ROOKE: Surveillance State Has Arrived, And Masked Heroes Are Already Fighting Back

Photo by Jean-François FORT / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

Solar-powered black boxes have been installed in communities across the U.S. under the guise of “public safety.” Yet, in true American fashion, resistance is rising against what can only be described as the arrival of a full-fledged surveillance state.

Flock Safety cameras, the most prominent brand in this AI surveillance space, are automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that capture high-resolution images of every passing vehicle. Flock and similar systems now operate in thousands of communities, with over 110,000 cameras mapped nationwide, according to DeFlock, an open-source project mapping license plate readers.

Thanks to recent tech upgrades like Leonardo’s SignalTrace, these cameras do more than just read license plates and record your vehicle’s unique details; they also track the electronic signatures of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, RFID, and other wireless signals from devices inside or near your vehicle. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)

Using AI and optical character recognition, these systems extract as much private data as possible, including timestamps and geolocation, before uploading it to a cloud platform accessible to all participating law enforcement agencies. And they can do this to law-abiding U.S. citizens without warrants. Flock markets this as solving crimes, but the system inherently sweeps up everyone. Drive past a camera on your work commute or while doing errands, and your route becomes part of a searchable database.

And the truly terrifying reality is that it doesn’t just track your car or devices. Newer Condor cameras use pan-tilt-zoom capabilities and AI to detect and follow pedestrians in real time as they walk through the frame. Your daily trips to work, school, and soccer practice can be reconstructed without ever needing a warrant for traditional GPS or cell tracking. They claim the system doesn’t decrypt message contents, but they don’t really need that because the metadata alone paints an intimate portrait of your life. They know when you typically leave, for what reason, and with whom, based on data that you never gave them........

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