Are Smart Cities Becoming Surveillance Cities?
The short version: Michael S Gibson's video asks the right question: 'smart city' branding is often just a friendlier name for a growing surveillance network of ALPRs and networked cameras.
Our Take
Michael S Gibson's video does something a lot of local news coverage won't: it connects the dots between 'smart city' marketing language and the actual hardware going up on street corners. License plate readers, AI-flagged camera feeds, and live-streaming street lights don't get installed because a city council debated the civil liberties tradeoffs in public. They get installed because a vendor pitched them as efficiency upgrades, and most residents never hear about it until a camera mast is already bolted to the pole outside their house.
That's the core problem DeFlock exists to document. Flock Safety and similar companies sell these systems city by city, often with little independent oversight of how long data is retained, who can query it, or whether it gets shared across jurisdictions and with federal agencies. 'Smart' is doing a lot of marketing work to obscure what is, functionally, a tracking grid for every car that passes through town — innocent or not.
Gibson's framing is worth sitting with: the infrastructure of a surveillance state doesn't usually arrive labeled as one. It arrives as a safety feature. If you want to see how far this has already spread, check our camera map for what's been documented near you, and if you're ready to push back at a council meeting or public records request, our take-action page has a place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Michael S Gibson, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.