In a year stuffed with war talk, a collapsing dollar, and a political class that acts like all of the damage from the Biden regime has been fixed, a lot of Americans have decided the great villain of 2026 is a traffic camera. That sounds small until you realize what the camera actually is.
It is not a cop on a corner who happens to notice a stolen Buick. It is a private contractor building a searchable map of every car that rolls past a pole. Connor O’Keeffe put it cleanly. The government would never get away with dropping a GPS tracker in every glove box. So it rented the next best thing and called it public safety.
Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers photograph the plate, the make, the model, the dents, even the bumper sticker. That record goes into a national database other agencies can query. The company now runs about 120,000 cameras across 49 states. Sen. Josh Hawley says those boxes produce more than 20 billion vehicle scans a month. If you drive, you are in there. Your church run. Your doctor’s office. The house you visit after dark.
The sales pitch is always the same. Stolen cars. Missing kids. Bad guys. Nobody wants a kidnapper to get a head start. The problem is that the machine does not stay pointed at kidnappers. It stays pointed at everybody, and then a bored officer with a password decides what “everybody” means.