deflock and repeal the patriot act

Our Take

Credit to Yodesmoeses for drawing a straight line between two eras of surveillance expansion. The Patriot Act normalized the idea that Americans should trade privacy for a vague promise of safety, and two decades later Flock Safety's camera networks are doing the same thing at the neighborhood level — no warrant, no debate, just cameras quietly logging every car that passes.

That framing matters because ALPR systems don't feel like the NSA or FISA courts. They feel like local government doing its job, dressed up as crime-fighting tech. But the data they generate — where you drove, when, how often — gets stored, shared, and sometimes handed to federal agencies without the public ever voting on it. Treating Flock as part of the same surveillance lineage as the Patriot Act is a useful reminder that mass data collection doesn't need a dramatic name to be dangerous.

If you want to see how far this has spread in your own area, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for city council meetings and public records requests.