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⏱️ 5-minute read
When Seeing Becomes Tracking
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Flock Safety [ [link removed] ] and the rapidly expanding network of automated license-plate readers appearing along roads across America. Police departments use Flock cameras to find stolen cars, locate suspects, and solve crimes.
That is exactly what makes this issue hard. A technology can work and still give government powers free people should be reluctant to hand over. My concern then, and now, is the difference between seeing and tracking.
A police officer can sit alongside a road and see my car drive past. I have no reasonable expectation that nobody will see me while I am driving in public. But connect thousands of cameras, preserve those observations, and make the database searchable, and the government suddenly can reconstruct where people have been.
Twenty years ago, following someone around town required officers, cars, manpower, and time. Those practical limits mattered because surveillance was expensive and difficult. Now a dense network of cameras can do much of the same work with a few keystrokes.
The concern is not that Flock fails. It is that it works so well.
Technology has changed what government can know about us. It hasn’t changed what government has any legitimate reason to know.
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Below the paywall, I break down:
What Ron DeSantis is doing to pull Flock cameras off Florida state highways
Why Greg Abbott shut off Texas state funding for further expansion of the Flock network
How a $1 fee aimed at catalytic-converter theft helped finance thousands of surveillance cameras
Why opposition to Flock is becoming a bipartisan issue across the country
How California lawmakers failed to get even modest privacy safeguards to Governor Newsom
Why the real issue is bigger than Flock — and bigger than whichever party controls government today...
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