These are tracking your every MOVE! #politics #safety #datacenters #shorts

Our Take

Aleks Vranicic's short cuts to the exact question we keep hammering on: it's not just that Flock Safety's cameras are everywhere, it's that a private company is sitting on a firehose of location data — billions of plate scans a month — and quietly cross-referencing it against police and government databases. That's not a neighborhood watch, that's a nationwide tracking infrastructure running on autopilot, with almost no public vote on whether it should exist.

The "who controls it" framing matters because ownership determines accountability. When a local police department buys a camera, at least there's a city council and a records request to lean on. When the actual data lives inside Flock's servers, gets pooled into a national network, and gets shared across jurisdictions with vague retention and audit rules, the chain of accountability gets murky fast — and that's by design, not accident.

Short-form videos like this one are doing real work just by putting the scale of this system in front of people who've never noticed the black-and-white camera bolted to a pole near their exit ramp. If this is news to you, go see how close the network already is to your own street on our map, and check take-action for ways to push back at the local level.