Americans are protesting — and vandalizing — traffic cameras, as politicians and podcasters tap into the techlash.

Carl Gunn is outside by his pool in St. Petersburg, Florida, sitting near his weapon of choice: a pool skimmer. For the past two months, Gunn has been going out each Saturday to sit in a camping chair in front of the traffic cameras in town, using a sign attached to the net to obstruct the camera recording each and every license plate coming down the road. He calls himself the “Flock Blocker,” referring to the name of the surveillance company that has over 120,000 cameras in operation across the country. “Well, actually, I’m not blocking it,” says Gunn. “It’s a camera, and I’m giving it something to look at.”

This summer, the retired cabinetmaker has appeared on TV several times for blocking Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers, or ALPRs, that surveil drivers across the country. The company states that its nondescript cameras simply take photos of license plates; the photos are then stored in a private database so police departments can search the images to solve crimes. But Gunn, the American Civil Liberties Union, and scores of other critics say that its AI-enabled net of cameras amounts to a private mass-surveillance network monitoring everyone who drives by. “They say, ‘We’re just taking a picture of you,’” says Gunn. “But they’re taking a picture here, a picture there, a picture over here. And then AI puts that together and the next thing you know, they can tell where you’ve gone and where you’re going. They put this in a file, and then they get you the next day.”

Flock has been in operation since 2017, but only this summer have rumblings against the company reached a critical mass; alongside AI data centers, the ubiquity of cameras has sparked a political backlash among Americans disturbed by the encroachment of tech on their communities. Officials in Tempe, Arizona, on Wednesday announced the city was shutting down Flock and would no longer collect license plate data. “These cameras have helped our police officers do their jobs, and we don’t discount that,” said Mayor Corey Woods. “But the risk of misuse is too great.” And Axios reported that Missouri senator Josh Hawley is launching an investigation into the company’s “collection, retention, and dissemination of the data.”

The surveillance company has had a generationally bad run of press in recent months, including a Washington Post report in August that tracked dozens of police officers charged or accused of using Flock’s cameras and database to harass people or stalk their ex-girlfriends. Another lowlight: The residents of Dunwoody, Georgia, learned in April that the company had accessed cameras in a children’s gymnastics room in a Jewish community center as part of a sales demo. In a statement to 404 Media, Flock said that Dunwoody was a partner city that consented to such action. In regard to police abuses, Flock mandated that all police departments using its cameras turn on its internal audit tool flagging abnormal searches — and cut the time it would keep data from a month to a week.

With the swell of criticism in August, Flock Safety’s media team has had some difficulty keeping up. Last week, its team told several outlets that it was “touching grass and taking a break” and would respond when it’s “had a snack.” But CEO Garrett Langley has been on a press blitz framing Flock’s mission as keeping Americans safe and police abuses as unacceptable. He told Fox News there needs to be a “balance” between privacy and safety in the country, claiming that the cameras have assisted the police in over 1 million investigations. He told a local news channel in Detroit that he is open to regulation about information sharing and penalties for when its data is abused. He told Puck that the whole thing was a bit of a misunderstanding: “People’s concerns were actually not with Flock. It was with who was using it, and people had a concern of whether they trusted local law enforcement.”

Still, demonstrators in small towns and big cities are calling for local governments to cancel Flock contracts with their police department and referring their neighbors to sites like DeFlock, which provide a map of ALPRs in the area. Flock cameras have been defaced in 36 states as local news across the country is flooded with reports of young men getting arrested for shooting or destroying the cameras in their town. Gunn, for one, does not approve of shooting the cameras. “I don’t like handcuffs, they hurt my wrists,” he said.

There have been more creative methods of dissent as well. In Seattle, a man dressed as an ALPR camera at a city-council hearing to protest dozens of similar cameras deployed around the city. Last week in San Diego, a man showed up to a city-council meeting dressed as Darth Vader to say that he approved of the 500 Flock cameras in the county: “I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend,” he said. And so that the police “can follow and surveil the Rebel scum as they move from playground to playground.”

Then there is James Carolan, a 29-year-old concert-stage tech living in northern New Jersey, who has taken a social-media stunt around Flock Safety to the level of performance art — or harassment — depending how you look at it. On his off-day this week, Carolan is reading me the cease-and-desist letter he just received from a manager at Flock Safety. For the past month or so, Carolan has been recording videos of himself as this Flock manager in prank calls to the phone numbers of rich and powerful people in the Epstein files, who, somehow, never changed their contact info. “I hit my face with a healthy dose of Vaseline and I turn the AC off because I think the sweat does add to the humor,” he says of his call prep.

