The Corporate and Government Surveillance Trap You’re Paying For
The short version: A podcast duo unpacks how Flock-style ALPR networks blur the line between corporate data-harvesting and government surveillance — and who foots the bill.
Our Take
James Keys and Tunde Ogunlana over at Call It Like I See It are asking the right question: who exactly benefits when a private company builds the surveillance infrastructure that your local police department leans on daily? Flock Safety's model is the trap in the title — cities pay subscription fees for "crime-fighting" cameras, but the data, the standards, and the business incentives belong to a private vendor with every reason to expand its footprint, not shrink it.
That's the part too many city council debates skip over. This isn't a one-time purchase of equipment — it's a recurring revenue relationship where the product is a permanent record of where you drive, parked quietly in a database that police, federal agencies, and sometimes other paying customers can query. The "trap" framing is apt: once a few hundred cameras go up and departments build workflows around the data, pulling back becomes politically and operationally hard, even as the privacy cost to ordinary residents keeps climbing.
Credit to Keys and Ogunlana for putting corporate incentives at the center of the surveillance conversation instead of treating it as purely a law enforcement story. If you want to see how far this network already reaches in your area, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back at a city council meeting, our take-action page has what you need to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Call It Like I See It podcast, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.