🚨 Are Women Safe or Surveilled How the Surveillance State Became a Tool of Abuse

Our Take

Freedom Uncut raises a question we think about constantly: who's actually watching the watchers? Every Flock camera, every license plate reader, every 'safety' network is only as trustworthy as the humans who can query it. And history keeps showing us that cops, dispatchers, and other insiders have used law enforcement databases to look up exes, run plates on women they're interested in, or feed information to abusive partners. A system marketed as protection becomes a vector for exactly the harm it claims to prevent.

Flock Safety likes to point to audit logs as the fix, but logs only matter if someone is actually reviewing them, and most agencies have shown little appetite for that kind of self-policing. The deeper problem is architectural: once a dense, searchable record of everyone's movements exists, it will be abused, because that's what surveillance infrastructure does over time, regardless of the stated intent at rollout. 'Safety' framing is how these networks get funded and expanded; accountability is rarely built in with the same urgency.

Credit to Freedom Uncut for putting this uncomfortable tradeoff in front of viewers instead of just taking the marketing at face value. If you want to see how far this infrastructure already reaches in your own area, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for the next abuse scandal to make the news, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back locally.