A former World Wrestling Entertainment star turned Tennessee mayor just choke-slammed a $1 million deal to install hundreds of Flock Safety cameras across his home county.
Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs — who had a 30-year wrestling Hall of Famer career as Kane Kane — has “paused” the local sheriff’s plans to install 270 Flock cameras over concerns the AI-tech violated Fourth Amendment protections of unreasonable search and seizure, he told The Post.
“The more that I’ve learned about Flock cameras, the more troubled I am,” Jacobs said.
He and the sheriff are on the same page, and the pause remains in effect until the pair are replaced in office next month, he added.
Mayor Glenn Jacobs, a former WWE superstar and the now two-term mayor of Knox County, has “paused” the Sheriff’s plans to install 270 Flock cameras in his municipality. USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
Flock Safety is the Atlanta-based company behind the brand of controversial smart-cameras that can track a car’s every move based on its dents, bumper stickers and roof racks.
“[Flock cameras] track people’s every movement and track where you are going every single day — that, to me, is the most disturbing aspect of this and it’s unconstitutional,” he told The Post, citing the Supreme Court ruling in the 2018 case, Carpenter v. United States, which found that police need a warrant to access location data that reveals a person’s movements over time.
Kane — who is now mayor of Knox County, Tennessee — just choked-slammed his county’s deal to install hundreds of Flock Safety cameras over privacy concerns. Corbis via Getty Images
The mayor believes that Flock is ushering-in “blanket surveillance” on law-abiding citizens.
He claimed the company has continuously lacked transparency regarding what their cameras can truly do, saying it has “capabilities not even imagined.” He pointed out several instances of documented abuse of Flock data as reasons the pause was necessary.
Just last month,18 Georgia officers were arrested for misusing Flock Safety date — including a police supervisor who used the camera system to track her boyfriend, reports said.
The Hall-of-Fame mayor believes that Flock is ushering-in “blanket surveillance” on mainly law-abiding citizens. Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
“It is not that we don’t want law enforcement to have the tools they need to do their jobs — it’s that there needs to be a pause until we have the regulations in place that protect the confines of the constitution,” Jacobs said.
Flock, however, has already quietly become law enforcement’s go-to surveillance tool around the country, having wired itself into more than 5,000 police agencies nationwide with nearly 90,000 cameras live since 2018, according to DeFlock, an activist group tracking the company’s surveillance and expansion.
The growing anger and concern regarding the cameras, which have been criticized as “Big Brother”-style mass surveillance systems for the local governments around the country, has led to attacks on the tech’s infrastructure from vigilantes and protestors.
Last month alone, there were multiple instances of Flock cameras getting vandalized.
Jacobs spent 30 years in pro wrestling, and was known best as Kane. WireImage
This includes a series of incidents in California, Long Island, Connecticut and upstate New York in the last month alone, according to officials and sources.
A slew of bills have now been introduced to regulate the tech, including new legislation by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) that would strip federal funding from any local governments or police departments that deploy the controversial security cameras.
A spokesperson for Flock did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
