The Cities Beat Flock. The Surveillance Moved Where They Can't Reach.

By February, at least thirty cities — Flagstaff, Cambridge, Eugene, Santa Cruz — had canceled their Flock Safety contracts ^[1]. The backlash was real, and it worked. Flock's CEO had been caught telling the public one thing about federal work while running pilots with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations ^[2]. Audits turned up local police running searches for federal agencies under terms like "ICE" and "immigration" ^[2]. The company cut data retention from thirty days to seven and began requiring a case number on every search ^[3]. The backlash crested with a Republican governor. Ron DeSantis, a close Trump ally, put it plainly ^[4].

I don’t want to have this become a surveillance state. — Ron DeSantis

Then Florida wrote the check. The same governor drew from a $250 million fund meant to support federal deportations and handed Peregrine Technologies $22 million to consolidate license-plate and body-camera data across state agencies ^[5].

protection of privacy and civil liberties has been at the core of the product since day one. — Peregrine Technologies, Inc.

The backlash didn't reduce surveillance; it renamed it. Flock was a name a city council could vote on — a vendor with a public record of misleading statements and a camera on a pole you could point to. Peregrine is a data-integration firm almost nobody has heard of, funded through a state grant program no zoning board reviews. The same plate data and body-camera feeds now flow through a vendor that has not drawn a single protest. None of that touches the other channel, which was never connected to a city council vote in the first place. ICE has been assembling its own enforcement stack since at least last September: a $78,000 robot that opens doors and deploys smoke ^[6], and now a $2 million order of quadruped robot dogs from Boston Dynamics ^[7]. There are $16.7 million in electric-shock gloves for agents ^[8]; California lawmakers moved to ban them, and legal experts noted federal courts have ruled states can't regulate the conduct of federal officers ^[8]. There is a $180 million plan to hire private bounty hunters to watch over a million homes ^[9]. There are Skydio drones, $40 million in armor, $1.6 million in Glocks, and a record $24 million in Amazon cloud infrastructure ^[10]. Palantir holds a $30 million contract to pick the targets ^[11]. This is not the Flock backlash spilling over. It was being built at the same time, on a separate track. That is the point: it marks the boundary of what a city council can reach. The asymmetry is clearest in who gets to watch whom. Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured Apple, Google, and Facebook to remove apps that let residents track ICE agents ^[12].

The Department of Justice will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement. — Pam Bondi

Meanwhile a federal appeals court ruled in February that the IRS may hand taxpayer addresses for roughly 1.28 million people to ICE ^[13]. And the Supreme Court stripped district judges of the power to issue universal injunctions ^[14], the one tool that could have paused a federal program everywhere at once. So the win was real, and it was narrow. A city council can cancel a contract with a named vendor. It cannot reach a state grant program, a federal procurement pipeline, or a court ruling. The cameras came down in thirty cities. The surveillance moved to places where no zoning board, no privacy ordinance, and no referendum arrives.