Flock says its cameras make US safer - so why are they being sabotaged?

There have been recent incidents of privacy breaches that have caught national attention. Last week, a police officer in Kentucky was charged after using the Flock system to track his ex-girlfriend - who filed a protection order - over 2,000 times.He was caught using Flock's newly mandatory, AI-powered audit tool that flags suspicious use.Others are concerned about Flock being a way for police to avoid warrants, which are usually required to search a person's property or tap their phone. In 2025, a detective in Johnson County, Texas, searched over 80,000 images to locate a woman suspected of having an abortion. He did not have a warrant.CCTV cameras, licence plate readers, and surveillance are not new. But the scale of Flock's network and the integration of AI in modern surveillance tech is a recent development and it's turned Flock into a household name. Americans who otherwise ignored the cameras in their cities have started to notice, and tune in to the capabilities of the technology around them.With AI, unlike older licence-plate readers, law enforcement can search surveillance footage with a string of words like "Caucasian man, blue shirt" - not just a licence-plate image.One ...