This week in AIskip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to TechScape<\/p>\n A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Flock backlash highlights differing attitudes towards surveillance Illustration: Guardian Design \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n The US is in the throes of a major political backlash against technology. We\u2019ve talked in this newsletter before about the hatred of the hyperscale datacenters, which power artificial intelligence and have blanketed the US. And now there\u2019s a secondary wave of contempt sweeping the nation.<\/p>\n Cameras \u2013 automated license plate readers, to be specific \u2013 made by Flock Safety are inspiring ire and violence across the country. These cameras snap pictures of car\u2019s license plates as they drive by. According to Flock, about 120,000 cameras erected across the US conduct 2bn scans of license plates per month.<\/p>\n Like datacenters, the cameras offer a physical object to resist, unlike a social network or a piece of software. It\u2019s quite a lot easier to protest a gigantic ugly building or an ominous black camera on the side of the road than it is to give up Instagram.<\/p>\n Widespread video surveillance in the US isn\u2019t entirely new. In the aftermath of the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, the US government vastly increased the scope of its surveillance of telephonic and digital communications. Flock now offers local law enforcement a nationwide searchable database of license plate scans, and police officers have been documented abusing it egregiously<\/a> to stalk their romantic partners.<\/p>\n In the UK an estimated 1m surveillance cameras are operational<\/a>, and they have not drawn a similar level of political heat.<\/p>\n London erected the \u201cring of steel\u201d surveillance cordon, which included the wide deployment of CCTV cameras, in the early 1990s, in response to bombings by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.<\/p>\n Both countries went through their surveillance evolutions roughly a decade apart. Those 10 years saw rapid advances in technology that defined the public spaces that governments wanted watched \u2013 physical town squares or the digital one \u2013 and growing awareness of the profound impact of tech surveillance on the general public. Simply put, the UK went through its transformation at a time when surveillance by tech companies was not top of mind. And Americans aren\u2019t accustomed to cameras on every corner the way Londoners are. We\u2019re more likely to joke that each of us has a personal FBI agent<\/a> monitoring our search history.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1788887778_787_500.jpg\")
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