A private network of 120,000 cameras now logs where Americans drive, and the data has already been used to stalk, to profile protesters, and to feed an immigration dragnet no one voted for. Britain, running an even larger police network of its own with facial recognition now spreading on top, is further down this road than most, and the quiet fightback shows how ordinary communities are switching the watching off.
Safety as Pseudonym
Larry Ellison told an Oracle event in 2024 that constant recording would keep citizens “on their best behaviour.” He offered it as reassurance. Read the sentence again, and it describes something else: behaviour management at scale. People who know they are watched adjust, soften, comply. Two years on, that idea has hardware, and a great deal of it.
The company called Flock Safety now runs roughly 120,000 automated number-plate cameras across the United States, under contracts with about 7,000 law enforcement agencies in 49 states. Each camera logs the make, model and colour of a passing car, the time and the location, and feeds all of it into a searchable database that officers in any jurisdiction can query nationwide. The default retention is thirty days. There is no warrant in that process, no judge, no moment where anyone asks whether the driver being logged is suspected of anything at all. Every vehicle is recorded, period.
This is the problem with modern surveillance. It accumulates silently, one intersection at a time, until the ordinary act of driving to work or to a clinic or to a place of worship leaves a permanent trail.
Catching the Watchmen
The clearest argument against a system like this is not theoretical. It is the record of what the people running it have already done with it.
In Milwaukee, an officer used the Flock network to track a romantic partner 124 times, and that partner’s former partner 55 times. He resigned and pleaded guilty. But what happened next is maybe more telling: one of the detectives who investigated him was himself later arrested for using the same system to track two people and secretly fit a GPS device to a car. In Haines City, Florida, an officer searched the database for his estranged wife’s vehicle more than seven hundred times across ten months. The Institute for Justice, tracking these cases, found dozens of them nationwide, with most occurring since 2024.
And it gets worse. The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained records of more than twelve million searches logged by nearly four thousand agencies between late 2024 and October 2025. Among them were more than eighty agencies running searches that targeted Romani people using slurs and no stated crime. There were searches connected to people attending protests, an activity the First Amendment is supposed to protect, and searches tied to women seeking reproductive healthcare. In Georgia, a camera marketed for finding stolen cars and missing children was used to ticket a motorcyclist for holding a phone. The tool was sold for one purpose and, predictably, used for others.
Using the Side Door
The most consequential drift has been toward immigration enforcement. Flock states that its data is not for that use. Yet reporting by 404 Media found that federal agents, lacking a contract of their own, simply asked local police to run searches on their behalf, roughly four thousand of them. In Dayton, Ohio, a city audit found more than seven thousand searches conducted for immigration purposes in direct violation of the city’s own policy. Unable to exit the contract quickly, officials pulled black bin bags over all seventy-two cameras. In Illinois, an audit revealed that Texas police had used Illinois plate data to track a woman who had travelled there for abortion care, and that a federal pilot programme had quietly gained access to the state’s cameras against Illinois law.
A network built to be shared is a network that leaks by design. Once the data exists in one place, every promise about who may see it becomes a promise someone else can break.
Way Beyond ANPR
Flock is only one animal in this ecosystem. Axon, the company behind police body cameras and the TASER, is growing faster still, bundling cameras, drones, cloud storage and artificial intelligence into ten-year contracts and posting revenue growth above thirty per cent quarter after quarter. Its newer products move past recording toward interpretation. Axon Vision uses AI to recognise activity in live video as it happens. Axon Guardian is pitched as a continuous set of eyes and ears, watching body and fleet cameras for signs of escalation. The Department of Homeland Security has announced a nationwide expansion of body cameras across its agencies.
A camera that records is a witness you can question later. A camera that interprets in real time is a judgement being made about you now, by a system you cannot cross-examine, trained on data you never saw. Axon’s own chief executive has acknowledged the anti-surveillance momentum building against all of this, describing it, revealingly, as a “birthing process for new technology.”
The Word and the Subtext
Notice how consistently one word appears in the marketing for these systems. Safety. It is the word placed in front of every expansion, because it is the word that makes objection feel like recklessness. Who argues against safety? But a term repeated often enough to silence questions has usually stopped meaning anything. The Patriot Act arrived under the same banner. So did every checkpoint and every database that followed. Safety, then, is more a Trojan horse.
This is where consciousness enters what looks like a purely political story. Surveillance does its real work before any officer misuses it. It works on the mind of the watched. A person who assumes they are being recorded begins to self-edit, to avoid the protest, to take the longer route, to think twice before saying the honest word. Lawyers call this “the chilling effect,” and with a system this pervasive, it is not an accidental by-product. It is the product. A population on its best behaviour is a population that has quietly agreed to be lesser than it was. Just like atoms vibrate less when you cool something (the chilling effect; think how water becomes ice as it cools), so too does a population lose its vibrancy.
Britain is Already Further Down this Road
It would be comforting to read all of this as an American problem, a story about one aggressive company and a constitution written in the eighteenth century. It is not. The machinery is spreading across democracies, and Britain sits nearer the front of that queue than almost anywhere outside China.
The United Kingdom runs one of the largest vehicle-surveillance networks in the world, and it is operated by the police rather than a private vendor. A national network of roughly 11,000 number-plate cameras feeds a central system whose current platform processes more than 350 million reads a day. The plate, the time, the location, is collated into one database and kept for up to a year, longer where an investigation calls for it. Set that against the seven-day retention Flock has just been pressured into adopting in the States, and the comparison is not flattering. The system Americans are marching to city halls to switch off is smaller and shorter-lived than the one British drivers already pass through every day, without a vote ever being held.
Where number plates lead, faces follow. By early 2026, thirteen of the forty-three police forces in England and Wales were using live facial recognition, cameras that scan the faces of passers-by in real time and check them against a watchlist, with a national rollout planned and forty new recognition vans on order. The first permanent cameras of this kind went up in south London in late 2025. Independent testing of one system found that black women drew the highest rate of false matches. A court has already ruled one force’s use of the technology unlawful, and the official response has been to expand it rather than pause it. The British reader worrying about a private American firm is standing inside a larger version already.
The Communities Switching it Off
Here is the part the marketing leaves out. It is being dismantled, in public, by ordinary people.
A single developer built DeFlock, a map that plotted more than ninety thousand of these cameras and made the invisible grid something residents could finally see. Flock sent him a cease-and-desist letter; the EFF defended him for free, and the map stayed up. Once communities could see what surrounded them, the politics changed fast. More than fifty cities and counties cut ties with Flock in 2026, over twenty of them in July alone, from liberal college towns to conservative rural councils citing the same worries. Washington State now requires these systems to be registered with the attorney general. Under mounting pressure, Flock itself has been forced to make its abuse-detection audits mandatory rather than optional.
None of this required destroying anything. It required people looking at what was there, naming it accurately, and using the lawful tools of a free society, the public records request, the council vote, the audit, and the map, to reassert a boundary. That is what sovereignty looks like in practice. Not a fantasy of escape, but the steady refusal to accept that being tracked from birth to death is simply the status quo.
The cameras are real, and the trail they build is real. What has not been settled is whether we live as people who have accepted the watching, or as people who keep insisting, in daylight and on the record, that a citizen is not a suspect and a street is not a cell.
Join the Conversation
Where do you feel the line sits between genuine safety and surveillance dressed in its language? Have you noticed the watching change how freely you move, speak or gather in your own life? Share your experiences and insights below.
