“We need to dismantle DHS,” Ed Vogel said on a July 27 episode of the far-left Popular Resistance’s Clearing the FOG podcast. Vogel is an anti-surveillance activist and leader in DeFlock, arguably the most active group in the movement against automated license plate readers (ALPRs). “The more contracts that we can start to cancel on a local level, we start to chip away at DHS’s power,” he said.
Casual observers might view the growing popular opposition to Flock Safety and its ALPRs as an isolated issue, driven by bipartisan sentiments. But the movement is heavily influenced by ideological activists like Vogel and organizations that have championed causes like Defund the Police. Other groups, including the DSA and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), now organize against Flock and ALPRs.
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Like Vogel, these organizations tend to see the fight against Flock as part of a larger struggle against not just the Department of Homeland Security, but policing itself. Having learned from the public pushback against these past campaigns, anti-police activists have refined their messaging and tactics to be more broadly appealing. But their goals are the same: dismantle the institutions that keep Americans safe.
DeFlock sits at the top of the anti-ALPR activist pyramid. The group provides detailed trainings to would-be activists, and also offers data, websites, and even a mobile app that lets users track ALPRs wherever they go. Its Discord server features an entire section where individuals can share information obtained through Freedom of Information requests and coordinate with other activists across the country.
Not all of its leaders share Vogel’s radicalism. His two collaborators at DeFlock, Will Freeman and Bob Smetana, seem more focused on Flock and privacy issues more broadly. Freeman’s most ideological take, as expressed on a 2025 episode of the Lock and Code podcast, is that “the [tech] companies are the bad guys.”
Still, Vogel’s long history in anti-tech-surveillance activism is informative of the group’s broader purpose. He emerged from Chicago’s social-justice scene. Sometime after 2020, his organizing shifted from broader causes centered on “racial, social, and economic justice in the Chicago area” to hardcore police abolition.
By 2021, Vogel was active in the Coalition to Cancel the ShotSpotter Contract in Chicago, attacking gunshot-detection technology as part of one of the nation’s “largest surveillance systems” that, he argued, “exacerbate[d] existing issues of racist policing.” He wrote articles pushing abolitionist critiques of the Chicago Police Department. By 2022, he was involved with the Lucy Parsons Lab, a Chicago-based think tank focused on “expos[ing] the surveillance overreach by governments and corporations” and how “technological advancements are increasingly used to exploit Black, brown, and low-income communities.”
In 2025, Vogel became a co-founder of Southerners Against Surveillance Systems and Infrastructure (SASSI, pronounced “sassy”). He also wrote an article for the Atlanta Community Press Collective—an organization that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from communist billionaire Jim “Fergie” Chambers’s Babochki Collective. In the article, Vogel frames “surveillance tech” and the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” as components of a “multi-pronged counterinsurgency strategy.”
This idea of police technology as “counterinsurgency” is central to Vogel’s worldview. He claims, for example, that ALPRs were first used to monitor and combat the Irish Republican Army. In this telling, cameras, drones, and other tech are not crime-fighting tools, but a means of fighting movements that are rebelling against the state.
This attitude is evident in Vogel and friends’ work against ALPRs, against police training centers, and against gunshot detection technology like ShotSpotter. And after the surprising wave of support for their work on Flock, Vogel and fellow radicals are looking to scale up this activism.
Their organizing calls and materials give every indication that DeFlock’s next targets are fusion centers—the post-9/11 intelligence hubs that coordinate the work of federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies—and real-time crime centers (RTCCs), which facilitate access to these technologies by first responders. Vogel sees both as manufacturing threats, rather than responding to them. In his view, both fusion centers and RTCCs are an even bigger problem than Flock Safety, which exists only “because of the existence of fusion centers.”
The attack on these centers is, in turn, part of a broader strategy. During a September 2026 DeFlock seminar on fusion centers, Vogel said that he aims to “shift the public narrative, shift more people into wanting to defund and dismantle this infrastructure.” He believes this can happen at the state level and advises others in the movement not to push “for any sort of oversight and transparency. I do not think that will be meaningful.”
