Our police love the Flock cameras, and they should. The rest of us are quietly trading away the last great American freedom: the right to be ignored.
Sometimes, we just want to quietly tiptoe through our own life.
—I don’t think this is an unreasonable request. As a 57-year-old man, I want to wake up, brew an espresso, pull out of the driveway, and head to the courts to hit what I will generously describe as baseline winners. Then I want to come home, pick up my Epiphone twelve-string, and butcher a few acoustic chords into a microphone that deserves better. I want to do all of this silently, anonymously, and without my exact coordinates being logged into a centralized, searchable database like I’m a high-value asset in a Jason Bourne movie.
(Yes, I just published my own pattern of life in one paragraph. The difference: I volunteered it, nobody paid for it, and you’ll forget it by Thursday. The database never forgets.)
—But apparently tiptoeing is asking too much. Instead, we are all living like Ozzy Osbourne circa 2002: unwitting stars of our own mandatory reality show, broadcast around the clock to servers we will never see, minus the MTV.
—The AI is always listening. Mention to your wife that your left knee feels weird, and within the hour your phone is serving ads for titanium joints and a law firm that specializes in suing your knee. Brake hard on Gulf of Mexico Drive because a snowbird in a rented Buick executes a spontaneous four-lane U-turn, and your own car, the one you’re still making payments on, rats you out to your insurance company like a trained informant. Meanwhile your Fitbit files a biological dossier confirming exactly how out of shape you are. Your watch is disappointed in you. Your watch has notified the group.
—Add it all up and we have built the unholy trinity of observation: Big Brother, an omniscient Old Testament God, the perpetual guilt of Roman Catholicism, and the most oppressive marriage in recorded history, rolled into one giant piece of state infrastructure. A spouse who never sleeps, never blinks, remembers every sin you’ve committed since 1994, and cross-references them against your odometer.
—Except it is NOT God watching us, and that’s the thing this whole column hangs on. God, at least, offers forgiveness. A real spouse eventually falls asleep. The database just adds it to your file.
—And now, right here at home, comes the final layer: the Flock cameras.
—First, A Word About Our Police
—Before we go one step further, let me say something clearly, so nobody can misquote me at the post office: I love our police. Our officers are excellent. Our chief is doing exactly what a good chief should do, which is squeeze every legal drop out of every tool the law allows, and he’s been transparent about it. If my golf cart vanishes at 2 a.m., a professional with a flashlight will materialize before the ice melts in my nightcap.
—This column is not about them. It’s about the rest of us, and what we are quietly, numbly agreeing to.
—What The Flock Is Happening On Longboat Key?
—For those blissfully unaware, our town operates a network of Flock Safety cameras under a five-year contract, positioned so that every vehicle entering or leaving Longboat Key gets its plate, make, model and color captured by Artificial Intelligence, which is a fancy tech-bro way of saying “RoboCop without the cool motorcycle.”
—The sales pitch is genuinely seductive. The department calls the technology a “force multiplier” doing the work of 20 officers, around the clock, without overtime. And it works: when boat radars vanished in the middle of the night, the cameras helped crack the case. As an insurance policy for a low-crime island, it’s a good tool, used by good officers, and I mean that sincerely.
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” we all say, and I’ve said a version of it myself at cocktail parties, usually while holding a drink and feeling reasonable. It’s the logic of letting your neighbor read your mail in case there’s a coupon for half off a colonoscopy. And every one of us who says it still closes the blinds at night and would summon attorneys by helicopter if the government proposed photographing our lanai on the hour. We don’t believe it. We find it soothing. You don’t need something to hide to want something to yourself. Privacy is not the refuge of the guilty. It is the natural habitat of the free.
—Because the cameras don’t just capture bad guys. They capture EVERYONE. Every pharmacy run, every visit to a friend, every aimless drive to clear your head. SNAP. SNAP. SNAP. The Fourth Amendment nerds call what happens next the Mosaic Theory: one snapshot of your car on a public road is nothing, but thousands of them, run through an algorithm, become a portrait of your doctor visits, your friendships, your 3 a.m. Tylenol runs. The software learns your “pattern of life.” It knows your normal, it holds a backstage pass to your life that you never authorized, and its entire job is to notice when you deviate.
—Twenty years ago, that portrait required a detective, a sedan, a thermos of bad coffee and a judge’s eventual curiosity. Today it requires a login, wired into networks nationwide, one query away from a government employee you will never meet, in a state you have never visited. That is not a security moat. That is a dragnet with a homeowners’ association.
—How Numb Have We Become?
—This is the part I actually want you to sit with, more than any joke in this column.
—Human beings are not built to be watched all the time. Watched people perform. Watched people edit themselves. Watched people drive past the turn they were going to take, for no articulable reason, because some small ancient part of the brain whispers: this will go in the file. There used to be a word for the feeling of being followed everywhere, monitored, logged, your patterns studied by an unseen intelligence. The word was paranoia, and we medicated it. Now it’s just the terms of service.
—And look how fast we adjusted. Twenty years ago all of this was dystopian science fiction; today it’s a Tuesday. We are the frog in the pot, except the frog at least had the dignity of not knowing. We know perfectly well, and we’ve decided the water is fine because it arrived one comfortable degree at a time, each degree marketed as a pragmatic positive.
