What Coal Country Can Teach America About Fighting Flock
From socialists to Freedom Caucus Republicans, an unlikely coalition is working to ban mass surveillance technology in deep-red West Virginia.
Schuyler Mitchell
Paige Reiring showed up at Woodchuck’s house with a revolver strapped to her hip. She didn’t know anything about the man except that he loved America and hated Flock cameras. He’d reached out to Reiring via TikTok after seeing her videos tracking automated license plate readers in the city of Morgantown; he wanted her to come look at a new one in his neighborhood. Reiring told me she brought her gun as insurance—this was West Virginia, after all, and she was “just one lady.”
At first glance, Reiring—a 33-year-old lesbian socialist and third-party candidate for the West Virginia House of Delegates—wouldn’t seem to have much in common with Woodchuck, a proud patriot who decries so-called “Nazi communist bastards” for putting a surveillance camera in front of his yard. But over the course of a 45-minute conversation, the two found they were standing on some solid common ground. Neither thinks mass surveillance has a place in West Virginia. Or, for that matter, anywhere else.
“If I had introduced myself as a socialist, he would not have spoken to me,” Reiring said. But when she told Woodchuck she was running for the state house seat in his district, he pledged to pass out her yard signs. “‘We need people like you who are willing to point these things out and get rid of them,’” Reiring recalled him saying of Flock cameras.
In 2026, few things unite Americans more than hating Flock. The company’s AI-powered network of license plate readers has been at the center of a much-documented nationwide backlash, as revelations about police abuses of the technology increasingly come to light. More than half of US voters now say they oppose ALPRs in their communities. And as my colleagues Chasity Hale and Sophie Hurwitz reported last month, “Both Republicans and Democrats in battleground states like Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are wooing voters by promising to place guardrails on unregulated surveillance technologies.” One Arizona sheriff put it best when he remarked at a hearing that “Flock has become a four-letter word.”
I’ve been covering policing and surveillance for years, and I’ve never seen a law enforcement technology catch quite as much flak as Flock. At first, the intense pushback surprised me—civil liberties advocates have been warning about the federal government’s expansion of mass surveillance since 9/11, and police departments across the country have long deployed ALPRs alongside other invasive technologies. I wanted to understand why Flock, specifically, has inspired such robust bipartisan reproach. But more importantly, I wanted to see where all this anti-Flock momentum is going—and if it could spark a wider anti-surveillance movement in America.
In August, I traveled to West Virginia in search of answers, where an unlikely coalition of activists is powering a thriving anti-Flock crusade. Crucially, the state isn’t a battleground: West Virginians voted for President Donald Trump by a whopping 42-point margin in 2024, second only to Wyoming, and Republicans hold more than nine in 10 seats in the state legislature. Yet state lawmakers in Charleston have been among the most aggressive in the country when it comes to publicly sparring with Flock executives over privacy concerns. While some officials are calling for better guardrails, many critics—including both the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia and the ultra-conservative state Freedom Caucus—are pushing to ban mass surveillance technology altogether. Freedom Caucus chair S. Chris Anders told me Flock is “the first really big bipartisan issue [he’s] seen come up” in West Virginia since starting his term in 2024.
In an August hearing, state delegates grilled Flock’s director of government affairs, Kevin Kane, on the company’s privacy policies and security. Unsatisfied with Kane’s answers, Republican lawmakers then exchanged a series of scathing public letters with Flock, accusing the company of attempting to hold secretive back-door conversations and demanding that corporate representatives testify under oath before the House Government Organization Committee. Flock’s “technical personnel” are now set to appear in Charleston days after the midterm elections; legislators say to expect state regulations next year.
The backlash to Flock “is an example of the facade starting to crumble,” said Kyle Vass, an investigative reporter with the West Virginia ACLU who grew up in the southwestern city of Huntington. “People are seeing this for what it is: the expansion of the police state.”
On a Monday night in mid-August, I attended a “DeFlock teach-in” at Monkey Wrench Books in downtown Morgantown, a city in the north-central part of the state that’s home to West Virginia University. More than 40 people packed into the small space, squeezing between bookshelves displaying titles like All This Safety is Killing Us and Why Would Feminists Trust the Police?
The crowd was rapt as civil rights attorney Lesley Nash explained how to find public information about Monongalia County’s Flock contract and navigate the open-source ALPR mapping website DeFlock. When it came time for audience questions, a young, cherub-faced man with long dirty-blond hair announced he’d recently been arrested for allegedly destroying a Flock camera. The room erupted in applause. “You didn’t do it!” someone shouted.
Earlier that month, a local news post about the young man’s arrest had received 29,000 comments, as Facebook users rushed to his defense with a flood of implausible alibis. (Morgantown has a population of around 30,000.) Suffice to say he’s a bit of a hometown hero.
