The government’s warrantless tracking machine is getting pushback from an unlikely corner of red America.

Gun store owners started pulling the plug first, and now a county mayor is declaring the whole contract invalid.

And what Knox County, Tennessee Mayor Glenn Jacobs just did to Flock Safety is the kind of move that has surveillance-state defenders scrambling for a response.

A WWE Hall of Famer Draws the Line

Jacobs, the former WWE superstar known as Kane who has served as Knox County Mayor since 2018, sent a letter to Alex Guth, a regional sales director for Flock Safety, declaring that the county’s 2020 contract with the company is no longer valid.

The letter, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, lays out the math plainly. “By our calculations, equipment and services purchased to date under the 2020 contract total $274,720, not including the $800,000 purchase made through Omnia,” Jacobs wrote.

“Therefore, in my role as Chief Executive of the County, this is to inform you that I do not believe the 2020 contract between Knox County and your company is valid and there is no current service agreement in place,” Jacobs continued, adding that the letter also served as notice the county would not be renewing the contract.

The threshold requiring Knox County Commission approval sits at $100,000. The sheriff’s office blew past that figure years ago, buying cameras in batches designed to stay just under the $25,000 price tag that triggers mayoral review. The original contract was started in 2020 by former Knox County Sheriff’s Office Captain Aaron Yarnell, who is now one of 11 people indicted in a theft conspiracy case within the department.

Flock did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

Jacobs told DCNF investigative reporter Emily Kopp in a video that he initially thought Flock cameras were just ordinary license plate readers. He quickly learned otherwise. “They take a snapshot, then it uses AI to not only store the data place, but also create what’s called a vehicular fingerprint, and that’s make model color of the car, distinguishing features such as roof racks, even bumper stickers,” Jacobs said.

That is not a traffic camera. That is a rolling dossier on every driver who passes by, built without a warrant, without probable cause, and without most residents having any idea it was happening.

“The lack of transparency surrounding Flock’s rollout is one of the most troubling aspects about all this,” Jacobs posted on X. “It sure seems like there was a sprint towards a fait accompli before the public took notice.”

The Knox County Sheriff’s Office had been planning to use state grant money to install 270 additional cameras on top of the roughly 140 already in place. That expansion is now in doubt. The Knox County Commission was set to vote on an emergency Flock camera ordinance, with the ordinance requiring only one reading to pass.

Gun Stores Already Said No

Knox County did not start this fight. Gun store owners got there first, and their reasons cut right to the heart of why these cameras are a Fourth Amendment problem.

Social media posts flagged a Flock camera positioned outside Gun Commanders, a firearms dealer in Cleveland, Georgia, and the backlash was immediate. The store’s owner, Mike Carter, confirmed to the DCNF that he deactivated the camera.

“When I installed the system more than a year ago, my intentions were simple and sincere: to help protect my employees, my customers, and my business from theft and violent crime,” Carter told the DCNF. “Before making that decision, I took the time to understand how the system worked and the privacy safeguards that were in place, including extremely limited data retention.”

“At no time was the camera installed to monitor, track, or infringe upon the rights or privacy of law-abiding gun owners,” Carter added. “After listening to our customers and considering the impact this controversy has had on our staff, our families, and our business, I have decided to remove the Flock camera from our property.”

“Effective immediately, the camera has been rendered inoperable and is no longer functioning. It is currently in the process of being permanently removed from our property,” Carter said.

Eagle Sports Range, a range and federally licensed dealer operating in Cudahy, Wisconsin, also took its cameras down after installing them in 2023, according to WISN, a Milwaukee-area TV station. The range had originally allowed Flock to install cameras after a string of burglaries at several Milwaukee-area gun shops. Eagle Sports Range later said it had no idea the system would be used in ways that cause serious privacy concerns, and tried to remove the cameras in February 2026. According to the range, Flock denied that request, citing a contractual obligation to keep them in place.

And that detail matters. Flock’s contracts are not casual arrangements. They are multi-year agreements with teeth, designed to keep cameras in place long after a community has second thoughts.

