The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

People were not persuaded by the usual "safety" pitch. The dominant view was that mass surveillance keeps expanding while petty theft, break-ins, and other crimes people actually experience still go unresolved. Several comments grounded that with firsthand stories about clear video, Find My location data, and existing camera footage that police simply did not act on. That turned Flock into a symbol of a bad trade. You give up privacy and still do not get competent enforcement. The sharper argument went beyond mistrust of current police. Many treated the system itself as dangerous because it normalizes always-on monitoring that future governments, abusive officers, or politically motivated prosecutors can exploit. The concern was not only abuse by a rogue employee checking an ex-partner. It was the creation of a searchable physical-world equivalent of a geofence dragnet, one that lowers the cost of enforcing trivial laws, selective laws, or unjust laws at national scale. A few people said they could support surveillance if it reliably enforced ordinary rules. Most rejected that premise outright. They argued modern legal systems rely on discretion, imperfect enforcement, and barriers to state power, because full enforcement of every rule would quickly become a revenue machine or an authoritarian one. That is why comments were broadly sympathetic to direct action against the cameras, even among people who disliked vandalism in principle. The mood was less "crime fighting has gone too far" than "institutions stopped earning trust and people are responding accordingly." Flock also drew special heat because commenters said the company has resisted removing equipment after contracts ended, reinforcing the sense that this is infrastructure designed to entrench itself once deployed.