Why We’re Obsessing Over License Plate Readers While the Real Surveillance Happens in Our Pockets
The Big Idea: Flock Safety cameras have become the villain of countless town hall meetings and Reddit threads. But while we argue about license plate readers on lampposts, we voluntarily carry the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in human history, and feed it our lives, minute by minute. Flock is the magician’s waving hand. The real trick is happening elsewhere.
The Flock Panic
If you’ve driven through an American suburb recently, you’ve probably passed one: a small black camera on a slim pole, quietly logging your license plate, the make and color of your car, and the exact time you passed. These are Flock Safety cameras. Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that have spread across thousands of U.S. communities, often installed by police departments or even neighborhood associations.And people are furious, understandably so. The concerns are real:
- Persistent tracking of vehicle movements across networked jurisdictions
- Data retention for weeks or months, searchable by law enforcement and private industy without warrant.
- Minimal oversight and murky data-sharing agreements
- Function creep, where a tool sold for “finding stolen cars” becomes a general dragnet
These are legitimate grievances. But here’s the uncomfortable question:
Why are we so fixated on the camera we can see, when the ones we can’t are infinitely more powerful?
The Sleight of Hand
Flock cameras are visible. They’re physical. You can point at one, photograph it, demand a city council remove it. That tangibility makes them a perfect target for outrage, and a perfect distraction.Consider what a Flock camera actually knows about you:
- Your car passed a fixed point at a specific time.
Now consider what the smartphone in your pocket knows:
| Data Source | What It Reveals |
|---|---|
| GPS / location services | Every place you go, how long you stay, patterns over years |
| Accelerometer | How you walk, drive, sleep—even your gait signature |
| Microphone permissions | Ambient audio, keywords, environment |
| App telemetry | Who you talk to, what you buy, what you desire at 2 AM |
| Purchase history | Health conditions, financial stress, life events |
| Social graph | Your relationships, affiliations, and influences |
| A Flock camera sees a car. Your phone sees a soul. And unlike the camera on the pole, you paid $1,000 for the privilege of carrying it. |
A Brief History of Watching
Surveillance isn’t new. What’s new is its invisibility and predictive power.
- The Panopticon (1791): Jeremy Bentham designed a prison where a single guard could watch any inmate at any time, but inmates could never tell when. The genius wasn’t constant observation; it was the possibility of it.
- The Stasi (East Germany): At its peak, one informant for roughly every 6.5 citizens. Labor-intensive, human-driven, and yet still incomplete.
- CCTV Britain (1990s–2000s): Cameras everywhere, but requiring humans to review footage…analog eyes on analog tape.
- Today: No guards needed. No informants. No tape to review. Algorithms watch everything, and more importantly, they predict.
The evolution isn’t just more surveillance. It’s a shift from observation to anticipation.
Foucault Saw This Coming
The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), used Bentham’s Panopticon as a metaphor for modern power. His key insight:
When you believe you might be watched at any moment, you begin to watch yourself. You self-censor. You conform. Surveillance becomes internalized until the watcher is no longer needed.
This is the profound difference between Flock and your phone. A Flock camera exerts external control…it catches you after the fact. But algorithmic surveillance achieves the Panopticon’s true goal: it shapes behavior before it happens.You hesitate before searching a controversial term. You think twice before texting a joke. You curate your digital self, knowing it’s all logged.
The prison has moved inside your head—and you built the cell yourself.
The Double-Edged Sword
Here’s the maddening part: the same technology that surveils us is genuinely useful.
- Your maps app predicts traffic because it’s tracking millions of people, including you.
- Your health app catches an irregular heartbeat because it monitors your body 24/7.
- Your assistant answers instantly because it’s learned your habits.
Convenience is the currency we use to purchase our own surveillance.This is what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism: a system where human experience is the raw material, and the product is prediction. Not just predicting what you’ll buy…but nudging what you’ll do, think, and feel. Elections, moods, movements, and markets can be shaped by whoever holds the data.Social engineering at scale no longer requires a Stasi officer. It requires an A/B test.
Winston and Julia, 2026
Recall 1984. Winston Smith and Julia flee to a quiet field in the countryside to escape the telescreens, to find one unwatched moment of intimacy and freedom.Now transplant them to today.They leave their phones behind (good…that defeats the location tracking, the microphones, the app telemetry). They drive to the countryside. But:
- Their license plates are logged by Flock cameras on the way out of town.
- Satellites image the open field from orbit.
- Their absence from the network is itself a data point, an anomaly worth flagging.
- The purchase of gas, the toll on the highway, the cell tower ping from a phone one of them forgot to fully power down.
The countryside offered Winston a blind spot because Oceania’s surveillance was physical and fixed…telescreens on walls. Today’s surveillance is ambient and predictive. There is no field far enough.But here’s the twist Orwell didn’t fully anticipate: Winston wouldn’t need to be forced. He’d carry the telescreen willingly, in his pocket, and check it 96 times a day. Julia would tag their location in a photo. The Party wouldn’t have to install anything. We volunteer.
So, What the Flock?
Flock cameras deserve scrutiny. Fight them, regulate them, demand transparency. But recognize the disproportion:
Fighting Flock cameras while ignoring your data footprint is like installing a deadbolt on a house with no walls.
The cameras on the poles are the surveillance we’re allowed to see, the acceptable target, the visible outrage, the distraction that lets the real machinery hum along quietly. The genuine architecture of prediction and control isn’t bolted to a lamppost. It’s in the cloud, in the algorithm, in the terms of service you scrolled past.The most effective surveillance state isn’t one that watches you against your will.It’s one you happily fund, feed, and carry everywhere, while pointing angrily at the camera on the corner.
If there is enough interest, I will divulge other ways and places you are “observed.” Or you can just ask Alexa.
On a completely different note, I have released a new book that asks the question, “Are You a Witch?” The link will take you to my author page, where you can browse a multitude of books on a variety of subjects. There is something for almost everyone.Thanks for stopping by, and feel free to comment below.
So the next time you see a Flock camera and feel that flash of indignation, ask yourself: what’s in my pocket, and what does it already know?That’s what the flock we should really be talking about.
BTW does FLOCK mean (For the Love Of Cats?) Probabaly not… More like flock of birds, or cars…or people..
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