How to kick out Flock and organize to stop mass surveillance

Forming a small team is the first thing to do. (It’s okay if you don’t have an exact plan yet to achieve your goals, that’s what this how to guide is here to help with!) When Flock equipment appeared on our streets, our friends took notice and began to discuss a community response. We had been seeing reporting on surveillance and Flock from news outlets like 404 Media. Without much of a plan, we held our first meeting at the public library. After a couple meetings, our core team was six people, and this remained our core team for a couple months. We held meetings twice a month, and communicated via a small Signal chat.¹

Before doing any public events and before creating any social media presence, we also created a larger Signal chat where we could engage other supporters of the movement in conversation about Flock, and with calls to action. This “big chat”, as we call it, proved to be a crucial tool. Whenever we hosted events or had conversations about the issue, we would add folks into the big chat if they wanted to stay up to date with the effort. We had planned on the big chat being for announcements only. But soon after it was made, it proved to be a useful digital space where people could discuss concerns about surveillance, throw around ideas, connect casually with other supporters, and even form their own groups when there was shared interest. Mostly, people would share regular news stories about the awful things Flock is connected to, and the harms it causes. Organizers then took the information shared in the chat and put it into a document, that eventually became a searchable bibliography. This would be used by locals who wanted to learn more, and we would point officials to this documentation when they wanted more information or when we had to refute inaccurate claims. 

“Mass surveillance technology is unpopular. It offers communities a false solution and latches on to people’s sense of fear and lack of control. But by turning frustrations and fears of mass surveillance into collective power focused on concrete outcomes, the movement was able to instill in people a sense of agency and community belonging, which led to more trust, empowerment, and actual community safety.”

People from other organizations or listservs joined that chat to engage and stay updated. We noticed that some people in the chat were regularly and amicably engaging with local anti-Flock calls to action.  Eventually, three of these people were invited into the core group of organizers.It was the big chat that allowed us to find more trusted folks to join the core organizing team.

Over the months, the big chat helped foster and maintain trust and connection between groups. Some folks used the big chat to find others to create surveillance warning signs and placed them on poles where flock cameras were installed. 

People from other municipalities without a strong anti-Flock movement joined the chat to exchange information and ideas. And people from other groups, including the Ithaca Immigrant Solidarity Group, SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice), Cornell’s ACLU chapter, Cornell’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Clinic, the Palestine solidarity movement, and faith-based groups, participated in our chat regularly to liaise between FlockOff! Ithaca and their groups. 

Mass surveillance technology is unpopular. It offers communities a false solution and latches on to people’s sense of fear and lack of control. But by turning frustrations and fears of mass surveillance into collective power focused on concrete outcomes, the movement was able to instill in people a sense of agency and community belonging, which led to more trust, empowerment, and actual community safety.

1. Signal is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted messaging app that collects minimal metadata from its users. It is a good idea to turn on disappearing messages in group chats, and to encourage members of chats to be conscientious about what they post. Signal offers good technical protection, but it cannot protect from bad actors or problematic individuals allowed into group chats, so your group must strike a balance between making your group easy to join by those who want to be a part of your movement, while also protecting from those who cause harm. For better understanding how to manage Signal group chats securely, see:
https://ssd.eff.org/module/creating-and-managing-signal-groups

For most of the summer after we got started, we researched. There was a lot we didn’t know about how Flock got into our community, how it was funded, when contracts ended, or what we could do about any of it.

Some important things to do early are:

• Ask officials to share any active Flock contract(s) and information. You need to be able to see problematic clauses in active contracts that police and elected representatives ignore or are unaware of—like the fact that Flock maintains the right to utilize our data and share it with oppressive federal agencies. This step enables your group to know when contract renewals happen, which are often automatic unless a municipality takes action to stop the auto-renewal.
  
• File a freedom of information request for contracts. Filing a request likely happens through a portal on a government website, but it might also be done by email. Search for the correct way to do this for your city or town. You may also want to file separate requests for order forms and network audits, which will provide important dates and information.
  
  There are many resources on how to file these requests online, including 404 Media‘s videos on freedom of information request filings and a New York specific FOIL toolkit from NYCLU. The website Muckrock also allows you to search for other people’s information requests that you can adapt to your own, if you’re just getting started. Here’s language similar to what we filed, which you can use:

This is a request pursuant to the [YOUR STATE’S FREEDOM OF INFORMATION LAW].

