In 1984, Orwell Imagined Total Monitoring. Today, Flock Cameras. Same Story.
When Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, they were responding to a specific technological anxiety of their moment: the proliferation of instantaneous photography and an aggressive newspaper press that could, for the first time, capture and distribute a person’s image without their consent. Their argument — that citizens possess a fundamental right to be left alone — was considered radical. Courts were slow to accept it. Most people assumed the intrusion was simply the price of living in a modern, connected society. That framing should sound familiar.
The surveillance debate playing out in cities like San Marcos, Texas today follows the same arc. A new technology arrives, promising safety or convenience. Institutions adopt it faster than the public fully understands what they’ve consented to. Then a reckoning comes — often prompted not by legislators but by journalists, local activists, and a few elected officials willing to absorb the political cost of saying no.
The Pattern: Technology Normalizes Before the Law Catches Up
History consistently shows that surveillance expands during periods of anxiety, and its infrastructure tends to outlast the crisis that justified it. The telephone wiretapping practices of the early twentieth century, authorized loosely under wartime emergency powers, became standard law enforcement tools long after the emergency passed. COINTELPRO, the FBI’s domestic surveillance program exposed in the 1970s, operated for years in the open secret that monitoring political activity was simply what modern government did.
Automated license plate readers follow this pattern with remarkable precision. Flock Safety operates a network of over 90,000 cameras across 49 states. Each camera captures and stores license plate data, feeding a database that law enforcement agencies nationwide can query. When San Marcos adopted Flock, the city was not making an exceptional decision — it was doing what hundreds of municipalities did, because the technology was available, vendors were persuasive, and the framing around public safety made opposition feel irresponsible. That normalization is exactly how surveillance infrastructure embeds itself before the democratic conversation about whether it should exist has even started.
The Reckoning Arrives Through Journalism, Not Legislation
What eventually broke COINTELPRO into public consciousness was not a legislative review — it was a group of activists who broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania in 1971 and leaked the documents to journalists. The parallel today is imperfect but instructive. It was investigative reporters, not federal regulators, who documented Flock’s lax logging policies, its cooperation with immigration enforcement, and the data security failures that publicly identified millions of surveillance targets. The website HaveIBeenFlocked.com — which Flock reportedly tried aggressively to remove — performed essentially the same function as those leaked files: it made the abstract concrete, giving ordinary people evidence that they were already inside the system.
In my work advising organizations on strategy, I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. Institutional inertia holds until the cost of maintaining the status quo exceeds the perceived risk of change. What the reporting on Flock did was shift that calculation, not just in San Marcos but in communities across the country.
Local Government as the Decisive Layer
This is where the historical parallel offers its most useful lesson. The Brandeis privacy framework ultimately succeeded not through a single federal ruling but through decades of state-by-state, case-by-case accumulation of legal precedent. Local action compounded into national norm change.
The San Marcos City Council’s June vote to let the Flock contract lapse in December 2025 was precisely this kind of local action. The council heard from both sides — from residents concerned about due process, data security, and Flock’s collaboration with ICE and CBP, and from local law enforcement worried about losing a tool they’d come to rely on. What ultimately moved the deliberation was reframing the question. The council stopped debating whether Flock was useful and started asking what actually produces safety: investment in healthcare, food security, stable employment, economic development. Surveillance technology that diverts resources from those foundations does not make a community safer — it simply makes it more monitored.
Final Thoughts
Warren and Brandeis wrote in 1890 that the common law must keep pace with the growth of civilization. What San Marcos demonstrated is that local elected officials don’t have to wait for that law to catch up. They can pull the infrastructure out from under a surveillance apparatus by simply declining to renew a contract. The fight feels new because the technology is new. The underlying question — who gets to watch, and who gets to say no — is as old as the republic. Other city councils now face the same decision San Marcos did. History suggests the ones who act early tend to look prescient rather than reckless once the broader reckoning arrives.