IU donation; Flock cameras; Gas tax

Our Take

Credit to WTIU's Clayton Baumgarth for at least putting Flock cameras on the local news docket, even if it's sandwiched between a $100 million university donation and a gas tax update. That's actually how a lot of communities first hear about license plate readers rolling into their town: as a quick mention in a roundup segment, not as a standalone story about a surveillance system that logs every car that passes a fixed point, forever, in a database most residents never voted on.

That's the real danger of Flock's expansion strategy. It doesn't announce itself as "mass surveillance infrastructure" — it shows up as a line item in a city council budget or a passing mention in a news brief, right next to a story about school funding. By the time people realize hundreds of these cameras are quietly building a searchable record of their daily movements, the network is already installed and normalized.

If you're in Indiana or anywhere else and want to know whether Flock has already set up shop near you, check our camera map before it becomes just another line in a local news brief. And if you want to push back on a deployment near you, our take-action page has the tools to start.