The ACLU of Texas put the problem in plain terms. “ALPRs threaten our privacy by allowing the government, without a warrant or judicial order, to record and monitor every car that passes, creating a record of where you go, including political meetings, doctor visits, gun stores, and religious institutions,” Nick Hudson, senior manager of policy and advocacy at the ACLU of Texas, told the DCNF.

Congress Is Starting to Move

US Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) introduced the “Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act” to ban federal agencies from purchasing or operating Flock cameras or any form of automated surveillance that identifies, tracks, or records individuals. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

“We gotta ban these dadgum things,” Burchett said.

Burchett has been working directly with Jacobs on the issue. “I’ve been speaking with Mayor Jacobs about this, working with coordination with him on this thing, so hopefully, we’ll get some movement out of this,” Burchett said.

“We should never choose between safety and liberty,” Burchett said separately. “We’ve got to keep our country safe, but we keep sacrificing some freedoms that define us.”

Jacobs told the DCNF that he sees the potential for these systems to become something far more dangerous than a crime-fighting tool. “[T]hat’s what we have to be aware of … the potential this technology has in the future to become a tool of oppression and surveillance,” he said.

“Without strong safeguards in place, we may be inadvertently creating a warrantless mass surveillance network,” Jacobs and Knox County Commissioner Adam Thompson said in a joint statement.

Jacobs has also called on the Tennessee General Assembly and Congress to act. “Therefore, I urge Commission to prohibit the use of these devices in Knox County until such time as a strong federal and/or state regulatory framework is in place,” he wrote. “Further, I appeal to the Tennessee General Assembly and the United States Congress to look at this issue and determine what actions are needed to secure the Liberty of the People as new technologies such as these emerge.”

The ACLU estimates between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock cameras are deployed nationwide. Flock’s own marketing claims the company works with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and is present in more than 6,000 communities, generating billions of vehicle scans per month.

That is not a pilot program. That is a national surveillance network that grew largely in the dark, approved by local officials who often had no real understanding of what they were signing.

“The more that I’ve learned about Flock cameras, the more troubled I am,” Jacobs said. “There’s virtually no state or federal regulation protecting our privacy and protecting our civil liberties.”

He is right. And the pattern of how these contracts spread deserves scrutiny. Local governments were often pitched Flock after a free trial or a presentation about solving car thefts. What many did not fully grasp when they signed up is that the system was never purely local. By default, many contracts enabled a national lookup feature, allowing law enforcement agencies anywhere in the country to query the data a specific city collected.

Gun owners visiting a firearms dealer. Patients pulling into a doctor’s office. Churchgoers arriving for Sunday services. Every one of those trips gets logged, time-stamped, and made searchable, without a warrant, without suspicion, and without the driver ever knowing.

That is not law enforcement. That is a government database of everywhere law-abiding Americans go, assembled one license plate scan at a time.

The Fourth Amendment requires individualized suspicion and a warrant before the government searches a citizen’s home or vehicle. It does not stop applying simply because the surveillance happens on a public road. Blanket tracking of everyone who drives past a camera is the kind of mass data collection the Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment to prevent, even if the technology they could not have imagined is now making it trivially easy to do.

What Jacobs did in Knox County, and what Mike Carter did at Gun Commanders, and what Eagle Sports Range did in Wisconsin, is not complicated. It is a refusal to participate in a surveillance apparatus that was installed quietly, expanded aggressively, and justified with the same logic that has been used to justify every government overreach since the country was founded: safety.

But safety is not a blank check on the Bill of Rights. And the fact that it took a former professional wrestler turned county mayor to say so out loud, while Congress is only now getting around to introducing a bill, tells you something about how far the surveillance state had already crept before anyone sounded the alarm.

Flock has not responded to the DCNF’s request for comment on Jacobs’ letter. The cameras, for now, remain in place. But the contract Jacobs says is invalid is the same contract that was initiated by a man now indicted in a theft conspiracy, approved without the oversight the county’s own rules require, and expanded in ways that most Knox County residents never voted for and never knew about.

That is not a public safety program. That is what the surveillance state looks like when it moves faster than the people it is supposed to serve.

Sources: Daily Caller News Foundation; WVLT; WBIR; WIVK-FM; Fox News; The Center Square; Bearing Arms; WISN