How Flock cameras embed racial capitalism, colonial surveillance tech in ‘public safety’—from Palestine to US highways
Original framing: “Flock cameras are the latest weapon of America's post-9/11 surveillance state” — Middle East Eye
Flock cameras are the latest iteration of a 200-year-old pattern: militarized surveillance tech developed for colonial control and later repurposed for domestic policing. The 19th-century ‘scientific racism’ used to justify slavery and Indian Removal mirrors today’s algorithmic profiling, while the COINTELPRO programs of the 1960s–70s laid the groundwork for today’s predictive policing. The 2001 Patriot Act’s expansion of surveillance powers directly enabled the privatization of these systems, creating a feedback loop where occupation tech becomes ‘public safety’ tech. Ignoring this history obscures how Flock cameras are not an anomaly but a predictable escalation of state-corporate surveillance.
The Flock camera scandal is not an isolated ‘overreach’ but a symptom of a global surveillance-industrial complex where colonial logics of control are repackaged as ‘public safety.
’ The tech’s origins in Israeli occupation infrastructure—later sold to US cities—expose how racial capitalism thrives by militarizing marginalized communities, with Indigenous, Black, and Palestinian populations bearing the brunt of its data extraction. The absence of these perspectives in mainstream coverage allows the industry to frame surveillance as a neutral tool, obscuring its role in reproducing hierarchies from Palestine to Ferguson. Solutions must center Indigenous data sovereignty, corporate accountability, and international treaties to dismantle this architecture, while creative and trickster lenses reveal the absurdity of treating surveillance as inevitable. The path forward lies in treating these systems not as technical challenges but as political ones—rooted in history, resistant to erasure, and demanding reparative justice.