I don't think paranoia about the connection standard was the goal here. It seems more likely to me they wanted to increase awareness of the fact there are FAR less obvious (and absurdly easy) ways for governments to spy on citizens than Flock's installations.

Even if the goals of the government for installing such hardware are above board, they aren't known for being the most mindful of security so these systems can often be hacked and abused by malicious entities. It's something that really does need well thought out limitations set.

We should push back against all of it

The issue is that they can do it without anyone knowing, it has no approval or denial process involved. You hear about flock now, but this is a new technology that most aren't looking at and isn't regulated.

If there was a hidden, little-discussed USB port at the top of every streetlight, that might be a cause for concern, yes

It's not even USB. All data connections are wireless and either through a phone connection or a Wi-Fi mesh network (and calling it a mesh is generous, in practice this will be a dodgy daisy chain of connections running down the road).

That's fine for updating the timing of lights to match sunset, but it sucks for data heavy applications like video surveillance.