“We have this really long history of people who aren’t from here, who have a lot of money, coming in and extracting wealth from the state, and then leaving the state in shambles.”
In Morgantown, locals have been particularly incensed that the Monongalia County Commission approved spending up to $180,000 of opioid settlement money to fund the sheriff’s office’s contract with Flock. Those funds—the product of years of nationwide litigation against major pharmaceutical companies accused of fueling the opioid epidemic—were largely intended to provide crucial addiction recovery and harm reduction services. Yet since 2022, much of that money has flowed into law enforcement agencies’ coffers. In an August investigation for Mother Jones, I found that Monongalia County wasn’t alone; as of this writing, at least 22 agencies in twelve different states have spent more than $1.4 million in opioid funds on Flock and other ALPRs. Seven of those agencies are in West Virginia.
“There is not a single human being inside the state of West Virginia who was born and raised here who has not been adversely affected by the opioid crisis,” Adam Menear, a 45-year-old father born and raised in Morgantown, told me at the time. He started a petition in March calling on the Monongalia County Commission to halt the installation of Flock cameras. It’s received more than 1,600 signatures.
“The new crisis,” Menear added, “is the fact that the funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.” (The Monongalia County Commission did not respond to a request for comment.)
Police Are Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Flock Cameras
Menear’s comments echoed a sentiment I heard from numerous West Virginians: Public agencies’ contracts with Flock feel like the latest slight in a long history of corporate repression and state abandonment.
During the peak of the industrial coal boom, primarily out-of-state coal operators owned hundreds of company towns across Appalachia. Absentee corporations controlled the homes, roads, schools, churches, private security forces—even the drinking water. Miners were pressured to shop at company-owned stores with company-issued currency. “Nowhere was the percentage of miners who lived in company towns higher than in West Virginia, where nearly eight of every ten miners were subject to such control,” writes historian Ken Fones-Wolf in the foreword to Frederick Barkey’s book Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party in West Virginia, 1898–1920. Coal mining made a few West Virginia families very rich, but much of the wealth flowed away from the state—and as the coal industry declined, companies packed up and moved out, leaving decrepit infrastructure and impoverished communities in their wake.
Today, West Virginia consistently ranks last or near-last in public health, education, and economic outcomes. It has the highest drug overdose death rate in the country and the highest rate of adult depression.
“I like to describe West Virginia as an extraction colony within the borders of the US,” said Vass, of the ACLU-WV. “We have this really long history of people who aren’t from here, who have a lot of money, coming in and extracting wealth from the state, and then leaving the state in shambles.” Coal was West Virginia’s third and most famous wave of extraction, but it was preceded by the salt industry’s exploitation of enslaved labor in the early 1800s and the late-19th century commercial logging boom.
Now, Vass says, it’s tech companies that are performing a new form of 21st-century digital extraction: hoovering up the personal data of everyday Americans without their consent, without a warrant, and making a profit. (Flock didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions, but the company “does not sell data,” a spokesperson said.)
In Huntington—the second-most populous city in West Virginia and the gateway to its southern coal fields—city officials voted in July to approve a contract with Flock despite seven hours of largely negative public comment. “I think Flock has really been the spark that’s ignited the conversation around data collection and tech companies as a form of extraction,” Vass said. He noted that people are connecting the rise of AI-powered mass surveillance to fights against data center development in their communities—perhaps the only political issue that’s currently more bipartisan than Flock. Organizers are now working to gather signatures for a citywide ballot initiative that would cancel Huntington’s Flock contract and prohibit other third-party mass surveillance systems in the city.
Up north in Morgantown, Paige Reiring also pointed to state history when explaining why the backlash to Flock has been so impassioned. Over coffee at Monkey Wrench Books, Reiring pulled out her phone and began swiping through her camera roll—“just so you know that I do live by the things I say.” She showed me images she’s saved of abolitionist John Brown, as well as West Virginia labor icons like Sid Hatfield and Bill Blizzard, who fought on the side of union miners during the bitter Coal Wars of the early 20th century. During that time, miners struggled for better wages and union recognition in a series of violent clashes, while coal companies paid private detectives to infiltrate and spy on organizers. The fighting culminated in the infamous Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest armed civil insurrection in the US outside of the Civil War.
“West Virginia is a red state, but this is a state that has been under martial law several times, including during the West Virginia mine wars,” Reiring said. “I think there is a very strong spirit of understanding what it’s like to be constantly surveilled and have your life monitored by people who have power over you.”
Police are “acting like they never solved any crimes before the invention of this technology,” said Republican state legislator S. Chris Anders.
