When my lady and I moved into our new house back in 2020, we were immediately confronted with a smallish but pressing ethical dilemma: what to do about the big, blocky Ring doorbell camera that the previous owners had installed? This was the year of America’s Latest Racial Reckoning, and Ring (which was purchased by Amazon in 2018) had been in the news a lot during that heady summer because of its partnership with police departments around the country. The company allowed the police to request footage taken by cameras like the one fastened to the wall outside our front door, and obtain it either via search warrant or because users opted in to share with police investigations. Our neighborhood was already swarming with police officers and those solar-powered surveillance unit things on the sidewalks, so the Ring camera at our house felt like even more of an incursion. We unplugged that jawn and never turned it back on.
Ring spent a few years trying to downplay its police ties, and recently canceled a planned partnership with Flock Safety after a particularly creepy Super Bowl ad and the ensuing public backlash. Flock has been in the news a lot lately because it too is facing a growing backlash to its giant web of AI-powered license plate readers across the country. People have taken to blocking and vandalizing Flock cameras, which can help track people’s movements. Even Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who nobody would confuse for critics of police, have moved to rein in Flock cameras in their states. In 2026, you know an issue is bad when it can cross the political spectrum like this.
Could this anti-Flock energy be the start of a broader movement against the constant surveillance that Americans have come to take as a given in the 25 years since 9/11? We’ve become willing peepers and passive snoops in the name of hypervigilance — against potential terrorism (although we don’t know what we’re even supposed to be looking for), against crime (even though crime is at record lows), or even just against potential unpleasant behavior from other people moving about in public (lest someone go un-shamed for leaving a shopping cart unreturned). And the machinery to surveil each other has become ever-more habituated into our daily lives: regular-degular, non-cop people buy dashboard cameras for their cars as a matter of course; parents lament that the AirTags they’ve put in their children’s bookbags don’t update often enough for their liking; people on advice forums regularly wonder if a partner or spouse who doesn’t have “Share My Location” activated on their phone might be hiding something.
After 9/11, privacy advocates warned that ramped-up government spying on Muslims in the U.S. was never going to end there and that we would justify ever more surveillance to feel safe. But do you think they imagined that 25 years on we'd be signing up for monthly subscriptions to make sure the panopticon matches our outfits?
The Supreme Court has argued time and time again that, though the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee a right to privacy, it is implied in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights. Somewhere in those murky shadows between the amendments is supposed to be the limit of how much the government can interfere in our private lives. We’re living in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a ruling originally built in those penumbras, and we’ve seen the devastating consequences. Flock has already played a starring role in helping enforce abortion bans. Activists continue to demand a limit to the reach of our government, but what I keep asking myself is: where is the limit from each other?
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ON THE POD
It’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and we’re still living in the ripples. This week, we revisited our episode on the expanded definition of terrorism.
Plus, we interview Matthew Guariglia, a historian of policing and technology and race and ethnicity in the United States, and a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the growing frustrations the public has with Flock cameras, police surveillance and the panopticon at large.
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