Mass surveillance is intrinsically insulting and dehumanizing. As an American, such a concept immediately evokes George Orwell’s 1984, or even Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Minority Report — a dystopian future in which the state determines your guilt before you even commit a crime. In such popular media, the presumption of innocence becomes inverted: “Guilty until proven innocent.” Individual liberty, to the extent that it still exists, comes second to public safety.

Likewise, in the American zeitgeist, no name for a mass surveillance tool could be as apt as “Flock.” It perfectly describes exactly who you are in this relationship between private companies engaged in mass data collection and the government entities on the other side of the ledger: sheep — to be watched, herded, and sheared for profit.

Already, Flock Safety has installed more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states, capturing 20 billion license plates per month. It’s impossible to drive anywhere without seeing one on the way to your destination — and that’s the point.

Defenders of Flock try to convince you that the new watchtower at the entrance to your neighborhood is of no concern and is in no way different from the other privacy abuses you’ve tolerated your whole life. “It’s just a license plate reader, like on the toll roads,” they say.

But that’s not reality.

Flock Safety’s Condor cameras can go far beyond the capabilities of standard automated license plate readers (ALPRs). Placed on public sidewalks, Condors use artificial intelligence to pan, zoom in on, and track individuals who move across the camera’s line of sight. In a particularly concerning case, an independent report uncovered how the camera was able to zoom and........

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