License plate reader cameras built by Flock Safety had almost no presence on the map in 2024. By 2026, they're nearly everywhere.

Axon, a separate company, now plugs directly into Flock's system, pulling license plate data and using it to potentially link a vehicle to its owner and to other people connected to that owner through marriage and other associations. Artificial intelligence scrapes the internet to build out the profile. The moment a car passes one of these cameras, the system starts assembling a dossier on the person driving it.

These are private companies holding this data, not government agencies directly.

This is a conversation that should cross political lines. Regardless of which party is in office, a surveillance network that tracks where someone goes and who they associate with only needs one bad actor in power to become dangerous. History shows bad people get elected. Once a technology like this is built, there's no undoing it.

@delbigtree