I am requesting the specific, active contract(s) between the [YOUR MUNICIPALITY] and Flock Safety (or “Flock Group Inc.”) in connection to the fixed-location automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and gunshot detection technology currently used by [YOUR POLICE DEPARTMENT/ CITY].

If there exist any separate order form(s) between  [YOUR POLICE DEPARTMENT/ CITY] and Flock Safety (or “Flock Group Inc.”), please include any active order form(s)

If there are multiple contracts between municipal agencies entities and Flock Safety (or “Flock Group Inc.”), I request all active, relevant contracts, and all contract amendments.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by email attachment.

• Research how Flock is funded. In our area, Flock was largely funded through state-level grants that make no mention of their connection to surveillance contracts. In our area, it was funded by the Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) Initiative that the New York governor likes to hype up, while concealing that this grant is largely a transfer of public funds to a mass surveillance company whose technology has done nothing pertaining to gun violence, locally. This funding component was important, because funding for Flock was tied to beneficial community programs in our county. Eventually, we needed to make it clear that not contracting with Flock would not imperil those other programs financially, even though Flock-supporting officials scaremongered to the contrary, without evidence and without checking for themselves.
  
• Build rapport with local officials and government staff. We often received documentation we needed more quickly and effectively by just asking for it. Filing official requests was always slow and often didn’t work properly, but staff and elected officials were within their rights when sharing information that isn’t protected or confidential. In addition to asking for relevant documentation, FlockOff! Ithaca communicated with officials regularly, threading the needle where we aimed to be respectful but firm. We pushed back on anything that was inaccurate or not based on evidence, while also earnestly presenting accurate, helpful information.
  
• Stay authentically engaged in the community. The core group of FlockOff! Ithaca had strong connections to our locality from our other projects and past organizing work. If you’re not already involved in supporting other movements, spending time supporting groups that work on issues you care about goes a long way. This builds relationships that last for years and fosters the interpersonal trust that allows for future success. All of the initial core organizers had been involved in at least two other movements in recent years, and the trusted connections from those movements helped us pull in much, much broader support than we would have otherwise had.
  
• Have fun with your organizing group! We had a lot of meetings after full days of work when we were all tired. This is sometimes how things have to be. However, we also knew that it’s important to instill an association with positive feelings when engaging with other members of the core group. Whenever possible, we met outside when the weather was nice and held events that were more social and fun when possible, like a soup and puppet-making party during the colder months. Events like these allowed a broader range of people and the local arts community to participate and contribute to the movement. We also went out for karaoke and bowling, as celebrations of victories along the way.

The idea with all of these points is to have a strong internal cohesion and be intimately versed in the relevant materials you’re able to access. You become an expert on Flock, its harms, what other cities have done, how your city is funding it, how it arrived in your streets, which elected officials support it, and which ones are likely to help you. By the end of this step, you should also have:

• A strong core team that knows how to work together
• Good relationships with elected officials, some municipal staff, and other movements
• A group of curious, activated supporters who can spring into action sometimes but might not want to be in the core team
• A dossier and timeline of how and why Flock came to exist in your community, and how it is funded
• A case for why Flock is incompatible with your locality’s values

In order to be successful, your movement has to be able to show that it has the support of many people who care about the issue and are taking steps to do something about it.

We hosted our first public event at a local community center on a weekday evening in September. In the first half of the event, organizers spoke about Flock, how ALPRs worked, documented the harms of the technology, and outlined what we wanted to do about it. We also fielded some questions from the audience. During the second half of the event, we had folks decide what topics they wanted to discuss, and people were given time to converse with one another. One of the attendees of this event eventually became a core organizer for our group.

After that event, we would inform community members of upcoming opportunities to give public comment at City of Ithaca and Tompkins County Legislature meetings. We were intentional in encouraging people to come to those meetings and voice their views, especially if they hadn’t done so before. Over the months, we also hosted other events and rallies before the city and county meetings. 

As mentioned earlier, surveillance is both a symptom and a cause of a disempowered society. By helping people to turn their frustrations and fears of mass surveillance into collective power focused on concrete outcomes, people were able to truly feel a sense of agency and belonging, which leads to more trust, empowerment, and community safety. Surveillance can only offer a false solution to the sense of fear and lack of agency many folks feel.

