras?

Is Flock footage a public record?

What actually stops Flock expansion?

Sources

Flock Safety / ALPR Industry:

• Wikipedia: Flock Safety
• CNBC Disruptor 50, June 2025
• Reuters: Flock $275M funding round, March 2025
• Flock Safety Evidence Policy, January 2026
• Flock Safety: Does Flock Share Data With ICE?, January 2026

Civil Liberties Reporting:

• ACLU-MA: Flock nationwide access, October 2025
• ACLU: Flock Roundup, August 2025
• ACLU: Police Audit Logs Don’t Work, October 2025
• EFF: 2025 Investigations Review, December 30, 2025
• EFF: License Plate Surveillance Logs Reveal Racist Policing Against Romani People, November 2025
• EFF: Get the Flock Out of Our City, February 2026
• EFF: Protester Surveillance via Flock, November 2025

ICE / Federal Data Sharing:

• 404 Media: ICE Taps Into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, May 2025
• The 74 / The Guardian: ICE Taps Into School Security Cameras, February 2026
• UWCHR: Leaving the Door Wide Open, October 2025
• NPR: Cities Ditching Flock, February 2026

Lawsuits and Case Law:

• ACLU: Schmidt v. Norfolk case page
• KTVU: Class action against Flock, February 2026
• Institute for Justice: San Jose License Plate Readers case
• EPIC: Vehicle Fingerprinting Amicus, February 2025
• EPIC: Schmidt v. Norfolk Amicus, April 2026
• EFF: Bell v. Norfolk amicus, September 2025
• Justia: United States v. Jones (2012)
• Justia: Riley v. California (2014)
• Supreme Court: Carpenter v. United States (2018) PDF
• Justia: Kyllo v. United States (2001)

Drone Surveillance:

• FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 (Pub. L. 118-63)
• FAA Part 108 BVLOS NPRM, August 7, 2025 (Federal Register Doc. 2025-14992)
• Chula Vista PD UAS Drone Program
• NYPD UAS Impact and Use Policy, February 4, 2026
• ACLU: Drones for Intimidation, March 2026
• 18 U.S.C. § 1367 (satellite interference)
• 47 U.S.C. § 333 (radio interference)
• FCC Jammer Enforcement page
• DHS Counter-UAS authority (6 USC § 124n)
• DoD Counter-UAS authority (10 USC § 130i)

Countermeasures and Direct Action:

• DeFlock ALPR map
• EFF Atlas of Surveillance
• ALPR Watch companion app
• EFF: Anti-surveillance mapmaker Will Freeman refuses Flock C&D, February 2025
• ICNL: Anti-Mask Laws in the United States, September 2025
• Suffolk News-Herald: Suffolk VA arrest, October 2025
• OPB: Eugene/Springfield end Flock contracts, December 2025
• Cambridge MA: Flock contract termination, December 2025
• Gizmodo: Flock Cameras Have A People Love Smashing Them Problem, February 2026
• NCSL Transportation License Plate Policy
• Cap_able adversarial clothing
• Reflectacles anti-FR eyewear
• Mission Darkness Faraday bags
• SLNT Faraday bags
• GoDark Faraday bags
• SnoopSnitch on Google Play
• AIMSICD on GitHub
• TU Darmstadt AirGuard (Bluetooth tracker detection, not drones)
• AirSight AirGuard (commercial drone detection, not consumer)
• Dronetag Drone Scanner
• OpenSky Network

Surveillance Self-Defense:

• EFF Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD)
• ACLU-DC: Defend Against Police Surveillance at Protests
• Access Now Digital Security Helpline

Related Reading on TheThriftyDev

• The 2026 Sovereign Stack: Privacy Tools That Actually Resist
• Age Verification Creep Tracker: KOSA, App Store ID Laws, and More
• FCC Wants Your ID to Activate a Phone, Privacy Is Dead
• Delete Yourself From Data Brokers Without Paying DeleteMe

Last verified June 26, 2026. State laws and product availability change; verify before relying on any countermeasure. Civil disobedience carries real legal risk. The Constitution is not a magic shield, it is a promise the courts have not yet kept.

Why the cancellations are not the end of the story

We track the cancellation wave, the misuse record and the vendor swaps on their own page: Why More Than 100 Cities Dropped Flock Safety.

