07/22/2026
What the Flock?
The Panopticon Comes to Northwest Arkansas
If you've driven through Northwest Arkansas this week, chances are you've been photographed. Probably more than once.
Not because you were speeding. Not because you were suspected of a crime. Not because a police officer had any reason whatsoever to stop you. Simply because you happened to drive down a public road where a Flock camera was mounted.
We're beginning to encounter Flock (and other surveillance) cases with increasing frequency across Northwest Arkansas. Every month, it seems another jurisdiction joins the network, another camera goes up, and another stretch of road becomes part of an ever-growing surveillance grid.
Flock is an AI surveillance company.
Most people know it as a company that reads license plates. That's certainly the marketing. But that description misses the bigger picture. License plates are simply the entry point into a much larger system designed to collect, organize, search, and analyze enormous amounts of information about where vehicles (and by extension, the people inside them) travel throughout their daily lives. Every pass creates another data point. Another timestamp. Another location. Another piece of a digital trail that can later be searched, mapped, and reconstructed.
The Panopticon
Long before cameras existed, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a prison he called the Panopticon.
The design was simple. Prisoners would be arranged in cells surrounding a central observation tower. The guards inside the tower could see every prisoner, but the prisoners could never know exactly when they were being watched. The prisoners eventually behaved as though they were always being watched.
Nearly two hundred years later, French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham's prison and transformed it into something much larger. He argued that modern societies increasingly function like a Panopticon. People don't need to be physically restrained if they believe they're under constant observation. The possibility of surveillance becomes enough to shape behavior.
When I (Brannen) was studying philosophy at UCA, the chair of our philosophy department had actually met Foucault in Paris years earlier. At the time, the Panopticon seemed like an interesting academic thought experiment. Today, it feels considerably less theoretical. Because we no longer need prison walls, and we carry the Panopticon around with us.
Freedom Is Rarely Lost All At Once
The most dangerous government programs rarely begin with bad intentions. Catch stolen cars. Find missing children. Locate wanted fugitives.
Of course, those are all worthwhile goals. I don't doubt that Flock has helped accomplish each of them. There are undoubtedly cases where the technology has solved serious crimes that otherwise may have gone unsolved.
But history teaches us something equally important. Government surveillance almost never gets smaller. Once the infrastructure exists, it expands. More cameras. More jurisdictions. More agencies with access. More information shared across larger networks. New artificial intelligence tools layered on top of old databases. The technology improves. The search capabilities improve. The data accumulates. And every expansion is justified as just one more reasonable step. No single step feels particularly dramatic. But eventually you look around and realize you've built something that would have been politically impossible had anyone proposed it all at once.
It's like a frog in boiling water. Drop it in all at once, and it panic hops out. Raise the temperature slowly and it gets "cooked in the squat."
"If You've Done Nothing Wrong..."
Whenever this discussion comes up, someone inevitably says, "Well, if you've done nothing wrong, why do you care?"
Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing. Privacy is about preserving the freedom to live an ordinary life without every movement becoming part of a permanent, searchable government record. The Fourth Amendment was never written to protect criminals. It was written to protect everyone.
Our constitutional rights are not rewards for good behavior. They are limits placed on government power precisely because history demonstrates that governments naturally seek more information, more efficiency, and more control. The Founders understood that a government capable of monitoring everyone is a government that possesses extraordinary power over everyone.
