How Public Safety’ Could Turn Into Mass Surveillance | ALPRs, Tom Homan & Zero Tolerance

Our Take

Technocracy Dissident's breakdown gets at something we've been flagging for a while: the gap between how ALPRs are marketed and how they can actually be used. Flock Safety sells these cameras as a quiet neighborhood watchdog for stolen cars and amber alerts. But the video does good work connecting that pitch to the political moment — when officials start talking about "zero tolerance" for protesters and their "supporters," the infrastructure to surveil an entire movement is already sitting on utility poles in thousands of towns. You don't need a new law to abuse a camera network that's already logging every plate that passes by. You just need a new justification.

The Carpenter v. United States angle is the right legal thread to pull. That decision recognized that stitching together someone's movements over time reveals far more than any single data point — it's the pattern that's invasive. ALPR networks do exactly that, at scale, for anyone who drives near one of Flock's cameras, whether they're a suspect, a witness, or just someone who went to a protest once. When "public safety" becomes the catch-all excuse, the people getting tracked aren't just criminals — they're whoever officials decide is inconvenient that week.

This is why we keep pushing people to see what's actually deployed near them. Check our camera map to find Flock installations in your area, and if you want to push back on secretive contracts or unchecked expansion, our take-action page has concrete steps for your city council meeting. Credit to Technocracy Dissident for laying out the mechanics clearly — the more people understand how this system works, the harder it is to quietly weaponize it.