Big data and the police state have been converging for some time, but the rapid rise of the Flock Safety license plate camera network is redefining American authoritarianism, and its role in the upcoming midterms should not be underestimated.
Flock records license plate data from across its network into a centralised and searchable database. In so doing, a vehicle can be tracked across state lines by the Flock automatic license plate readers it passes. The more readers, the more granular this tracking data.
The location and quantity of Flock cameras is not a matter of public record. The company installs them on the basis of local orders, and they are not limited to law enforcement or government customers. The website, DeFlock.org, has documented and mapped reports of over 80,000 of these cameras in the United States. The heat map of cameras looks a lot like a photo of the United States taken at night. They have rapidly become ubiquitous across their country.
The company is waging a public relations defence, assuring the public through their website that abuse will not be tolerated. It is hard to take the claim seriously, given that abuse is the whole reason to create such a system.
We know of numerous cases of abuse of the system by American law enforcement. We likely don’t know about another whole set of cases. Wisconsin used the license plate readers to track a resident leaving the state to buy weed, arresting him on his return. Last week, three Georgia police officers were fired for misusing the system. A Google search for “flock abuse arrests” offers pages of results.
Few police forces will turn down an opportunity for better access to more intelligence. A system that knows the whereabouts of anyone with a car at all times can make a whole host of investigations easier. Tracking license plates at a highly granular level could make systems such as Amber alerts all but a historical footnote. Enter the plate in the database rather than the broadcast text message and you have a better than even chance of finding the car.
To be fair, any network of amateurs with web cams and windows facing the street could collect similar data as an open source intelligence project. Flock, themselves, are not the whole problem, as much as they are the focus of the issue. Without them, someone else would probably be doing the same thing, and likely with less public awareness.
The privacy concerns are real. There are ever fewer freedoms left in the country that claims to be the freest. Some countries have vastly more advanced surveillance systems than the Americans do.
The big concern, though, is how the Flock dataset and system marries to another big problem going on in the United States right now. We know that the Trump administration is concerned about losing the mid-terms in a fair fight. We also know that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been turned into Donald Trump’s own secret police service. Flock and ICE are not two separate, unrelated problems.
We do not know to what extent ICE is abusing Flock, however we can be reasonably certain that they are, given ICE’s known abuses of power over the past year and a half, and their blatant unwillingness to discipline their own employees. Criticising the American administration is enough to get visitors blocked from entering the country. We can infer that they keep extensive data on those who do not support Trump.
ICE is already widely expected to be used to steal this fall’s American elections. They did not buy $16 million of wearable cattle prods two months before voting day for decoration. The risk is great that ICE will use Flock and similar systems to track and interfere with voters likely to vote against the MAGA Republicans in tight races on election day.
The government knowing your whereabouts and limiting that knowledge to finding a kidnapped child sounds noble, but the slipperiness of the slope is clear to see when that government has no moral or ethical qualms. And in spite of Flock’s public relations efforts, we know that the company has been holding training sessions for police on how to use their technology to surveil No Kings protesters, telling us both that they understand their own capability, and on which side of ‘freedom’ they stand.
Flock gives government a critical piece of the mass-surveillance puzzle needed to steal the elections without it being directly attributable. It also gives them critical and expanding data to work with following the election when the MAGA leadership are working to consolidate their power following those elections so that the 2028 presidential election is not in real play. It gives them the ability to know, with reasonable certainty, where their opponents and their supporters are at all times.
Flock, ICE, and MAGA are a dangerous combination. They are not separate problems, they have to be opposed as part of the fascist ecosystem being carefully put into place across the United States.