A media campaign is trying to recast grassroots opposition to Flock surveillance cameras as Chinese propaganda

More than 40 Sinclair-affiliated local TV markets aired a package claiming opposition to Flock license-plate cameras and AI data centres was being driven by a China-linked far-left network. The underlying evidence largely traces to organisations that have received money from billionaire Neville Roy Singham and have also posted about Flock. 404 Media argues there is little evidence those posts caused the much broader anti-Flock movement.

That broader coalition is awkwardly bipartisan: critics include Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley and Thomas Massie as well as Ron Wyden and Ed Markey. Much of the movement grew organically from documented cases of police misuse discovered through public records and local activism. Flock’s own CEO previously characterised an anti-surveillance mapping project as effectively extremist before later apologising.

The useful pattern here is broader than Flock: once resistance to a technology becomes politically inconvenient, the fight can shift from “is the technology being abused?” to “who is secretly behind the people complaining about it?”

Surveillance infrastructure is becoming entangled with the same foreign-influence rhetoric already used around elections and social media, which can make legitimate scrutiny easier to dismiss without answering it.