Once he’s got, say, Peggy Siegal or David Mitchell on the line, Carolan asks why he was never invited to Little St. James or if they want in on a deal to put Flock cameras in schools to catch bad kids selling Juul pods. The cease and desist states it is defamatory to pretend to be a Flock manager “disappointed” he was not invited to Jeffrey Epstein’s island; Carolan gained thousands of followers in a few weeks before his channels on TikTok and Instagram were taken down. He says he was inspired to include Flock in the bit after he was arrested during a protest at Delaney Hall in Newark in May, during the hunger strike at the private jail ICE uses as a detention center. “I would not trust any of the cops I encountered during that experience with a Flock camera,” he said.

Despite the threat of the lawsuit, “my dad thinks it’s hilarious,” Carolan said. “My mother is very worried, but she believes in a lot of the same stuff, so I’ve been getting her to come around about it.” He said even his Fox News–loving uncle approves. It feels like the country has hit “a critical massive bipartisan loathing of Flock Safety,” he said. “So it’s been a little encouraging, honestly.”

There appears to be across-the-aisle anger at having one’s comings-and-goings tracked without consent — a privacy concern that politicians are picking up on this midterm year. The city council of the liberal enclave of Taos, New Mexico voted in July not to renew its Flock contract — along with 50 more cities and towns this year, according to DeFlock. In rural Hood County, Texas, the constable put trash bags over the cameras and told Flock to “come get your garbage.” Senator Bernie Sanders has come out against the company, describing its private network as “mass surveillance.” In Flock’s home state of Georgia, a Republican state senator has joined a task force of sheriffs to determine statewide guardrails for automated license-plate readers. In Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed addressed Flock cameras in a video recorded behind a barred fence: “Do you ever feel like you’re in a cage being watched? Well, you are. By Flock cameras.”

In the House, Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett has said he has concerns about Flock Safety and the Fourth Amendment; in August, he put forward a bill banning any federal law enforcement from paying for or accessing Flock’s database. In a twist showing the unexpected pervasiveness of Flock this cycle, one of Burchett’s opponents in November is an independent candidate arrested in August for allegedly shooting up four Flock cameras.

And popular podcasters have amplified public anxieties. “You can’t just spy on us,” Joe Rogan said in a recent episode, while right-wing talker Tucker Carlson struck an even more ominous tone in the preamble to his interview with anti-Flock YouTuber Benn Jordan: “Flock Cameras and the Coming Slave State.”

Like other fresh-faced tech executives boosting controversial products, Langley sees Flock as a way to change society forever. “We generally don’t think crime should exist,” he told Forbes last year, adding that it “can be a thing of the past.” In a TED Talk from April, he said that a police chief told him Flock was “as transformational as DNA” to solving crime: another shift to a more evidence-based form of detective work. Opponents point to the many false detentions spurred by its cameras as evidence to the contrary.

The 38-year-old began his career similar to millennial executives before him — as a serial entrepreneur in the tech start-up world. In 2011, two years after graduating from Georgia Tech, he co-founded an app called Experience offering the widely reviled service of dynamic seat pricing at sports games; it was eventually sold to Cox Enterprises for $200 million. Then came Clutch, a car service, and Moment, an app to help people use data to give gifts. There was also an idea ripe for disruption on his personal website that he never got to: “Toilets — impacts the whole world. hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.”

In 2017, Langley was building an early surveillance camera when he got a call from a DeKalb County detective who told him that a Flock prototype helped solve a break-in earlier that day. He immediately called his co-founders to let them know that “this is what we’re going to spend the next decade of our lives working on,” he said in an interview with the Atlanta Business Chronicle. He was right. The company now has over 1,500 employees with over 120,000 cameras in action in the country — and a valuation of $8.3 billion, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and Founders Fund.

Flock has been happy to point to successes, like the Providence police chief who said its AI-enabled cameras tracked the Brown University shooter last year even as he changed license plates on his gray Nissan sedan. And Langley sees more opportunity in high-profile crises. “We would have solved that case,” he told Vanity Fair in August, referring to the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie in Tucson. (The website Futurism noted that there were 120 Flock cameras in the Tucson area when she was taken.) Flock did not make Langley available for an interview; however, a spokesperson for the company said that the vast majority of the public supports ALPRs as long as appropriate safeguards are in place, citing polling in Seattle and San Francisco showing broad resident backing.

Langley has suggested that he appreciates scrutiny. Earlier this year at the TED conference in Vancouver, he projected on the stage a screenshot of the first national story about Flock back in 2018: “Snitching Ass Startup Raises $10 Million to Privatize the Surveillance State.” Langley got a polite laugh from the receptive crowd. Then he told them he printed and framed the article from the now-defunct site the Outline. It was a reminder “that when you work on important things some people will disagree. And that’s okay. It means you should work harder.” A spokesperson told New York that for every city or town that cancels or pauses a contract, ten new customers are signing on. On the tech-friendly All In podcast in August, Langley said that the company was expanding rapidly with drones as their “fastest-growing business.” Those are a lot harder to block with a pool skimmer.