Flock Cameras in Texas: Voters Say They Were MISLED

Our Take

Credit to the Flock Off channel for surfacing something we hear constantly in our own inbox: the bait-and-switch. Cities and counties pitch Flock Safety as a narrow tool for finding stolen cars or solving the occasional hit-and-run, then quietly expand it into a network that logs where every car goes, cross-references it with other jurisdictions, and in some cases gets wired into facial recognition and data broker pipelines like Palantir. Voters in Sarah Longwell's focus groups aren't wrong to feel lied to — the gap between the sales pitch and the actual data retention and sharing policies is the whole scandal.

What's striking is the cross-partisan nature of the anger. Tucker Carlson fans and die-hard Trump critics rarely agree on anything, but surveillance infrastructure that nobody voted for and nobody can see tends to flatten those divides fast. Christopher Hooks' point about Greg Abbott is sharp too — Texas has built its brand on 'we don't track you, we just let you build,' and a statewide plate-reading grid run by a private vendor cuts directly against that mythology. This isn't a red-state or blue-state problem, it's a consent problem.

If you want to see whether this is happening in your own city, check our camera map before you assume your local council was straight with you about what they signed up for — and if you find a camera that was never disclosed at a public meeting, our take-action guide walks you through how to push back.