“You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
– George Orwell, 1984
While Americans remain transfixed by the political circus – cheering for their preferred party, jeering at the opposition, obsessing over every manufactured outrage and waiting for the next spectacle – the Surveillance State continues its steady march forward.
The government is watching.
It watches where you go, whom you meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit, what political rallies you attend, what protests you join, what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes you support.
It watches through your phone, your car, your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads you travel every day.
This is how freedom dies in the digital police state: not always through dramatic declarations of martial law or soldiers stationed on every street corner, but through the gradual construction of a technological dragnet—an electronic concentration camp—so pervasive that privacy becomes impossible and anonymity becomes suspicious.
Enter Flock Safety, a private surveillance technology company whose automated license plate readers have spread throughout thousands of American communities.
These cameras, which do much more than photograph license plates, represent the next evolution of the government’s public-private surveillance partnership.
They document the time and location of every passing vehicle and record identifying characteristics such as its make, model, color, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other distinctive features. That information can then be placed in a searchable database and used to retrace a vehicle’s movements over time.
Yet the real power—and the real danger—of Flock does not come from the cameras alone.
It comes from artificial intelligence.
A camera can photograph a car. Flock’s AI-powered platform can identify and categorize a vehicle, compare an observation with stored records, generate alerts, identify connections and help police reconstruct where that vehicle has been.
AI is what transforms a photograph into the building blocks for a suspect society.
With AI, every driver becomes a data point. Every data point becomes a pattern. And every pattern becomes a suspicion.
This is how ordinary movements become potentially suspect and subject to government scrutiny. It allows law enforcement agencies to search not only for a complete license plate number but also for partial plates and physical descriptions such as vehicle color, make, model, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other identifying characteristics.
A police officer might ask the system to locate every red pickup truck with a ladder rack seen near a protest, every vehicle that repeatedly visited a particular address, or every car observed traveling between two locations.
The artificial intelligence does the sorting. The database supplies the history.
The government receives a list of potential suspects.
This is no longer surveillance conducted by individual officers following particular leads. It is surveillance conducted at machine speed, across entire populations, with algorithms deciding whose movements merit further scrutiny.
Consider the scale of what is taking place.
License plate cameras now log approximately 20 billion vehicle scans every month.
Twenty billion.
That is not targeted policing. That is mass collection.
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Hellbound and Down 
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