America's surveillance problem is much bigger than Flock

"You are being watched" was the tagline that opened every episode of the TV series "Person of Interest," which ran from 2011 to 2016 and already feels ancient. The conceit was that the good guys, aided by a friendly AI, could use information from a sea of cameras and microphones to stop crimes before they happened.

That fictional world comes to mind in light of the controversy surrounding Flock Safety, a company that has installed some 120,000 cameras in cities and towns across the United States. Flock's automatic license plate recognition system identifies passing cars and stores their identifying details in a searchable database. The utility to law enforcement is obvious.

But after years of strong growth, the company is facing a serious backlash. Dozens of jurisdictions have canceled their contracts with Flock since 2025. Some are angry that Flock has been used for immigration enforcement; others point to examples of law enforcement officers abusing the system. On Thursday the company announced that it's shortening its default data retention to seven days instead of 30, among other changes.

My libertarian heart is always warmed when there are signs, however faint, that the future might contain less surveillance rather than more. And critics of Flock's misuse are right to be alarmed. But Flock is only part of a much bigger problem. The more fundamental mistake was letting surveillance become a ubiquitous part of American life.

It's hard to imagine now, but in the 19th century, when cameras were young, it was considered discourteous to take a person's picture without permission. Now, once we've left our homes, our images are being recorded constantly. In cities and suburbs and, increasingly, rural areas, cameras along the road are accepted as a fact of life. That's a problem.

In a democracy, we ought to have the right not simply to privacy but to anonymity — to go through the ordinary occupations of daily life without being tracked and surveilled. To be seen by real people — fellow walkers, fellow drivers — is one thing; to be constantly recorded is something else entirely. It's mass surveillance.

A traffic camera might seem innocuous, a device to discourage running red lights. A license plate reader might seem just a way of keeping track of cars in case a villain happens along. But combine enough bits of data, and the government can create what the Supreme Court condemned in June in its decision restricting the use of geofencing: "a virtual panopticon with which to scrutinize its citizens' activities."

Privacy advocates are calling for tighter controls before authorities can query Flock's database, perhaps even a warrant requirement. Flock now audits law enforcement requests, and says its audit tool flagging abnormal activity soon will become mandatory for law enforcement. Some of the officers who have been arrested after allegedly misusing Flock were, the company says, caught through its efforts. But no government will ever fully resist the temptation to mine whatever data is gathered.

"The Machine is everywhere," Harold Finch of "Person of Interest" told his associate John Reese way back in 2011. "Watching us with 10,000 eyes. Listening with a million ears." The capital M referred to an AI system Finch had designed. The eyes and ears were the background sounds and images constantly being recorded.

The Machine was fiction. The constant watching and listening are real. The problem now is the government's growing obsession with keeping a constant eye on those it exists to serve.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and law professor at Yale University.