The Cameras Don't Care Who You Vote For

I’ve been reading about a US congressman trying to defund a company called Flock Safety, and their network of automatic licence plate readers. Thomas Massie, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky, wants to strip federal funding from any local government using them. No bill text yet, just a press release. But the discussion around it is more interesting than the bill itself.

We don’t have Flock here, not exactly, but we’ve got the same appetite. Victoria Police already run automatic number plate recognition on patrol cars and fixed points. The tollway network knows where your car has been for years. None of this is hidden, it’s just diffuse enough that nobody feels like they’re being watched, even though they are.

What got me about the Reddit thread wasn’t the politics of Massie himself, plenty of cynicism there about election-year timing, fair enough. It was one comment further down, about a woman whose now-husband admitted to using mall security cameras to suss out her interests before he ever spoke to her. Not illegal, probably not even against store policy. Just quietly creepy in a way no one had really legislated against, because nobody imagined the tech would get cheap enough, and good enough, for a mall security guard to have that kind of reach.

That’s the bit that sits with me. We keep having the debate as though surveillance is a binary, government bad, private good, or vice versa depending on your priors. But the plate reader on the pole doesn’t care if it’s owned by the council, a private company selling data to police without a warrant, or some bloke with a login he shouldn’t have. The camera doesn’t have politics. The access to what it sees does, and that’s where all the actual argument should be happening.

I work in IT. I’ve spent two decades building and maintaining systems that log things, that keep records, that make processes auditable and searchable. Most of that work is genuinely good, it catches fraud, it finds outages before they become disasters, it saves someone’s Saturday. But I know exactly how tempting it is to keep more data than you need, because storage is cheap and someone might ask for it later. Multiply that instinct across a private company selling access to law enforcement, and you get exactly the sprawl people are worried about in that thread: even if you ban the plate-reading function specifically, the same hardware still fingerprints your car, tracks the signal from your phone, runs facial recognition on whoever’s in the passenger seat. Banning a company doesn’t touch the capability. Someone in the comments made that point better than most op-eds I’ve read on it.

There’s also a genuine tension I don’t think gets resolved just by picking a side. Recognise the technology has actually solved crimes, found missing kids, tracked down hit-and-run drivers. Also recognise that a network like this, running indefinitely, searchable by anyone with the right login and a bit of nerve, is a different thing entirely to a single camera outside a shop. Scale changes the nature of the thing. A council camera on a lamppost is not the same category of object as ten thousand of them networked together with retention forever. I don’t think you can hold both of those truths and land on a comfortable, tidy policy. I don’t know that there is one.

What I do know is that “public information” isn’t a magic word that makes surveillance fine. Standing on a public footpath watching a person walk past is different to recording every person who’s ever walked past that spot for the last three years and running a search on all of them at once. The law hasn’t fully caught up with that distinction, here or in the US, and until it does, we’re relying on companies and police forces to just not do the worst version of what the technology allows. That’s not a plan. That’s a hope.

I don’t have a neat ending for this one. I’d like to see it debated properly rather than as a partisan football, because right now it’s mostly falling along “who owns stock in which surveillance company” lines, which is its own kind of depressing. But someone, somewhere, from whatever side of politics, actually trying to draw a legal line around this stuff is better than nobody trying at all.