People shared our calls to action in other chats and on local listservs, so an increasing number of people came to support at meetings and during events. At least one other affinity group (focused on sharing knowledge about open source and liberatory tech) formed as a result of the FlockOff! Ithaca big chat. 

The big chat provided a supportive digital space for people to engage with one another in ways that perhaps resembled the early days of social media. Today’s social media platforms are structured so that each account is basically one speaker with many listeners. Platforms encourage engagement to be a spectacle or entertainment rather than earnest, thoughtful dialogue.

One-to-many communication platforms make it difficult for supporters of a movement to cultivate relationships with each other. Social media platforms are best suited for announcements and pronouncements, not conversation. Movements that primarily communicate though social media will be weaker, since the formation of relationships between supporters of the movement is obstructed by the platform itself. That’s what FlockOff! Ithaca’s big chat on Signal corrected for.

However, it is useful to have one-to-many communications for specific purposes. Instagram is visual, and the half-life on a post is short, so Instagram is best suited for announcements. (We also used Instagram because many locals use it, even though Instagram’s owner, Meta, is a surveillance company). We then eventually created a Substack newsletter. Where Instagram is image-first, Substack is text-first, which allowed us to provide longer explanations and rationales that needed to be public, like before we engaged in direct action. Additionally, an older demographic often prefers getting updates and asks via email, so Substack and listservs allowed us to access that demographic.

Once you have spent time cultivating relationships and have thoughtfully started to build out your communications channels, you’re set up for the next step.

Calling and emailing local government officials still works at the local level. Showing up to public comment or virtually offering comments at meetings is effective because officials have to listen to comments during that time. If you are willing and able, it’s highly advised to have one-on-one conversations with elected officials. Face-to-face conversations give your group a greater understanding of where officials stand on the issue and where there might be obstacles to overcome. Meeting over coffee also creates an opportunity to dive deeper into any of the issues  of Flock surveillance.

FlockOff! Ithaca did all of the above. We attended many public meetings, and we asked our movement and its supporters to do the same. People spoke about:

• The range of harms and issues that Flock and mass surveillance are connected to—from the way reproductive rights and gender-affirming care are under attack by the federal government to the way that ICE accesses Flock data, often unlawfully.
• Flock’s incompatibility with our locality’s values and commitments: Ithaca is a sanctuary city, and Tompkins County has asserted its commitment to immigrant safety.
• The need for privacy and data protection, and how Flock spits in the face of the Fourth Amendment, while also attacking people’s ability to exercise First Amendment rights
• The connection between surveillance, increasingly militarized local police, and the violence of the American Empire abroad
• The close relationship between tech companies and billionaires who openly scorn democracy
• The many failures and ethical fiascos of Flock. We made it clear that mass surveillance is harm, not safety. We made it clear that the public does not support Flock.

We communicated firmly, not angrily. We were confident in our knowledge and documentation, and we spoke as if elected officials would listen in good faith. And they did actually listen. We didn’t need to be angry because there was mutual respect, and that proved to be constructive. Using all the materials we had gathered during Step 2, we presented our case against the city’s Flock contract. We showed up so often and with so many people that it became clear the community despised mass surveillance and would not stop until it was gone. It’s important to shore up your strong supporters and to engage heavily with elected officials and community leaders who are on the fence.

This lobbying step can take some time. It is likely you won’t have enough decision-makers on your side at the beginning. Presenting them with information and making regular asks for reasonable legislative steps forward is important, but it can take patience. Even when it moves quickly, it can be frustrating because plans never go as you expect.

We hit a significant snag in the fall of 2025: budget season, elections, and then winter break. This was a bummer. A few of our allies in local government left at the end of the term, and it felt like we had to begin again, two steps back, at the start of the next legislative term. But we regrouped and came back in force once the new year began.

We met with the newly elected officials and cultivated relationships with them. To our delight, the newly elected officials were more favorable to our anti-Flock efforts, not less. 

