Originally Published on Real Clear Politics
There is probably a camera on a pole at the entrance to your neighborhood. You’ve probably stopped noticing it. It is small, solar-powered, unremarkable, and it photographs every car that passes: yours, your neighbor’s, your teenager’s. And it reads the license plate, logs the time, and files the record in a national database. The company that owns it is called Flock Safety. Founded in 2017, valued at $7.5 billion, it now operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states, and its network scans roughly 20 billion vehicles a month.
Twenty billion. Each month. For perspective, there are about 290 million registered vehicles in the United States, which means the average American car is photographed, catalogued, and made searchable hundreds of times every year. Not because of a federal, state, or local warrant, not by court order, but by a subscription service your city council approved in the middle of tedious meeting never covered by any news organization and attended by a few bored citizens.
And the license plates were just the beginning.
Flock Safety now sells cameras that automatically zoom in on faces, audio sensors that listen for gunshots and, per an October company announcement, human screams, drones, and a “public safety data platform” called Nova that merges plate reads with data-breach records and public files into a single searchable profile.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s verdict on Nova: a “dystopian panopticon.” In September 2024, Oracle’s Larry Ellison stood before financial analysts and described where all this is headed with admirable candor: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
And he meant it as a selling point.
It is worth recalling how we got here, because the road, while sadly well-worn, is instructive. In April 2004, Google launched Gmail, and Americans in some quarters had a minor conniption. Google scanned the text of your email to place ads beside it; no human read anything, the company insisted, but 31 privacy organizations demanded the launch be suspended. A California state senator introduced a bill to stop it. Editorial pages lectured. The idea that a corporation would read your correspondence to sell you shoes struck ordinary Americans as self-evidently creepy.
That was the high-water mark of our resistance.