In such divided times, any issue on which the public can reach a relative accord is an achievement worth celebrating. Pretty much everyone (95%) agrees we’re in an affordability crisis. The share of Americans who believe ICE has “gone too far” has climbed to 65%. And then there’s the rapid shift in public opinion to abject hatred of AI and data centers. Who among us has not felt a swell of patriotic pride watching communities around the nation set aside their differences to ban data centers from their towns and punish the unscrupulous local politicians who attempted to surreptitiously approve their construction? Another such area of consensus seems to be percolating—one that’s in direct defiance of the tech oligarchs and politicians attempting to shape our world into a panopticon hellscape. Backlash against the $7.5 billion startup Flock Safety—the maker of AI-powered, license plate-scanning, pole-mounted surveillance cameras—has gone from brewing to boiling over in recent weeks, much to the chagrin of the police state and its Silicon Valley boosters. Following significant pushback from activist groups, the LAPD announced this week that it would allow its three-year contract with Flock to expire. Similar decisions to end contracts and take down existing cameras are coming from city councils elsewhere around the nation. © Reddit Privacy advocates like the EFF and ACLU warn that Flock and its competitors’ automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) are tools of mass surveillance that offer access to a trove of illicitly gleaned data to any government agency with a contract, with few safeguards in place to prevent abuse. Though Flock alleges it doesn’t share its data with ICE, many fear the cameras can and will be used to aid Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Given that ICE is just one of the many federal agencies being used to carry out that agenda, local PDs have been tripping over themselves to assist those federal efforts, and side-door access to the data in the software is well-documented, Flock’s reassurance is little more than cold comfort.