Fake Flock Cameras Exist. #flocksafety #surveillancestate

Our Take

Art The Enemy (via a nod to Benn Jordan) is onto something that should unsettle anyone paying attention to the ALPR boom: you don't even need a working camera to surveil a population anymore. If people believe a pole might be watching, they start behaving as if it is. That's the real product Flock Safety and its imitators are selling — not just data, but a psychological environment of constant possible observation. Fake units are cheap insurance for that effect, no warrant, no footage, no accountability required.

This matters because it scrambles the usual arguments about oversight. Departments can point to "transparency portals" and retention policies all day, but none of that applies to a dummy box bolted up by who-knows-who to scare drivers straight. The result is a surveillance landscape that's even harder to audit than the real one, because now you can't even trust your own eyes to tell you whether you're being tracked.

We'd rather people spend less energy guessing and more energy documenting. If you spot a suspicious pole-mounted camera, real or fake, log it on our map so the community can start building an actual picture instead of relying on rumor and intimidation. And if you want to push back on the broader rollout of this tech in your city, our take-action page has concrete steps.