How Flock Cameras Took Over America

This summer, Fernando Alfonso, the Texas editor for The New York Times, got in a car with a man named Philip. They drove around the suburban streets of Dallas searching for traffic cameras — not for a red-light camera, or a speed-trap camera, but something new, an automatic license-plate reader made by a company called Flock. Law enforcement officials say these cameras are essential to fighting crime, but Phillip and people like him, who have located 100,000 flock cameras all over the country, see them as something else: the beginnings of a surveillance state. Today, Kashmir Hill, a technology and privacy writer at The New York Times, discusses the company behind the cameras and the mounting backlash.