Update: the 2026 removal wave, counted four different ways

Four organizations are counting this wave and their numbers do not match, because they are not counting the same thing. The Institute for Justice launched a database of license plate reader cancellations in August 2026 and counted 227 local governments that canceled or did not renew a contract since the start of 2025, as of 22 September 2026. IJ states that its list deliberately excludes jurisdictions that only paused operations or switched to another vendor. DeFlock’s front page displayed 143,098 cameras mapped and 153 cities rejecting them when read on 29 September 2026, but those are live counters that change without notice. Stateline reported on 14 August 2026 that more than 50 communities canceled contracts or deactivated cameras during 2026 alone, and that Flock says its technology is used in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states. Fortune, citing the San Francisco Standard, counted 82 Flock contracts terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of them in the first five months of 2026. DeFlock told the Guardian that at least 56 municipalities deactivated, canceled or rejected contracts this year.

So when you read a headline number, check what it is counting: cancellations or deactivations, 2025 onward or 2026 only, and whether a switch to another vendor counts as a removal. On that last point, the honest answer is that it usually does not.

How the removals actually happen

Council votes. Santa Cruz voted 6 to 1 on 13 January 2026 to end its contract effective 12 February. Harrisonburg’s council voted unanimously in late July 2026 and bagged the cameras in trash bags pending removal. New Hanover County in North Carolina voted 4 to 0 on 8 September after 41 residents spoke against the cameras. Pflugerville’s council unanimously rejected a new agreement in late August, shutting down 28 cameras. Albany, California rejected a Motorola replacement on 8 September, days before its Flock contract expired.

Contracts allowed to lapse. Charlottesville discontinued its one year pilot. Denver removed all 110 of its cameras when the contract expired in March 2026. Longmont, Colorado let its contract lapse in December, then voted in March to approve Axon license plate readers on the same streets.

State level action. Florida’s transportation department revoked approvals for license plate readers in state rights of way on 31 August 2026, citing a recent exponential increase in deployments and concerning reports of misuse, and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said it would discontinue LPR use. Texas Governor Abbott ordered state agencies to pause Flock funding on 27 August 2026, and reporting puts at least 900 Texas cameras unplugged since, with 14 cities and counties dropping contracts or cutting camera counts. Missouri Governor Kehoe signed Executive Order 26-18 establishing ALPR safeguards.

Audits that found misuse. St. Charles County, Missouri ended its contract on 20 August after an internal audit found an employee had looked up Flock data for personal reasons, and all 28 cameras came down. Boston dropped Flock after its own 2025 Surveillance Technology Report showed that data sharing was active three days into the pilot despite a contract requiring it to be disabled. In Kosciusko County, Indiana, the council stopped funding and the prosecutor ordered all county agencies to discontinue use.

Update: the misuse record, with names attached

This is no longer a list of hypotheticals. In Milwaukee, detectives investigating officer Josue Ayala found he had used Flock to learn the location of his romantic partner 124 times and that partner’s ex 55 times, according to a February 2026 criminal complaint. CNN reported that he agreed to resign and plead guilty to attempted misconduct in public office. The detective who investigated him, Tehrangi Chapman, was arrested in July 2026 and admitted, according to a criminal complaint, to using Flock to track two people and to secretly installing a GPS device on one person’s vehicle.

In Indianapolis, five IMPD officers were charged in September 2026: Matthew Dane Binford, Abigail Cramer, Cassandra Crawley, Michael Rogers and Jonathan Schultz, on charges including fraud and official misconduct over alleged thousands of impermissible searches. Schultz alone faces 26 counts, including 12 counts of fraud and two of stalking. These are charges, not convictions, and the compiled reporting documents no trial outcomes. IMPD leases 301 Flock cameras across Marion County.

An Albany County, New York sheriff’s investigator was arrested on 9 September 2026, accused of searching Flock cameras for an ex-girlfriend’s car about 3,000 times. The arrest is documented. No disciplinary or criminal outcome appears in the reporting.

Smaller outcomes are documented too. St. Charles County’s internal audit found a civilian employee accessed Flock data for personal reasons, and Chief Kurt Frisz said every use would be audited, adding that “then we ensure we audit the auditors.” A Vero Beach employee was placed on leave after a news outlet contacted the department. IJ’s database of ALPR abuse records a Texas sheriff’s deputy using roughly 83,000 Flock cameras to find a woman who had allegedly had a medication abortion, at the behest of her abusive partner, and a Georgia police chief tracking his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times.

The aggregate is what matters. IJ’s written testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, citing a Washington Post review, states that dozens of officers have been charged with or accused of unauthorized use, that Flock’s system was involved in 46 of those cases, and that in 26 of them the targets were officers’ current or former partners, their exes’ new partners, or women the officers wanted to meet. IJ catalogs more than 240 incidents nationwide.

Access is its own problem. Woodland, California produced a community audit, which is advocacy work rather than a city or court finding, counting 4,353 immigration enforcement searches, 2,632,310 out of state searches flagged as a California SB 34 violation risk, and 4,259 organizations searching Woodland’s data between 2021 and 2026. Pflugerville found that nearly 380 agencies had access to its data. EFF documented officers entering joke text, and in some cases just mashing the keyboard, into Flock’s search reason fields.

