The cameras will only be used "criminals" until that word is redefined #deflock #flockcameras

Our Take

Peter Zezas packs a lot into a few seconds here, and it's worth sitting with: every surveillance system sold to the public starts with a narrow, popular target. Flock Safety pitches its cameras as tools for catching stolen cars and violent fugitives. But the hardware doesn't know the difference between a carjacker and a woman crossing state lines for a legal medical procedure that's illegal somewhere else, or an undocumented neighbor, or a protester whose cause falls out of favor with whoever's in office. The database doesn't forget, and the legal definition of 'criminal' is not fixed — it's whatever the next bill, executive order, or prosecutor's whim says it is.

That's the core problem with ALPR mission creep: the infrastructure is built once, under one set of assumptions, and then persists under every administration that follows. Flock's own marketing leans hard on trust-us framing, but trust isn't a technical safeguard. Once a few thousand cameras are logging every plate that passes, repurposing that data for a new category of 'criminal' is just a policy memo away, not a new installation.

Credit to Zezas for compressing that warning into a few words instead of a lecture. If you want to see how close this infrastructure already is to your own street, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait to find out how the definition changes, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back locally.