July 25, 2026
License to Drill
The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras
People are cheering, joking, and raging as anti-camera rebels go full street justice
TLDR: A growing number of people are damaging Flock’s car-tracking cameras to protest what they see as creeping surveillance. Online, the reaction is a mix of applause, legal pushback, and comedy — with commenters arguing this backlash was inevitable once people felt ignored.
America’s roadside camera fight has officially entered superhero-with-wire-cutters territory. The story centers on “NoMark,” an anonymous influencer dubbed “Minneapolis’ Batman,” who says he’s taken down more than a dozen Flock cameras — the black pole-mounted devices that photograph passing cars and feed that information to police systems. Flock says these tools help solve crimes and are “not mass surveillance tools,” but critics are absolutely not buying it. In the comments, the mood is less “please file a complaint” and more “well, what did you think would happen?” One of the strongest reactions came from people arguing that when ordinary residents feel ignored, sabotage starts to look like the only language anyone hears.
And the crowd brought receipts, jokes, and chaos. One commenter dropped a link to the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, basically saying: there’s a legal path too, folks. Another pointed to reports that some towns allegedly had to put trash bags over cameras after contract fights, flipping the vigilante narrative and asking whether the real strong-arm tactics are coming from the company itself. Then came the image that basically stole the thread: a 77-year-old man in a lawn chair using a pool skimmer with cardboard to block a camera — a protest so gloriously low-budget that commenters seemed delighted. The funniest hot take called Flock the “most successful honeypot of all time,” because apparently these cameras don’t just spot cars — they also summon every privacy warrior, amateur comedian, and local folk hero out of the woodwork.
Key Points
- •The article profiles NoMark, an anonymous Minneapolis vigilante who said he has disabled more than a dozen Flock Safety cameras, including by taping over lenses and cutting power wires.
- •Flock Safety’s pole-mounted automated license plate reader cameras photograph passing vehicles and compare the images against large databases.
- •Privacy critics cited in the article argue the systems enable warrantless location monitoring and contribute to mass surveillance, while Flock says its ALPRs are not mass surveillance tools.
- •According to the article, Flock is based in Georgia, valued at $8.4bn, and its cameras scan license plates billions of times each month in about 6,000 US communities.
- •The Guardian says it identified at least 33 incidents across 23 states in which people damaged or obstructed Flock cameras as an explicit protest against surveillance.