Update: the cameras are not going away, they are being relabeled

Follow the contracts and a second wave appears behind the first. Cities are not abandoning automated license plate recognition. They are abandoning a vendor. The best documented case is Boston, where Mayor Michelle Wu said the city had abandoned Flock, and the same annual report disclosed that Boston police had already launched replacement pilots: about 45 Motorola cameras starting in February 2026 and about 30 Axon cameras starting 1 June 2026. Those pilots were disclosed only in that report, which raised questions about compliance with a city council ordinance requiring approval before new surveillance technology is deployed.

The pattern repeats with different names. Denver is ending its Flock relationship and moving its license plate contract to Axon. Tempe’s council passed a motion in March 2026 to begin an Axon pilot while moving to cancel its Flock contract, which The Hill reported at $80,000. The LAPD sidelined its Flock relationship in July 2026, and the Los Angeles Times reported that alongside a $235 million Axon body camera contract. Syracuse’s council revoked Flock’s privileges in March and approved a license plate reader contract with Axon, and Flock’s readers were still sitting on city property weeks after a May removal deadline. In Abington, Pennsylvania, commissioners approved a five year Axon contract costing $6,576.50 a year, covering two cameras, installation, two license plate recognition licenses and vandalism warranties. Police there said the new system, which they identified as Axon Outpost, would not connect to Flock’s network. One of the township’s Flock contracts runs to 2028 and cannot be exited early.

The Guardian reported on 20 August 2026 that Axon has replaced Flock in at least seven municipalities across five states. The ACLU’s Chad Marlow told the Guardian that Axon has been “lurking in the shadows, waiting for Flock to fail and then rushing in.” Axon’s chief executive was more direct with investors and with NPR. Rick Smith said: “I would say we’re seeing a significant number of agencies want to come over to Axon and convert from existing license plate readers to us, specifically because of the controls and privacy work that we’ve done around this space.”

None of this is a side note, because Axon is not a smaller version of the thing being protested. It sells Tasers, body cameras, in car video, drones, the evidence platform that departments store everything in, and now the fixed cameras on the pole as well. Its own product page describes the device at the center of this migration: “Meet Axon Outpost, a rugged, fixed camera that unifies livestreaming, ALPR, and vehicle attribute recognition into one device.” It runs on solar or 110 volts and can be mounted on existing poles, new poles, buildings, vehicles, trailers or trees. The companion product, Axon Lightpost, does the same three jobs from a street light, built with Ubicquia, and Axon says it installs in under an hour. Both were announced on 22 April 2025 alongside Fleet 3, and Axon’s real time platform, Fusus, is the layer that pulls the feeds together.

The two companies were not always rivals. Reporting describes Flock’s vehicle identification technology running inside Axon’s Fleet 3 hardware, with evidence flowing into Axon’s evidence platform, and an expanded partnership announced on 28 August 2024. That arrangement ended when Axon terminated the integration on 24 July 2025, saying only that it was “no longer in Axon’s best interests.” Flock’s leadership described the decision as a surprise. Whatever the reason, the sequence matters: the same departments that spent two years being told they had a Flock problem are now being sold an Axon solution, often by the vendor whose cameras were already on their officers’ chests.

404 Media found cities ditching Flock and immediately replacing it with Axon equipment, including cameras designed to attach to an existing street light and blend into their surroundings. That is the whole mechanism in one image: the hardware stays on the pole, the logo on the invoice changes, and the public is told the problem was the vendor.

The civil liberties answer to this is on the record too, from the ACLU rather than from me. In August 2026 the ACLU’s Jay Stanley identified Motorola Solutions, which runs a nationwide law enforcement plate sharing system through its Vigilant unit, as one of Flock’s most significant competitors, and made the point that switching providers will not necessarily fix mass surveillance.

So the test after any cancellation is not whether the cameras came down. It is what the new contract says about who owns the data, how long it is kept, who else can search it, whether sharing is off by default, whether there is an audit log that the public can request, and whether the council votes on it in public before it goes up. Abington got two cameras and a written statement about data ownership. Longmont attached data protection requirements, transparency conditions and a one year evaluation to its approval. Albany, California rejected the replacement outright and let its Flock contract expire with nothing in its place, which is currently the exception rather than the rule.

Cancelling a vendor does not retire a capability. If you want the capability retired, the lever is the contract, the ordinance and the audit, not the name on the invoice.

More on keeping your own data yours is collected in the Privacy and Digital Rights Hub.