Lawmakers Admit They Don't Get the Tech They Pass

Our Take

This short from Verified Privacy VPN lands on something we've seen play out in city council chambers across the country: the people voting to approve Flock Safety contracts are often getting their entire technical education from Flock Safety itself. There's no independent technologist in the room, no adversarial testing, no one asking what happens when a database of every car's movements gets subpoenaed, hacked, or misused. The vendor makes the pitch, council nods along, and a permanent surveillance layer gets bolted onto a town that never really understood what it was buying.

This isn't a hypothetical problem. Elected officials have said on the record that they don't fully grasp what ALPR networks do once the cameras go up — how long the data is stored, who can query it, whether it's shared with federal agencies or sold to insurers. That knowledge gap is exactly how mass surveillance infrastructure spreads: not through informed debate, but through sales decks and vendor-supplied "case studies" nobody bothers to independently check.

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for putting a spotlight on the pattern. If you want to see how far this has already spread in your own backyard, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back at a council meeting near you, our take-action page has the tools to start.