There is a peculiar American humiliation in having to explain why you would like to buy groceries without helping populate a police database.

You needed eggs. Apparently, you also owed somebody a record of the trip.

Flock Safety’s roadside cameras collect license plates, vehicle characteristics, locations, and timestamps. Pass one and your car can become a searchable observation, available to an investigator with access. The company describes these as snapshots of public vehicle information. Such a modest word, snapshot. A birthday. A beach. Your car passing an intersection while you are trying to get through a Tuesday.

A collection of those observations has a different character. It lets an institution ask questions about where you have been. The public road supplies the material. You supply the life.

I resent the assumption that either is theirs for the taking. I resent being expected to prove that a trip deserves privacy, as though the default condition of citizenship were a standing invitation to inspect me. And I am tired of the little ceremony in which an industry takes something intimate, calls it data, and waits for the objection to become polite enough to ignore.

A road is not a confession.

On May 9, 2025, a Texas sheriff’s office searched a month of available records across 83,345 Flock cameras. The reason entered in the log was “had an abortion, search for female.” A woman’s partner had reported her. Investigators collected evidence and asked prosecutors whether they could charge her for taking the medication. They were told they could not.

The sheriff and Flock later presented the search as an effort to protect her welfare. But when the woman came to the sheriff’s office a week later, officers questioned her about the abortion and examined her messages. She had come to report a violent assault by the partner who had reported her. He was subsequently charged. The records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation document that sequence.

Her need for protection had to get past the state’s interest in her pregnancy.

Nobody has to invent a dystopia around this. The investigator typed the reason into a box. The archive was there to be searched. That is what should stick in the throat: how little had to happen before so much became available.

The usual reassurances arrive with the weary regularity of an automated email. Your plate is already visible. The records are only kept for a while. The system has rules.

Yes, a plate is visible. So is a person sitting in a café. Being seen by another human being does not make your afternoon the rightful property of an investigative system. We used to understand the difference between passing someone on the street and following them home. The distinction does not evaporate because the follower has learned to invoice the city.

Flock defaults to thirty days of retention, adjustable by its customers. That is a rolling month of observations, refreshed as people keep driving. Deletion at one end does not stop collection at the other. The archive gets younger. The appetite does not.

And rules governing access begin after the first trespass: the decision to make ordinary movement available for inspection. A lock on the filing cabinet cannot supply permission to fill it. An audit can help expose a search that should never have happened; it cannot make the person unsearched.

We have been through enough tracking scandals, data-broker revelations, and solemn announcements of revised privacy policies to recognize this transaction. First the intrusion becomes possible. Then it becomes profitable. Eventually, we are invited to a discussion about transparency. By the time the public gets a seat, somebody else is collecting rent on the furniture.

Flock has given that familiar entitlement a place beside the road. It is a physical reminder, on the route to work or the way out of town, that somebody has decided your passing should leave a record. You can object at the meeting. Your car can be recorded on the way home.

The intimacy of a life often resides in its errands. The pharmacy visited twice. The address you have stopped going to. The place across town where you are trying, quietly, to become someone else. A location does not explain any of these things. It can nevertheless furnish an official with a question you never owed him an answer to.

Now consider the protest. In September 2026, 404 Media reported on a Flock webinar that used Denver’s No Kings demonstrations to illustrate event-monitoring tools, including live video. People gathering to contest power became an example of how to equip power to watch them.

Even the objection gets a product demo.

A demonstration is public because people want to be heard. That does not mean they have volunteered for an institution’s future questions about their associations. A crowd contains the newly persuaded, the unsure, the person attending for the first time, the person whose employer would disapprove. Democracy needs room for people to arrive before they have worked out what arrival might cost. Surveillance sends the bill ahead of time.

The prison populist has a solution to this discomfort: imagine that the machinery will always be aimed at somebody worse than you. Give the state more power over them, and it will give you peace. The bargain offers a little borrowed sovereignty, the pleasure of picturing yourself beside the officer rather than inside the search results.

Donald Trump put that bargain in the title of his January 2025 order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” The order directed expanded state and local participation in immigration enforcement. The language does its work before any search begins. A population is cast as a threat; restraint becomes something to apologize for. All that remains is to equip the people promising to remove it.

The target changes. The equipment stays.

This is the prison’s political inheritance: divide people into those entitled to feel safe and those whose submission is supposed to supply the feeling. Then keep expanding the means of submission. A frightened public gets a spectacle of control. The people selling control get a recurring customer. The person who needs housing, treatment, or somewhere to escape a violent partner gets told the budget is complicated.