The effort accelerated suddenly after we mobilized a large number of people for a city government meeting in February. A new city council member began drafting a resolution to end the Flock contract right after that meeting. It was a fast timeline and required a lot of hustle. But because of the strong foundation we built with a committed core team that knew how to work together, and because we had the ability to cast a wide net to rally support from many other groups, we were able to push forward with this aggressive timeline. There was a resolution to be voted on in early March. We mobilized again with our established communications channels, in tandem with other groups in town. City Hall was packed with people the evening of the vote. The resolution vote was successful! Public support was so overwhelming that the resolution to end the contract with Flock passed unanimously. Even the officials who had been in favor of Flock didn’t want to cast losing votes against the public will.

We followed a similar playbook with the county. Our success in the City of Ithaca helped ground county legislators’ decisions to end their contract, as well. A few weeks after the city ended its contract, the county was primed to end theirs—and they did.

The actual week-to-week conversations and obstacles were more complicated than described in this piece, and they required attention and strategic judgment, but the details of this are beyond the scope of this piece.

Passing a resolution to end a contract with Flock isn’t the end of the issue. After all, Flock’s equipment is the problem, and there are cases of Flock refusing to uninstall their equipment after a contract is over. For example, the mayor of the City of Verona, Wisconsin, said that local police had made several requests to Flock to remove the cameras after the city had ended a contract with Flock, but the company refused to comply. The mayor stated to the Wisconsin Examiner, “It could have been an accident, it could have been an oversight on their part, but I think it was deliberate…they want to keep the cameras up, whether they have permission or not.”

We believe that if the equipment is up—especially because it is solar powered, with batteries—then it is likely running and sending our data to Flock’s servers. Flock is such an untrustworthy company that it cannot be believed when they say the equipment is powered down.

After reaching out to city officials about the timeline for Flock equipment removal, FlockOff! Ithaca organizers did not get any satisfactory or definitive answers. By the end of May 2026, the City of Ithaca and Tompkins County had both officially ended their contracts, but the equipment was still up, and local government seemed silent and paralyzed.

So we escalated, strategically.

FlockOff! Ithaca solicited dozens of signatures and sent a sign-on letter (CC’ing local media) with three additional organizations as signatories, demanding a timeline for equipment removal. 

Throughout the whole process of lobbying and legislative success, we would alert local media to what we were doing, to keep the issue at top of mind for the broader public. Local media covered the movement, but often gave far more voice to police and elected officials’ opinions. They didn’t quote us much, and often chose to frame our movement’s key points as different from the ones we were actually putting forth. All of this was frustrating, but it didn’t matter too much because a campaign needs to be known, even if it isn’t represented perfectly. This was also part of why we created our own Substack newsletter. The Substack allowed us to publicly represent ourselves and our arguments with greater clarity and depth.

Additionally, we knew that entertainment and spectacle are a crucial aspect of public perception for any movement. We had made an eight-foot tall wearable Flock puppet that folks put together out of papier-mâché at our soup and art party, which was present at most of our actions in 2026. The Flock puppet worked wonders when it came to media attention and drawing the curiosity of passers-by. At our rallies and actions we also made sure to play music from a speaker, and on a couple of occasions, had singers from a local Singing Resistance movement join us. 

We knew that it was important to have an escalation strategy. How do we continuously ratchet up pressure? If you don’t have a plan for what happens if you get ignored, then your movement can be easily sidelined. How did we make our movement un-ignorable? Through direct action.

We explained in our Substack that we had done everything through the proper channels and that it had been decided by local government bodies that Flock’s presence was unacceptable. We explained that according to the City of Ithaca’s own timeline, equipment removal was overdue. We explained that when we asked for clarity on the timeline for removal, we received no official response.

We also explained that because the contracts were over and there was no excuse for the surveillance equipment being up, we would engage in direct action to cover up at least one Flock camera. The purpose was to escalate, sending a message that local government needed to follow through on its commitments or we would continue to push harder.

The idea was to put the City of Ithaca and Tompkins County in a bind: would they use police to defend the equipment of a company they no longer contracted with, drawing attention to the fact  that they failed to remove equipment as promised? Or would they let us cover the cameras publicly in a way that sends a very clear message that Flock is unacceptable and the public has taken the matter into its own hands?

We told the public and the press that at a specific time and place at a local festival, Ithaca Fest, we would cover up a camera with a plastic bag. We were prepared for this to be an act of civil disobedience met with police interference and arrests.

