Carl Gunn is outside by his pool in St. Petersburg, Florida, sitting near his weapon of choice: a pool skimmer. For the past two months, Gunn has been going out each Saturday to sit in a camping chair in front of the traffic cameras in town, using a sign attached to the net to obstruct the camera recording each and every license plate coming down the road. He calls himself the “Flock Blocker,” referring to the name of the surveillance company that has over 120,000 cameras in operation across the country. “Well, actually, I’m not blocking it,” says Gunn. “It’s a camera, and I’m giving it something to look at.”

This summer, the retired cabinetmaker has appeared on TV several times for blocking Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers, or ALPRs, that surveil drivers across the country. The company states that its nondescript cameras simply take photos of license plates; the photos are then stored in a private database so police departments can search the images to solve crimes. But Gunn, the American Civil Liberties Union, and scores of other critics say that its AI-enabled net of cameras amounts to a private mass-surveillance network monitoring everyone who drives by. “They say, ‘We’re just taking a picture of you,’” says Gunn. “But they’re taking a picture here, a picture there, a picture over here. And then AI puts that together and the next thing you know, they can tell where you’ve gone and where you’re going. They put this in a file, and then they get you the next day.”

Flock has been in operation since 2017, but only this summer have rumblings against the company reached a critical mass; alongside AI data centers, the ubiquity of cameras has sparked a political backlash among Americans disturbed by the encroachment of tech on their communities. Officials in Tempe, Arizona on Wednesday announced the city was shutting down Flock and would no longer collect license plate data. “These cameras have helped our police officers do their jobs, and we don’t discount that,” said Mayor Corey Woods. “But the risk of misuse is too great.” And Axios reported that Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is launching an investigation into the company’s “collection, retention, and dissemination of the data.”

The surveillance company has had a generationally bad run of press in recent months, including a Washington Post report in August that tracked dozens of police officers charged or accused of using Flock’s cameras and database to harass people or stalk their ex-girlfriends. Another lowlight: The residents of Dunwoody, Georgia, learned in April that the company had accessed cameras in a children’s gymnastics room in a Jewish community center as part of a sales demo. In a statement to 404 Media, Flock said that Dunwoody was a partner city that consented to such action. In regard to police abuses, Flock mandated that all police departments using its cameras turn on to its internal audit tool flagging abnormal searches — and cut the time it would keep data from a month to a week.

With the swell of criticism in August, Flock Safety’s........

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