There is an actual corporate bridge between the cage and the cloud. GEO Group operates correctional and detention facilities; its subsidiary BI Incorporated provides electronic monitoring, supervision, and case management under ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. GEO reported a renewed award for that work in September 2025. Confinement and monitoring are two lines of business under one roof.

An ankle monitor can be preferable to a cell. That comparison cannot tell us why a person should be monitored at all. When surveillance is imposed on someone who could otherwise remain free, the prison has expanded its reach while congratulating itself on opening the door.

Flock offers a more diffuse version of the presumption that people should be made continuously available to authority. No ankle bracelet required. The roadside does the collecting, and a reason to look backward can arrive later. Everyone captured in the archive helps stock the shelf, whether or not an investigator ever takes an interest.

There is serious money in stocking it. Flock’s March 2025 funding announcement named Founders Fund among the participants in a $275 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Peter Thiel, associated with Founders Fund and a co-founder of Palantir, wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Whose freedom? The freedom to build the apparatus, certainly. The freedom to refuse it appears to be causing considerably more trouble. Small-government enthusiasm becomes exquisitely selective when the government has a purchase order. The state must keep its filthy hands off the entrepreneur and its eyes on everybody else.

Palantir makes software for turning institutional knowledge into action. ICE’s April 2025 award of $30 million for ImmigrationOS specified work on identifying and prioritizing people for apprehension, tracking departures, and managing removals. In January 2026, 404 Media published a user guide for ELITE, another Palantir tool used by ICE, describing maps, dossiers, and confidence scores estimating the reliability of people’s addresses.

Confidence scores on where you sleep.

An address can be correct and the purpose of finding it abhorrent. AI’s most useful contribution to an authoritarian project may be immaculate obedience: find the person, sort the records, save the official some time. The machine need never develop a taste for cruelty. There is a customer for that.

Palantyranny is the rule of the unaccountable over the searchable. It joins the corporation’s power to classify with the state’s power to compel, making a person’s life increasingly visible to authorities whose decisions remain difficult to examine or resist. Your movements become their evidence. Their assumptions become your problem. The machinery may know where you sleep without knowing why you are afraid—and still help decide who comes to your door. Its defining achievement is this unequal exchange: power acquires a detailed account of your life while owing you scarcely an account of itself.

Flock and Palantir occupy different parts of this business. What joins the camera to the dossier politically is the claim on your availability: your movements held ready, your circumstances made useful, your life kept within reach. More capable software makes that reach cheaper to exercise. It does nothing to make it deserved.

You do not owe Flock a useful Tuesday. You do not owe a sheriff an interesting past.

“I have nothing to hide” accepts the wrong obligation. It offers to earn privacy through good behavior. But freedom is not a prize awarded after an inspection, and innocence is no promise that the inspector will leave you alone. The ability to go about your life must survive an official’s curiosity, a contractor’s sales target, and the next election.

Nor does the injury wait for an arrest. Sociologist Sarah Brayne’s 2014 research found an association between criminal-justice contact and reduced attachment to record-keeping institutions such as medical care, banks, formal employment, and education. The same pattern did not appear for civic and religious participation. Her account of “system avoidance” identifies a frightening possibility: people can retreat from the institutions they need because those institutions make them visible.

Her study concerned criminal-justice contact. The question it leaves beside a roadside camera is what people will give up to avoid the attention they fear. The appointment postponed. The meeting missed. The journey reconsidered until staying home feels like a decision freely made.

That last trick is especially foul. Power sets the conditions; you do the shrinking. There may never be an order to disobey or a charge to contest. Just a smaller radius in which to be yourself.

So no, the answer is not to design a more considerate dragnet. The answer is to stop collecting ordinary lives against the possibility that somebody powerful will want them later. End the contracts for indiscriminate movement surveillance. Require deletion of the accumulated records and verification that it happened. Close the routes through which another agency or a commercial broker can supply what a community has refused to collect. A particular investigation needs a particular justification. The rest of us are not its raw material.

Locally, that means finding the renewal date, demanding the contract, and making the council defend the decision in public. It means asking for removal without allowing the conversation to collapse into a tutorial on settings. A surveillance company is a business. It can lose a customer. We do not have to preserve its revenue stream as a constitutional courtesy.

And when the presentation returns to how much the system could know, bring the argument back to what it has no right to know. The errands, the friendships, the private repair work of a human life. The destination that matters desperately to you. The destination that does not matter at all.

You went somewhere.

None of their business.

***

This essay was first published on the author’s Substack, The Armory, on September 10, 2026. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.