Glenn Jacobs, the former WWE wrestler known as Kane who now serves as Knox County, Tennessee's mayor, has blocked a plan to install 270 surveillance cameras across the county, warning the technology amounts to unconstitutional tracking of law-abiding citizens.
Jacobs paused the Knox County Sheriff's planned $1 million contract with Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company whose AI-powered license-plate readers have spread to more than 5,000 police departments nationwide since 2018. The mayor told the New York Post the cameras raise serious constitutional problems, and that the pause will remain in place until he and the sheriff leave office next month.
The decision puts a local Republican executive squarely at the center of a growing national fight over whether Flock Safety's surveillance network violates the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. It also lands days after Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, introduced federal legislation that would strip funding from any local government or police department deploying the cameras.
Jacobs, a 30-year WWE Hall of Famer who wrestled under the name Kane before entering politics, was straightforward about what pushed him to act.
"The more that I've learned about Flock cameras, the more troubled I am."
His concern centers on the scope of the data Flock's cameras collect. The system does not simply snap a photo when a stolen car rolls past. It logs license plates, vehicle descriptions, and movement patterns continuously, building a detailed picture of where ordinary people go and when.
"[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."
Jacobs pointed to the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States, which held that police need a warrant to access location data revealing a person's movements over time. That decision dealt with cellphone records, but Jacobs argued the same principle applies to a network of cameras that can reconstruct a driver's daily routine without judicial oversight.
He also raised concerns about capabilities the company has not fully disclosed. Jacobs told the Post that Flock's technology has developed "capabilities not even imagined" and faulted the company for a lack of transparency about what its system can actually do.
The constitutional argument is not theoretical. Jacobs cited documented abuse of Flock data, and the record backs him up. Last month, 18 Georgia law-enforcement officers were arrested for misusing Flock Safety's camera system. Among them was a police supervisor who used the technology to track her boyfriend.
That case illustrates the risk Jacobs described: a surveillance tool sold as a crime-fighting asset can become a personal tracking device in the hands of anyone with a login. No warrant. No probable cause. No judge. Just access.
Jacobs framed his position carefully, making clear he was not trying to hamstring law enforcement.
"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."
The Knox County Sheriff, whose name was not included in the Post's reporting, is described as being "on the same page" as the mayor regarding the pause. That alignment matters. It means the hold is not a political standoff between two officials but a shared judgment that the legal framework has not caught up with the technology.
Flock Safety has grown at a striking pace. The activist group DeFlock, which tracks the company's surveillance footprint, estimates Flock has wired itself into more than 5,000 police agencies with nearly 90,000 cameras live since 2018. That is a massive network of automated watchers spread across American roads, intersections, and neighborhoods, most of it installed with little public debate.
The backlash is arriving from multiple directions. On Capitol Hill, Rep. Massie's bill targeting Flock deployments would hit departments where it hurts, in the federal grant money many agencies depend on. The bill's details, including its formal title and number, have not been made public in available reporting, but its intent is plain: force local governments to choose between federal dollars and warrantless surveillance.
On the ground, resistance has turned physical. In the last month alone, Flock cameras were vandalized in California, Long Island, Connecticut, and upstate New York. Whether those incidents were coordinated or coincidental is unclear, but they signal a public that is not waiting for Congress to act.
Flock Safety did not respond to the Post's request for comment.
Jacobs's hold on the camera contract carries an obvious limitation. Both he and the Knox County Sheriff are set to leave office next month. Their replacements will inherit the decision, and the $1 million deal sitting on the shelf.
Whether the incoming officials will maintain the pause, renegotiate the contract with new privacy safeguards, or greenlight the cameras without conditions remains an open question. Jacobs has set the terms of the debate, but he will not be around to enforce them.
That makes the federal track potentially more durable. If Massie's bill gains traction, the question shifts from local discretion to national policy, and local officials who want the cameras will have to weigh the cost of lost federal funding against whatever crime-reduction benefit Flock promises.
No court has yet ruled directly on whether Flock Safety's camera deployments violate Carpenter. That gap leaves the constitutional question unresolved and gives both sides room to argue. But the Georgia arrests make the abuse risk concrete, not hypothetical. Eighteen officers with access to a surveillance system used it for purposes that had nothing to do with public safety. One tracked a boyfriend.
Conservatives who rightly distrust government overreach should pay attention to this fight. The instinct to back law enforcement is sound, but backing law enforcement does not require handing every badge in America a tool that logs where every driver goes, every day, without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment does not include a carve-out for convenience, and no amount of slick technology changes that.
