Should Palantir and Flock have access to all of your data? Mass surveillance in the guise of safety.

Our Take

Jayson Toweh's video cuts to the real issue with a simple, pointed question: should private companies like Palantir and Flock Safety have access to all of your data? We don't know the full details of what he covers, but the framing alone is worth sitting with. 'Safety' has become the all-purpose justification for building surveillance infrastructure that would never survive a direct vote if it were pitched honestly as 'a permanent log of everywhere your car goes, shared across thousands of agencies and private partners.'

The Palantir connection matters because it signals where this is headed. ALPR data isn't just sitting in a local police server anymore — it's being fed into data-fusion platforms built for pattern-of-life analysis at scale. Once that pipeline exists, the original justification (catching stolen cars, finding wanted suspects) becomes almost incidental to the bigger capability being built: a searchable history of human movement, available to whoever can get access, now or later.

Credit to Toweh for pushing this question into public view, because most people still don't know these systems are running in their own neighborhoods. If you want to see how close this infrastructure is to you, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action resources walk through how.