Somewhat surprisingly, no one bothered us, and many drivers honked in support, including a public bus. It turns out that our escalation strategy had worked. We got wind that the police were informed not to stop us by city officials. If they had, the city would have had a PR situation on its hands. In fact, two council members attended the action. We covered up five cameras that day and others have covered more since.

One week later, in early June 2026, contractors began to remove the Flock equipment.

Strategically, we focused on the City of Ithaca first, with a similar county-level strategy a couple steps behind. Ithaca is the largest city in Tompkins County, and without Ithaca’s participation, we knew the county’s Flock system would be less useful. 

This theory was accurate: once the City of Ithaca canceled its Flock contract, Tompkins County chose not to renew its contract. Then the Village of Trumansburg—in the same county— said that it would let its contract expire with one official explaining that the system is less effective: “We won’t have any data from the sheriff’s office for Tompkins County or Ithaca to help us with any type of investigation.” The dominoes kept falling, as the village of Cayuga Heights, just outside the city of Ithaca, voted to let their Flock contract expire soon after.

“Inadvertently, Flock created an opportunity for all of us to build strong, interconnected local movements, unified in opposition to mass surveillance. It provided a springboard from which the public can insist on ethical technologies with proper protections and consequences for misuse or mishandling of data.”

Throughout our campaign, we had been in contact with the ACLU, which has some model legislation that provides more local controls over surveillance, as well as auditing and transparency requirements. That legislation is called Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS). From early days, we had planned on working toward getting this legislation passed locally, once we had dealt with Flock.

The way we saw it, the first goals were kicking Flock out of Ithaca and Tompkins County to stop the immediate harm. Next, we want to build up some defenses against surveillance and create a baseline of protections and expectations. For us, CCOPS may be a step in that direction. 

Still, there have been concerns that the CCOPS model only provides oversight and for various reasons, did not prevent Oakland, California from contracting with Flock and renewing that contract. It is clear that other policy solutions are necessary to provide adequate protections against mass surveillance. Those policies must address how police departments and cities are (currently) able to procure mass surveillance technologies as if they were no different from procuring a computer or a vehicle. It is clear that mass surveillance must be understood by policymakers and legal institutions as distinct from other types of technology, and procurement of such tech needs to be limited, only allowable under certain extreme conditions. It may be necessary to ban technologies outright, as some cities have done with facial recognition and biometric surveillance. 

We have also identified the need for greater penalties for companies that we have little choice but to give our data to, which mishandle or lose our sensitive data—such as parking apps or health-related businesses. In the US, consequences for data breaches are virtually nonexistent, which encourages poor data security practices. 

Additionally, there are still active Flock contracts elsewhere in Tompkins County. Educational institutions in this area have Flock contracts, as do some private businesses. FlockOff! Ithaca has also connected with other anti-Flock movements across the country so that we can mutually support each other.

If your movement and locality has ended a contract with Flock, it is important to prevent other mass surveillance vendors that sell similar fixed-location ALPRs from contracting with your government, as a replacement. Many officials selectively heard that Flock was a bad company, but chose to ignore the fact that fixed-location ALPRs function as warrantless government and corporate surveillance of an entire population, as if everyone is under permanent criminal investigation. Some county officials still want a Flock replacement, which is what they did in the nearby city of Syracuse, New York, after canceling their Flock contract. 

So, organizers must weigh the costs—time, capacity, opportunity costs of not taking up a different priority campaign—of engaging in a specific policy push, and think about which efforts are likely to offer the most bang for your buck. There is a lot to be done, but as a small-ish group of organizers, it is useful to try to pick a couple of feasible short-term goals that put you on a steady track to ensure that technology is only deployed when it serves locals’ needs and doesn’t pose significant risks or violate our civil liberties.

Inadvertently, Flock created an opportunity for all of us to build strong, interconnected local movements, unified in opposition to mass surveillance. It provided a springboard from which the public can insist on ethical technologies with proper protections and consequences for misuse or mishandling of data. 

Those who have organized around privacy, digital security, and data protection for many years had, in the past, found it challenging to find broad-based support for these issues. And yet, recently, with the rapid acceleration of fascism and the technologies that empower authoritarians, Flock has provided a key activation point for many communities around the U.S. to mobilize around, and win. There is no reliable count, but at least three dozen cities have ended contracts with Flock.