The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

Summary

The first time that “NoMark” tried to knock out a Flock camera feed, he waited an hour for the perfect moment – pacing in and out of bushes that towered over him, a few feet behind a pole holding up the device.“I was just so nervous,” he said.NoMark, as he’s known on Instagram, had already gained an online following of hundreds of thousands for posting videos of himself wearing a black mask and taking on small-time vigilante missions: breaking up fights outside a bar and breaking into a refinery he believed was “polluting the city real bad”. The Minnesota Star Tribune dubbed him “Minneapolis’ Batman”. He spoke to the Guardian under condition of anonymity to discuss potentially illegal acts.On this June night, he set his sights on a new target: automated license plate readers (ALPRs) made by the US company Flock Safety.Allow Instagram content?This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.These black cameras, which are hooked up to a rectangular solar panel and typically mounted on a pole, snap photos of passing vehicles and run the pictures against large databases. They have sparked nationwide backlash from pro-privacy critics, who point to public records suggesting that these devices can help law enforcement keep tabs on specific license plates and the people driving these cars. That they can sweep in so many people’s location from an innocent act in a public space – regardless of whether the target is a suspect in a crime, and without a warrant – has led to fears of mass surveillance.Flock, based in Georgia and valued at $8.4bn, says its cameras scan license plates billions of times each month in about 6,000 communities in nearly every state in the US.The company said in a February blogpost that its ALPRs are “not mass surveillance tools” and that it “cannot track vehicles, much less individual people”.Ac...