A flock is a group of sheep.
You don't negotiate with a flock. You don't ask a flock for consent, or explain yourself to it, or worry much about what any individual member of it wants. You count it. You move it. You keep it penned where you can see it.
And when the time comes, you take what you need from it.
Interesting, isn’t it, that Flock is what they chose to name a company whose cameras now sit on more than 100,000 poles across 6,000 American communities, photographing your car, logging where you went and when, and feeding all of it into a searchable national database that thousands of police agencies can rifle through without a warrant?
Sometimes they tell you exactly what they think you are.
(And yeah, I know they say it's because the cameras sit up in trees and watch like a flock of birds. I like my version better.)
Recently, a software engineer named Will Freeman built a project called DeFlock—an open-source map showing where these cameras are. Remember, Flock cameras aren’t hidden. They’re publicly visible, bolted to public poles, in plain sight of anyone with eyes. Will just wanted to make it a little easier for us sheep to spot them.
For the crime of telling the rest of us where the cameras are, Flock's CEO called DeFlock a "terroristic organization" whose "primary motivation is chaos."
Errrrm… what?
A billion-dollar company photographs, logs, and tracks nearly every car in America without asking anyone’s permission and that’s somehow ok, but when a private citizen makes a map of the cameras, he’s a *checks notes* terrorist (?!)
The ACLU rightly called Flock’s take, "simplistic, juvenile, and ultimately authoritarian," but honestly, that's being polite.
Now, to be fair, Police departments credit Flock cameras with solving real crimes and finding missing people, and that’s not nothing. The desire to be safe is one of the most human things there is.
But when we look at what actually happens once the infrastructure exists, we have to wonder if the potential payoff on these things is worth it. I’d argue that it probably isn’t.
At least eighteen police officers (including multiple chiefs) have been caught using Flock to stalk ex-girlfriends, spouses, and romantic rivals. One ran a single plate hundreds of times.
In Dunwoody, Georgia, records showed Flock's own employees accessed the city's cameras over a thousand times—including a camera inside a children's gymnastics room. This after the company's own FAQ promised that "nobody from Flock Safety is accessing or monitoring your footage."
Federal agents regularly plug into the network in states whose laws expressly forbid it.
Every one of these incidents gets waved off as an aberration. A bad apple; a one-off.
But they're not aberrations. They're the product working as designed. Build a machine this powerful, hand it to fallible people, check it with almost nothing, and this is the guaranteed outcome.
The problem is that the tool doesn't care what purpose it's serving. It serves whoever's holding it.
Today it might well be pointed at someone whose politics you don't share, or who you or I view as a bad guy. When that’s the case, it might be easy to justify its use. But tomorrow the people holding it will change—they always do—and then suddenly it's pointed at your church, your gun shop, your homeschool co-op, or the political meeting you drove to on a Tuesday night.
A surveillance state is usually not built by your enemies. It's built by your friends, and then inherited by your enemies.
We know where this road goes. All we have to do is look at London. Nearly a million cameras for nine million people. The average Londoner is filmed in the hundreds of times a day, and yet researchers keep finding almost no correlation between all those cameras and the crime rate.
So why are they still filming everyone?
Why indeed.
Flock's own hometown of Atlanta is now the most surveilled city in America. Worldwide, only cities in China watch their people more closely than we watch ours.
Flock's CEO says "safety is a fundamental right," and I actually believe he means it. That's what worries me. No tyranny in history has ever announced itself as a tyranny. Every single one showed up promising to protect you—from crime and chaos, and the enemy within.
The Stasi kept East Germans extraordinarily safe from one another.
Benjamin Franklin saw this coming from about two and a half centuries away: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Yep.
This is the kind of thing that prompted Elijah and I to write the first Tuttle Twins book over a decade ago.
The Tuttle Twins Learn About the Law is built on the work of Frederic Bastiat, who spent his life on one deceptively simple idea: the law exists to protect your life, your liberty, and your property.
That’s it.
When the law stops protecting those things and starts being the instrument that violates them—when the machine built to “keep you safe” is actually the machine cataloging every place you go—the law has been turned inside out. Bastiat had a word for that.
He called it perversion.
A kid who understands that idea can look at a camera on a pole and ask the question way too many adults simply don’t ask: who is this for, and what happens when the wrong person gets to control it, and what can I do if that happens?
There is some good news in all of this.
More than fifty cities have canceled, deactivated, or rejected Flock contracts after residents showed up and made noise. As much as some of them hate it, city councils actually do answer to rooms full of neighbors in a way no federal agency ever will.
In towns all across the country, people fed up with not being heard are even taking matters into their own hands by cutting down or damaging cameras. I’m not saying that’s what you should do. All I’m saying is that sometimes, if you want revolutionary change, sometimes you have to think like a Founder.
The point is, this is winnable. It isn’t yet too late. It's being won in places where people have bothered to actually do something about it.
Do you have Flock cameras in your town? Have you asked your city council why they’re there, who approved them, and whose permission they got to start watching everyone?
More importantly, are you raising kids who know the difference between a citizen and a commodity? Who understand that they are not a resource to be counted, herded, managed, and exploited for someone else's convenience or gain?
The petty tyrants and powerful elite may think of us as sheep.
That doesn’t mean we have to act like sheep.
— Connor
