‘Orwell Wrote About It’: Experts Warn Flock Cameras Can Turn License Plate Into Mass Surveillance

Our Take

When the warnings start coming from inside a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room instead of just from privacy advocates, it's worth paying attention. The No Cap Press captures a moment that's been a long time coming: witnesses telling lawmakers, in plain terms, that a network of cameras designed to track 'suspects' is in practice tracking everyone. That's the core problem with Flock Safety's business model — it doesn't need you to be a suspect to log your plate, your location, and your pattern of life.

The 'Orwell' comparison gets thrown around a lot, maybe too much, but it's earned here. A system that records millions of plates a day, shares data across agencies and state lines with little oversight, and gets sold to small towns as a crime-fighting convenience is exactly the kind of infrastructure a surveillance state is built on — not through one dramatic overreach, but through thousands of quiet, 'reasonable' installations. Once that network exists, the use case always expands, and the public rarely gets a vote on where the line is.

Hearings like this matter because they put accountability pressure on the people writing the checks and the contracts. But testimony alone doesn't take a camera down — public records requests, local pushback, and informed residents do. Check our map to see what's watching your plate right now, and visit take action if you want to push back in your own town.