Flock Is the Most Un-American Company in America

There is a company you almost certainly never voted for, never consented to, and quite possibly never heard of, that knows where your car has been. Not in the abstract. Specifically. The intersection you crossed at 8:14 this morning, the lot you parked in last Tuesday, the address you keep driving to late at night. The company is Flock Safety, and what it has built, with almost no public debate, is the most thorough system of mass surveillance ever turned on the American people. It did it by selling cameras to your town council, one quiet vote at a time.

Here is how it works. Flock mounts automated license plate readers on poles, at intersections, in subdivisions, outside schools. Each camera photographs every plate that passes, stamps it with a time and a location, and uploads it to a searchable national network. Not the plates of suspects. Every plate. Yours, mine, the pastor’s, the patient’s, the gun owner’s, the man having an affair, the woman fleeing one. The cameras do not know who is guilty, because that is not their purpose. Their purpose is to record everyone, all the time, indefinitely, so that anyone with a login can rewind your life on a map the moment they decide they are curious.

Now remember what this country is supposed to be. The American founding has a specific origin story, and it is not vague. The Revolution was lit, in real part, by the writ of assistance and the general warrant, the British power to search anyone, anywhere, for anything, without naming a person or a crime. The colonists thought that power so monstrous they went to war over it, and when they won they wrote the Fourth Amendment to kill it, to require that a search name its target and its cause and pass a judge first. The general warrant is the thing America was founded against. It is the nearest thing to original sin in our constitutional order.

Flock is the general warrant, resurrected, automated, and sold by subscription. It searches everyone in advance, with no target, no cause, and no judge, and stores the results in case a reason is wanted later. A company whose entire product is the one thing the Constitution was written to forbid is not an American company in any sense that matters. It drapes itself in the flag in its marketing and sells the writ of assistance out the back.

And it is not innocent about the history. Flock markets itself as the cure for crime and the friend of the nervous suburb, and it has spread into thousands of jurisdictions by telling frightened councils that total surveillance is simply the price of safety. That is the oldest pitch in the history of tyranny, and it has always been a lie. Every secret police force that ever existed offered the same trade, your privacy for your protection, and every one of them kept the privacy and dropped the protection the instant it became inconvenient. A company whose whole business is talking Americans into surrendering, parking lot by parking lot, the exact protection their ancestors died to win has earned a harder word than “controversial.”

Then there are the departments that buy it, and here I will not be polite. A police officer swears an oath, and the oath is not to stop crime at any cost. It is to the Constitution. An officer who runs a warrantless dragnet on the movements of every innocent person in his town, who taps a private national database to follow innocent people across the country without so much as a judge’s signature, who runs the system to track a person he is privately fixated on, or to settle a grudge that has nothing to do with any crime, is not enforcing the law. He is betraying the document he swore to defend, in the precise manner that document was written to prevent. We have a word for a man who turns the machinery of a free country against the freedom it was built to protect. These are not heroes keeping us safe. At best they are oath-breakers, and at the edges they are the closest thing to a domestic enemy the men who wrote the Fourth Amendment could imagine.

The defense is always the same. It catches car thieves. It finds missing kids. And sometimes it does, the way a general warrant sometimes turns up a real criminal, which is exactly why general warrants are tempting and exactly why we outlawed them anyway. The Founders understood something we have let ourselves forget. A tool that can find anyone can find anyone, and a power that rests on the good intentions of whoever happens to hold it is not a safeguard. It is a loaded gun left on the table. The database that tracks the car thief today tracks the dissident, the reporter, the ex-wife, and the political enemy tomorrow, run by whoever wins the next election, and it will all be perfectly legal, because we stood by while it was built.

This is the sharp edge of something much larger, a surveillance apparatus assembling itself out of cameras and phones and purchase records into a single machine that can ruin anyone. I have written about that machine at length in The Database of Ruin, because the machine is the real stakes and Flock is only its most shameless salesman. But the camera on the pole is where the abstraction turns concrete, so start there. Find out whether your town has signed a contract. Go to the council meeting. Make them say out loud, in public, why the government should keep a permanent map of where you drive. Make them defend the writ of assistance to your face. They will not enjoy it, because stated plainly, in English, it cannot be defended.