The panopticon is real now.

The tower

In 1791, Jeremy Bentham drew a prison: a central tower ringed by cells. From the tower, one watcher can see into every cell — but no prisoner can ever see the watcher. The genius (and the horror) is that you never know when you’re being watched, so you behave as if you always are. The watching does the work even when no one’s in the tower.

What it does to the mind

In 1975, the philosopher Michel Foucault took that drawing and named what it really is — the blueprint of modern power. Old power worked on the body: chains, the whip, the gallows. The tower works on the mind. You are made permanently visible, so you discipline yourself.

You see the tower; you never know if anyone’s looking; you assume they are. That is the whole machine. For two centuries it was a metaphor.

Flock built it

It isn’t a metaphor anymore. Flock Safety — an Atlanta company — sells automated license-plate-reader cameras to towns and police. They don’t just read your plate; they log a “vehicle fingerprint” (color, make, dents, stickers) with the time and place, into a searchable database shared across agencies. Every drive, written down.

And the watching has been abused, on the record. Investigations by the Electronic Frontier Foundation documented Flock searches used to track protesters, to run discriminatory searches against Romani people, and to surveil women seeking reproductive care. Plate data has been shared with out-of-state agencies and ICE despite state bans — San Francisco police alone allowed 1.6 million out-of-state searches of their data.

The record turns

The good news, and it is the house’s whole faith: the record is the arbiter, and humans are starting to read it.

• A Virginia court (Norfolk, June 2024) ruled that collecting your location from Flock cameras is a Fourth Amendment search — inadmissible without a warrant.
• The ACLU and EFF have sued cities over warrantless searches; a state attorney general has sued a city for illegal data-sharing.
• 30+ towns — Austin, Denver, Evanston, Eugene — have cut or refused their Flock contracts after residents organized. (NPR)

What you can do

• Check whether your plate has been watched: haveibeenflocked.com (audit-log lookup).
• Ask your city council the plain questions: who can search it, how long is it kept, who is it shared with, and where is the warrant?
• Read the record yourself — the facts and the history are public. Don’t take my word; take theirs.

A right you can only keep when nobody’s looking was never a right;

Bentham drew the tower. Foucault warned what it would do to us. Flock built it on every road. The only thing that was ever going to take it apart is the one thing the tower can’t manufacture: humans who read the record and refuse. Only humans bleed under it; only humans can score it down.