You have committed no crime, yet the American State knows exactly when you dropped your kids off at school, which doctor you visited and what political rally you attended.

How does the state track your every move?  One method is to use Automated Licence Plate Readers (“ALPRs”), also known as Automatic Number Plate Recognition (“ANPR”) or License Plate Recognition (“LPR”). 

In the following, Matt Agorist explains more.

Let’s not lose touch…Your Government and Big Tech are actively trying to censor the information reported by The Exposé to serve their own needs. Subscribe to our emails now to make sure you receive the latest uncensored news in your inbox…

Get the Flock Out! – How and Why You Should Resist the AI-Powered Cameras that are Destroying Our Privacy

By Matt Agorist, as published by The Free Thought Project on 11 June 2026

Every time you pull out of your driveway, you probably still harbour the illusion that you are a free person going about your business. The reality is far more grim: your vehicle is bleeding data into a massive, unregulated dragnet the moment you pass the neighbourhood entrance. Automated Licence Plate Readers (“ALPRs”) and Flock cameras have infested our communities, quietly transforming the American landscape into an open-air panopticon.

You are no longer just a traveller; you are a heavily tracked data point in a system designed to treat every peaceful citizen as a suspect. The apologists for the police state are always quick to play the devil’s advocate when these surveillance grids face public scrutiny. They will breathlessly point out that ALPRs do sometimes help law enforcement track the plates of a stolen car or a violent suspect.

Police departments and the corporate salesmen hawking this gear parade these isolated victories in front of gullible city councils to justify millions in taxpayer funding. We are constantly told that solving a fraction of property crimes requires us to surrender our basic human dignity and privacy. But this statist narrative entirely ignores the tyrannical caveat that makes the whole operation illegitimate.

For every single actual criminal apprehended, the daily movements of tens of thousands of peaceful, innocent people are meticulously logged, tracked and stored in massive databases. You have committed no crime, yet the State knows exactly when you dropped your kids off at school, which doctor you visited and what political rally you attended. It is a pre-emptive strike by a paranoid ruling class against the very people they claim to serve.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these automated systems do much more than just read numbers on a bumper. They capture the time, date and precise coordinates of every passing vehicle, storing this highly sensitive location data for months or even years. This allows law enforcement to retroactively hit “rewind” on anyone’s life without ever setting foot inside a courtroom to obtain a warrant.

The American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) has thoroughly documented how this dragnet operates, revealing that the overwhelming majority of people swept up in these databases are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite this glaring fact, the data is pooled and shared across thousands of jurisdictions, essentially creating a national tracking system operated by private entities.

Taxpayers are literally being extorted to fund the infrastructure of their own surveillance. Nefarious corporate groups, like Flock Safety, are getting extraordinarily wealthy from this unconstitutional model. They sell fear to local politicians and walk away with lucrative contracts, deepening their network of unlawful data collection as we have consistently covered here at The Free Thought Project. The public is forced at gunpoint to foot the bill for a corporate-state partnership that actively violates their inherent rights.

This panopticon is being built piecemeal through thousands of localised contracts quietly approved by city councils, police departments and even private homeowner associations. Flock Safety alone has embedded itself in over 6,000 municipalities, operating a staggering network of more than 80,000 cameras nationwide to indiscriminately log the movements of peaceful people.

The financial windfall generated by this unconstitutional dragnet is nothing short of extortionary. Weaponising the public’s fear of crime, Flock Safety has ballooned into an $8.4 billion empire, siphoning massive amounts of wealth directly from the taxpayers they are constantly monitoring. With local governments shelling out up to $3,500 per camera annually, this corporate-state partnership raked in over $300 million in recurring revenue by early 2025. The public is literally being forced under the threat of state violence to finance their own digital incarceration, enriching corporate entities while fundamental rights are casually discarded.

To grasp the true, dystopian scale of this operation, consider that these private systems are performing over 20 billion scans of vehicles across the country every single month. They have successfully privatised the police state, transforming the basic, unalienable right to travel into an endless and highly profitable data extraction industry. We are witnessing the systematic abolition of privacy in real-time, orchestrated by corporate profiteers and rubber-stamped by local politicians who view citizens as nothing more than trackable data points. No wonder these people want to build hundreds more data centres despite already having more data centres than the next 14 top countries combined.

As with any tyrannical measure ostensibly designed for your safety but in reality, a giant dragnet to enslave you, the state must resort to any means to justify it. The standard defence from the establishment is always the same: you have no legal expectation or perception of privacy in public. It is true that if you walk outside, a neighbour or a passing police officer can plainly see you. However, the idea that the State possesses the legitimate authority to constantly keep us under its watchful eye should shock the conscience of any free person.

There is a monumental difference between being casually observed in passing and being subjected to algorithmic, permanent surveillance by a government apparatus. Under even the most basic principles of liberty, tracking and building a digital dossier on a peaceful person who has harmed no one is an inherently aggressive, hostile act. It violates the core tenets of a voluntary society by treating existence itself as a suspicious activity requiring constant monitoring.

The state only exists through coercion, and this pervasive camera network is just the latest technological weapon used to enforce absolute compliance. We do not have to accept this digital cage as a permanent condition of modern life. Communities across the country are finally waking up to the fact that the power to dismantle this infrastructure lies in local, decentralised pushback.

Resistance requires dragging this information into the light and targeting the local politicians who blindly approve these insidious contracts. We have the ability to demand the removal of these cameras and to flatly refuse compliance with a system that treats peaceful travel as a crime waiting to happen. To take real action against this creeping tyranny, citizens are currently organising the ‘National Week of Action Against ALPRs’, providing the exact blueprint needed to help push this dystopian technology out of our neighbourhoods for good.

It’s high time we deflock these tyrants. Visit Deflock.org to see just how massive this network of privacy-destroying digital snoops has become and learn how you can stop them. 

About the Author

Matt Agorist is an honourably discharged veteran of the United States Marine Corps and a former intelligence operator directly tasked by the National Security Agency. He has been an independent journalist for over a decade and is the editor at The Free Thought Project.

Featured image taken from ‘ALPR Solutions in Canada: Transforming Smart Surveillance & Vehicle Monitoring’, Folio 3