It wasn’t a lock, it was #flock @moreperfectunion

Our Take

Credit where it's due: @abighairyspider's wordplay—"it wasn't a lock, it was Flock"—does more work in a few seconds than most press releases do in a page. It reframes a quiet piece of street furniture most people walk past without a second glance as what it actually is: a camera that reads, timestamps, and stores your plate, your car, and your movements, often without your city council ever holding a real public hearing on it.

That More Perfect Union picked this up matters. These cameras get sold to local governments as a crime-fighting convenience, but the pitch skips the part where the data lives in a company's cloud, gets shared across a nationwide network of agencies, and can be queried for reasons that have nothing to do with the original justification. A lock protects your stuff. A Flock camera collects information about everyone who drives by, guilty or not, and keeps it.

If this clip made you wonder whether there's one of these near you, there probably is—check our camera map to see what's been documented in your area, and if you want to push back on your local deployment, our take-action page has concrete steps for showing up at the next council meeting instead of just scrolling past.