Framing Flock as a bipartisan issue in West Virginia feels a bit like pointing at the sun and calling it hot: accurate, sure, but a pretty facile description. Most people I spoke with didn’t identify with a major party at all, even if the state looks deep red on paper. And unaffiliated voter registrations are increasing.
Menear, the Morgantown father, told me he has “no trust for political parties.” But if he really had to explain, he says, he’d just tell you, “I believe in freedom.” A fervent belief in privacy and civil liberty—and a deep skepticism of the political establishment—is far more of an organizing force here than any party label.
If anything, in more recent history, these types of issues have generally been seen as the domain of Republicans. GOP Delegate S. Chris Anders, for instance, lists banning Flock cameras and mass warrantless surveillance as his number-one priority, alongside things like stopping the “trafficking of abortion pills into West Virginia” and ending “woke ideology” in schools. On the homepage of his reelection campaign site, he poses in a full-bleed photo, dark sunglasses on, aiming an AR-15 rifle. The image is overlaid with a quote, attributed to Anders: “I will not waver in my support of the principles of Life, Individual Liberty, and Private Property.”
As chair of the Freedom Caucus, Anders has been among the more radical camp pushing for a full ban on Flock; other Republicans’ proposed guardrails, he says, just won’t do. I asked him how he weighs his support for police officers, who say they need Flock to keep people safe, against his concerns about government overreach.
“It’s fairly simple,” Anders told me. Police are “acting like they never solved any crimes before the invention of this technology,” he said, but “it is not the job of the Constitution to bend itself around technology. It’s a job of technology to bend itself around the Constitution.” Anders introduced the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act in January, which would prohibit West Virginia law enforcement from using facial recognition software, surveillance drones, ALPRs, and other surveillance technologies without a warrant.
A bill that far-reaching is unlikely to pass at the state level, so Anders also worked with Jefferson County commissioners in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle to draft a resolution banning mass surveillance tech on county property. At an October 16 meeting, the five-person, all-Republican commission unanimously—and enthusiastically—voted to approve the resolution.
“Harpers Ferry is the birthplace of the civil rights movement,” commission president Pasha Majdi said at the meeting, referencing John Brown’s armed abolitionist raid in 1859. “It’s only fitting that Jefferson County is first in banning mass surveillance technology, the greatest threat to our civil liberties today.” Only one other commission in the US, Oconee County in South Carolina, has passed a similarly comprehensive ordinance.
In pushing for a total ban, Anders finds himself in an unlikely alliance with groups like ACLU–WV and DeFlock Monongalia, a grassroots collective that grew out of Morgantown mutual aid efforts. Voters on the left have expressed concerns that Immigration and Customs Enforcement reportedly tapped into Flock’s nationwide network, even as Flock claims it doesn’t share data with ICE. Other reports have found cops using the system to surveil No Kings protesters and to track a woman across state lines after she self-administered an abortion.
In October, DeFlock Monongalia obtained audit logs from the Monongalia County Sheriff’s Office via a public records request, which showed the county’s system had been searched more than 3 million times by 3,918 external organizations during the first nine months of 2026. The three law enforcement agencies that queried Monongalia County’s data the most were all located in Texas, and none of the top 20 were in West Virginia.
Aaron Hamler, 31, has been fighting Flock in Fairmont, a former coal mining town about 30 minutes’ drive from Morgantown, where city officials have spent about $30,000 to install five Flock cameras in public parks. I dropped by an organizing meeting at the Marion County Public Library, located in a charming 115-year-old former post office in downtown Fairmont. There, attendees crafted educational zines and sought practical advice from a Fairmont city council member who fielded in-the-weeds procedural questions about how to get a city contract cancelled.
Hamler told me that he sees the organizing wave against Flock as an opportunity to push for broader systemic change. West Virginians, like so many Americans, are fed up with the cost of living; they’re struggling to survive, Hamler says, and might find themselves “politically homeless.” He’s now working to start the first Democratic Socialists of America chapter in the region—there’s currently only one other DSA group in West Virginia, an organizing committee in Wheeling, about 100 miles away.
“A lot of people that I talk to have been in this spot where you’re too poor to survive, but you’re too rich to get any sort of benefits,” Hamler told me. Case in point: He and his wife, both health care workers, don’t qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because they’re “right over that line.” When they couldn’t afford daycare, his wife reduced her hours at the hospital to watch their daughter during the week, moving her shifts to weekends instead.
As the working class gets poorer and tech oligarchs get richer, it feels like Americans are “watching logs get put on a fire soon to be lit,” Hamler said. And when people see public funds allocated to something like ALPRs—or tax breaks given to data centers, or billions of dollars spent on a war with Iran—it feels to them like a personal violation. Flock cameras are just “part of the match that’s lighting the small corner of the log.”
