We are flocked

Iowa’s official state motto is, “Our liberties we prize, our rights we will maintain.” The right to live our lives freely and truly our own is under attack. I’d love to see some “Iowa stubborn” rear up against encroaching surveillance.

If the crowdsourcing is correct, there are 13 Flock cameras in the immediate Storm Lake vicinity and another four are clustered at an intersection between Storm Lake and Alta. To borrow an old line, what the flock is happening to us as a county, a state, a nation?

What’s happening is more surveillance, more data being gathered about our comings and goings by reading our license plates. These Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are everywhere. According to Red Wine & Blue, a national group of suburban women working to defeat extremism, “100,000 ALPR cameras are being used in more than 6,000 cities and towns.”

The “New York Times” reports that one company alone has 120,000 such cameras and contracts with 7,000 police departments across the U.S. Every state in the union would do well to mull the words of Iowa’s motto right now.

That one company is called Flock Safety and it’s a whopper of a misnomer if ever there was one. It manufactures one kind of system and says it “connects communities, businesses, and public safety so incidents can be understood clearly, and decisions can be made on facts.” That may be the marketing pitch to city or county governments, but citizens aren’t buying it.

Across the country, civil disobedience is beating its wings against the Flock. Individuals are protesting ALPRs by shooting at them, hitting them with vehicles, beating them with baseball bats, cutting them down, wrapping them in garbage bags, and splattering them with paint.

Destruction of property might shock or offend you, but citizens are responding to the real reason behind this surveillance. It’s not about safety. It’s about following the movements of “suspect” people based on little more than pigmentation.

Also, according to a story in the New York Times, a Texas policeman used ALPRs “to track a woman across state lines who was suspected of having an abortion.”

In Storm Lake, we have a police department that cultivates and prioritizes public safety over punishment, but it still doesn’t feel good knowing that Storm Lake’s finest are gathering data on us. Several No Kings rallies have been held at the corner of Lakeshore Drive and Lake Avenue, but when someone spied a surveillance camera at that intersection, the latest rally was moved to a different street. (Note: The camera is no longer at that location.)

People in Storm Lake are unlikely to take a whack at a Flock, and I am not condoning the destruction of property, but you could just shoot a bird at one. You could be discreet or creative in how you position a certain digit when approaching a Flock location, bearing in mind that protest is a First Amendment right.

In their “Good News” segment of “The Daily Beans”, podcasters Allison Gill and Dana Goldberg invite listeners to send in bird photos. Said photos can be of real avians or snaps of a person flipping off a property that displays the name of a certain head of state. Someone could start a new trend to the “Good News” segment by sending in “birded” Flock photos.

Not your thing? There are still other ways to protest.

Even bookish, bike-riding nerds can defy the powers of 0s and 1s working overtime. Riding a slower-moving, two-wheeled conveyance is an act of passive resistance and a way to stay off the, um, radar. By pedaling your bicycle or recumbent tricycle, you, too, can refuse to be a number--well, a combination of three letters and three numbers--in a great data collection scheme.

If this isn’t an argument for more people riding their bikes or motorized whatevers to get around town, I don’t know what is. Just be safe. Follow the rules of the road and smile (or wave) at the birdy as you go by. However many fingers you use is up to you.

Joan Zwagerman has an even greater appreciation for the freedom that her bicycle brings.