—The freedom to be anonymous, to tiptoe through your own life unremarked upon and unindexed, was never written down anywhere because nobody imagined it could be taken. It was the default setting of being alive. You were allowed to drive to the store at midnight for an embarrassing quantity of discounted cheese and have the whole transaction remain between you and God. You were allowed to be uninteresting. You were allowed to be ignored. That freedom is quietly leaving the building while we argue about camera poles, and the eeriest part is how little we feel it. Numbness is not the same as consent, but from a distance it looks identical.
—The Sarasota Scandal, Or: Systems Are Run By Humans
—Every department in America defends these systems with the same national script: strict protocols, full audit trails, and any misuse is just “a few bad apples.” It’s in the brochure.
—So let’s inspect the apples. Across the bay in Sarasota, a now-former police officer was recently fired and charged with felonies after investigators say he used the Flock system to run one particular license plate 355 times over five months with no investigation attached, including 121 searches of that single plate in one day. One hundred twenty-one times. In a day. I don’t check on my own children that often, and one of them owes me money. Unless that woman was driving a stolen nuclear warhead strapped to a panda, this was not police work. It was stalking, high-tech and taxpayer-funded. And it’s not isolated: an officer up in Haines City allegedly ran his estranged wife’s plate 717 times using invented justifications, with similar arrests recently in Kentucky and Kansas.
—To be crystal clear: none of these men wear a Longboat Key uniform, and our officers deserve zero guilt by association. That’s precisely the point. The problem was never the local cops. The problem is that a database of everyone’s movements will always, eventually, prove irresistible to some human with a login, and the vaunted audit trail doesn’t prevent it. The audit trail is not a shield. It’s a receipt: it faithfully records the stalking while it happens, then hands prosecutors a beautifully formatted spreadsheet afterward. Build the orchard, and somewhere in it, an apple goes bad. That’s not cynicism about police. That’s realism about databases.
—The DeSantis Smackdown
—Here’s the plot twist: the pushback didn’t come from the usual suspects. On August 31st the DeSantis administration, through FDOT, revoked every permit for license plate readers on state road rights of way, citing misuse, data privacy concerns and surveillance schemes, and gave everyone 30 days to take them down. The governor declared that Florida should not become a “digital AI surveillance state” and called for laws to keep us out of a “digital prison.”
—Let that sink in. Ron DeSantis, a man never once accused of being squishy on law enforcement, looked at these cameras and flinched. When this administration says a surveillance program goes too far, that is Keith Richards telling you to slow down at the bar.
—The Three-Foot Shell Game
—So how is our town responding to the state’s clear intent? By playing legal hopscotch. The plan under evaluation is to move the cameras just off the state right of way, onto a patch of municipal crabgrass, or a palm tree, or perhaps duct-taped to an exceptionally sturdy pelican, while keeping them pointed at the exact same road, feeding the exact same database.
—The state says, “You cannot indiscriminately track citizens on this road.” And the town answers, “Understood. But what if we stand three feet to the left and squint at the EXACT SAME ROAD?” It is the municipal equivalent of a kid holding his finger one inch from his sister’s face chanting, “I’M NOT TOUCHING YOU.” Adorable at age eight in a station wagon. Less adorable when performed by a government, with attorneys billing by the hour to determine the precise metaphysical boundary of a swale.
—And there’s a sequel nobody’s discussing: if suitable municipal dirt runs out, Flock happily sells to HOAs and condo associations, with the feed still flowing to police, at which point the whole operation slides beyond public records laws and every oversight lever you thought you had. If you think your HOA is drunk on power over mailbox colors, wait until it operates the checkpoint.
—The Monetization Of Our Freedom
—One more layer, the one we flee into toxic denial to avoid. As my far more radical, and frankly far smarter, daughter puts it: this is the monetization of our freedom. Flock is a venture-backed tech company. The product is a catalog of human movement, and the raw material is you, driving to Publix. Every logged trip is inventory. You were born a person. You are being archived as an asset class.
—A Eulogy For The Tiptoe
—So here’s where I land, and I’ll own it as one man’s opinion. Personally? I’d take them down. A free people should get to cross their own bridge without being catalogued.
—But I’m not asking the town to agree with me. I’m asking for two things no reasonable person, in uniform or out, can argue with. First, honor the spirit of the state’s order, not just its lettering: if the cameras are worth keeping, make that case in the sunshine at a commission meeting, not by relocating poles via memo. Second, show us the data. Word is out, and no fugitive with a functioning GPS drives into the most photographed lion’s den on the Gulf Coast. So of the Flock alerts our officers act on, how many are violent felons and stolen cars, and how many are expired tags? If it’s mostly felons, say so proudly. If it’s mostly paperwork, then we haven’t increased our safety, we’ve automated our harassment, converting a great police force into an armed DMV pulling over pool cleaners on an island where the most pressing emergency most afternoons is a seagull committing grand theft croissant. Every hour an officer spends answering a tablet ping is an hour not spent on the policing that built trust here: the bike rodeos, the door checks for snowbirds, the officer who knew your name. Our cops are better than the beep. Let them be cops.
—Because there is profound beauty in being unnoticed. We were not meant to live watched. We were not meant to perform our errands for an audience of servers. Being ignored was the default setting of American life, and it has become the anomaly, and I remind you this system was specifically trained to flag anomalies. Left unchecked, this is the final victory of the Worst Marriage Ever: the state is your spouse, the AI is your mother-in-law, and both of them are checking your odometer while asking why you never call.
—So keep strumming those acoustic guitars in your living rooms, Longboat. You may think you’re playing a solo, but Ozzy and the state are always listening.
—And for the love of God, stop looking at my license plate. The registration is up next month. I’ll get to it when I get to it. Allegedly.