While Vogel is among the most prominent anti-Flock activists, he’s not alone. Across that ecosystem—from the DSA to anti-ICE groups—many police abolitionists see the anti-Flock moment as an opportunity for more radical change.
Sarah Hamid of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has emerged as one of the clearest bridges between mainstream digital-privacy advocacy and police abolition. EFF’s director of strategic campaigns, Hamid describes herself as an “abolitionist working at the intersection of technology and global/domestic warfare.” She has been involved in various anti-police campaigns and forms of “community defense” since “the 2020 uprisings against state violence.”
The EFF name still bears some credibility thanks to its work promoting a free and open internet in the 1990s. It was founded by two tech innovators and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead at a time when federal agents were conducting heavy-handed computer-crime raids in an effort to police poorly understood new technologies. But in recent years, the organization has become more and more a part of the Left’s omnicause infrastructure.
Hamid’s goal is not regulation, but rather “no network at all,” she said at an August 2026 webinar, “Surveillance is not Safety,” during DeFlock National Week of Action Against ALPRs. In her view, creating transparency laws and guardrails for policing technologies like ALPRs is wasted effort, because organizers can simply “make the abolitionist demand. You can just say no.”
Hamid encourages activists to target the procurement process by tracking pilot-program expiration dates, contract renewals, budgets, and city council votes. Using this information, they can apply political pressure to stop purchases and contracts altogether. As she put it, “if surveillance is built through procurement, then procurement is also one of the clearest places to stop it.”
Organizing calls like the one at which Hamid spoke provide a wealth of information about both the tactics and the goals of the anti-Flock movement. As one participant in an August 13 DSA Block Flock call put it, getting rid of Flock is “one small piece in a wider pie towards abolition and liberation.” In the same call, Victoria McCullough, a member of the DSA International Committee’s Migrant Rights Working Group and an organizer in Richmond, Virginia, emphasized that getting rid of Flock was about dismantling immigration detention and the broader policing infrastructure.
“Part of defending immigrants and part of abolishing detention systems is to abolish tools that get used,” McCullough said. While Flock commands the lion’s share of activist attention for supporting the “disappearance deportation machine,” McCullough stressed that “it’s not just Flock. It’s every single surveillance camera. It’s every single surveillance system.” This extends to private use, as Vogel cites examples of Flock cameras being purchased by homeowner associations.
These activists are aware that they have forged an unlikely political alliance with the Right over ALPRs. During an August DSA Block Flock call, North Texas DSA’s Nora Soto said, “I could not have guessed that we would be partnering with . . . very white, wealthier suburbs around Dallas and conservatives and libertarian groups in DFW [Dallas-Fort Worth].” This coalition of people “from all walks of life” ultimately became the subject of a front-page article in Dallas’s largest paper, the Dallas Morning News, which framed DSA as a leading force behind the campaign.
Soto and others like her understand that radical messages don’t always work on this broader audience. After studying the work of other anti-Flock activists, the North Texas organizers decided to frame the campaign as a privacy issue. As Soto said, “the privacy thing is how we’re going to win,” not focusing on how ALPRs “target immigrants” or “target other communities.”
Soto is not the only activist to mention changing messaging depending on the local political context. In a recent interview with Techlore, DeFlock’s Bob Smetana pointed to support from Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Thomas Massie, and Lauren Boebert as evidence that the privacy framing was resonating on the Right, describing the latter two as “strange bedfellows” but praising them for “making noise.”
But the more politic messaging often ends up in the same place: kneecapping the police. The two DeFlock figures most often presented as the movement’s more mainstream voices, Freeman and Smetana, often argue that the best course of action is not to put the cameras up in the first place. This vision ultimately tracks with Vogel’s solution—just slow-rolled for a less radical audience.
Americans should not be confused about the goals of anti-Flock activists like Vogel and Hamid, or groups like the EFF and the DSA. They see the Right’s sudden opposition to Flock as a tactical victory in a longer struggle against all policing technology—and, ultimately, policing itself.
With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 now behind us, it’s alarming to think that one of the country’s fastest-growing activist movements dreams of wiping out the security infrastructure built to prevent terrorist attacks, seeing it as part of a “counterinsurgency.” Don’t be confused about what this is: “defund” by another name.