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Cities Cancel Flock Camera Agreements After Brazen Privacy Breaches
In 2025, something shifted in the long, largely one-sided battle over surveillance technology in American cities. The Atlanta-based company Flock Safety sells AI-powered license plate readers, or ALPRs, to thousands of police departments. Last year, they started losing. At least two dozen cities and counties cancelled, rejected, or terminated Flock contracts after local communities organized and said no.
In Austin, more than 30 community groups formed a coalition that forced the city to cancel its contract. The city government of Cambridge, Massachusetts, terminated its agreement after catching Flock installing cameras without permission. In Evanston, Illinois, an audit revealed that cameras were quietly feeding data to federal immigration enforcement. The pattern is the same: surveillance sold as a public safety tool is covertly repurposed in ways communities never approved. At the center of this movement is Fight for the Future—the primary digital rights nonprofit running the Flock Out campaign opposing Flock’s80,000+ AI-powered ALPRs.
Guest – Reem Suleiman, Senior Campaign Director at Fight for the Future. She previously served as the U.S. advocacy lead for the Mozilla Foundation, and was an original member of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, working to safeguard civil liberties against surveillance technology. FlockOut.org
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Prairieland Texas Case Update
The Prairieland cases have been grinding through both state and federal courts since a noise demonstration nearly one year ago. The demo was in solidarity with detainees at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, in early July 2025. It ended when an Alvarado Police Department officer arrived on the scene and became involved in a gunfire exchange. He allegedly sustained minor injuries—though the prosecution has withheld his medical records. What followed has become the nation’s first federal “Antifa” trial, with 22 defendants now facing a combination of state and federal charges, most of them held on bonds as high as $15 million.
In recent weeks, there have been new developments on multiple fronts: a third indictment of defendant Dario Sanchez over allegations that he removed people from group text chats, the quiet indictment of three additional defendants that defense teams say went unannounced, and an approaching trial date that has already been delayed twice. Today we’ll get an update on the cases and what the road ahead looks like for the Prairieland defendants.
Guest – Xavier de Janon is a criminal defense attorney and the Mass Defense Director at the National Lawyers Guild, where he provides protest defense and support for the right to dissent. Based in North Carolina, Xavier also represents individuals in politically motivated cases across the South.
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