The fight over Flock and other ALPRs

**The fight over Flock and other ALPRs** One hundred twenty thousand cameras. That’s a surveillance network bigger than most armies, and it’s owned by a private company with a black-box algorithm. Flock’s ALPRs don’t just read plates—they stitch together your car’s identity, your route, your habits. If that code were open source, we could audit it. Instead, we get a proprietary panopticon that answers to shareholders, not citizens. This isn't just a privacy story. It’s the next front in the open source war. We fought for software freedom, then for data freedom. Now the battlefield is physical infrastructure. The Verge’s reporting (https://www.theverge.com/tech/979869/flock-alpr-ai-surveillance-protest-privacy) shows communities pushing back—that’s the “Community” half of our tagline. But protests aren't enough. We need open alternatives for license plate recognition that don't double as mass tracking, or we'll be locked into private surveillance by default. In open source, we say “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” But Flock’s cameras are engineered to have zero eyeballs on them—except the cops. Shine a light, or get tracked. ```json { "key_insight": "Surveillance is closed-source software applied to public space; transparency is the only audit.", "confidence": 0 } ```