Let’s stipulate here, right up top, that it’s probably not a smart idea, or a morally upright thing, to go to Central Park in broad daylight and make out with your younger colleague, especially if you’re married. This is, reportedly, what happened between two white-shoe lawyers on a recent summer day. It’s possible this sort of thing happens all the time in a city of 8.6 million; it’s possible it doesn’t. Frankly, it’s none of my business or yours. The only reason I know about it is that a TikToker named Jay Guapo, who has 3.6 million followers, happened to be walking by and decided to film the couple, and scold them (“There’s kids around!”), and continue filming them over their distressed objections, and then post the video to his feed, where it has now been viewed more than 12 million times, becoming in the process an ongoing subject of investigation by The New York Post, which has published several stories about the incident, dubbing the pair the “canoodling lawyers.”
The TikTok commentariat was thrilled by the video. Viewers intuited from the mortified looks on the pair’s faces that they were profoundly unhappy to have been filmed — unhappy in a way that suggested the canoodling was unsanctioned. But some of the commenters seem more disturbed by Jay Guapo’s decision making, often arguing that, sure, maybe they were doing something wrong, but extramarital canoodling isn’t illegal. So why film it? And why post it?
For some, it was comeuppance for a grave sin; for others, it was simply the latest reminder that smartphone cameras and social media platforms have together created a stochastic kangaroo court — one that can be summoned through an invisible portal to deliver swift justice, or at least its own version of it. (The Financial Times reported six days after the video was posted that the law firm had put the elder, male canoodler on leave.) The taboo against marital infidelity needs no introduction and was, I’d be willing to bet, a settled matter before Moses climbed Mount Sinai the first time. But “filming strangers in public and putting it on the internet in front of millions of people, for fun” was not possible in the time of chiseled tablets, nor even just two decades ago, in the age of the BlackBerry. It’s too new a behavior for there to be any sort of cultural consensus about it. At what point does it become OK to film strangers? Whenever you want? If they’re breaking the law? Whose law? So the court remains in session, all day and all night, thanks to the miniaturization of recording devices.
It may seem hard to believe now, but at the dawn of this age, some people genuinely believed that the spread of cameras, microphones and whatever else into millions of hands could be a shield against surveillance.
This line of thinking was developed by a serial inventor and academic named Steve Mann. Sometimes called the father of wearable computing, Mann started designing portable tech as a child in the late 1960s, well before desktop computers were in widespread use. It was the Cold War, a paranoid era. Mann worked at a TV repair shop with a man who was fixated on bugs and wiretaps. And one of Mann’s early inventions was a device that did what he called “meta-sensing” — sensing the sensors — something that’s only become more important as these sensors proliferate. Toilets, urinals and faucets — he points out that these now have cameras in them to aid their operation. Low-resolution ones, but still. “All these things are watching us, and yet we can’t see them,” he explained in a TED Talk.
Mann proposed, as a countermeasure, “sousveillance” — from the French for “below.” The idea seems to have followed from his unusual hobby, rather than informing it. Pictures of him from the early days show a man carrying a computer on his back, with what looks like a periscope attached to his right eye. “Back in the ’70s,” he said in another lecture, “people used to cross the street to avoid me.” His thinking sharpened as he’d enter places that were full of CCTV cameras — a consulate, say, or even a grocery store — but didn’t allow photography. Mann found this hypocritical: Of course these places allowed photography, but only their own. Why should they alone be trusted with documentary evidence? Couldn’t a fuller and more trustworthy record exist were it distributed among many different parties?
Mann believed that a society like this — a sousveillant society — would be less corrupt and ultimately less surveilled. “If everyone remembered (recorded) everything,” he wrote, “there would be little need for surveillance.”
This is the optimistic, open-source instinct that fueled so much online-native politics in the early years of this century, from Anonymous to Bitcoin. This tendency — distrustful of authority, disdainful of normies and, despite all this, extremely bullish on the idea that powerful and novel technologies might improve (or neutralize) the behavior of both — has a mixed track record. Hating normies and authority can quickly become reactionary, as we saw when the message board that birthed Anonymous, 4chan, curdled into the 4chan we know today; Bitcoin, rather than replacing fiat money, became a speculative instrument that spawned a million more speculative instruments, few even pretending at this point to have a real-world use.
In sousveillance, you can see some of the same promise and the same flaws. You could certainly argue that the ideology notched some victories in the ’10s and beyond: Cellphone videos of police killings were arguably the most consequential pieces of media produced in that time span, and did meaningfully change how the police do their jobs — though ironically by creating a new form of surveillance. Most police officers have to turn on wearable video cameras of their own before doing much else. This doesn’t seem to have reduced the total number of fatal police shootings. But in some jurisdictions, videos of other police encounters — say, an amusing drunken-driving arrest — can be retrieved through public records requests and then uploaded to YouTube, to be shown to millions of people, for fun and profit. Normies again, you could argue, but they have the same internet as the rest of us.
Lately, Americans of all political persuasions have been using the internet to band together — in a very different way — against a new form of surveillance: automated license plate readers, mainly those produced by an Atlanta-based company called Flock Safety. These A.I.-enabled cameras, usually identifiable by their solar panels, have sprung up all over the country in recent years. There are now more than 100,000 deployed across every state but Alaska. According to the company and its law enforcement clients, all the cameras do is passively track license plates, creating a way to flag stolen cars and missing people in real time, while leaving behind a record that can be used to piece together a criminal suspect’s movements.
The cameras have been used to solve some serious crimes. In 2025, their ability to recognize cars by make and model helped the police in Providence, R.I., track down the Brown University shooter, who had switched out his license plates. They’ve also been abused: There have been dozens of cases of police officers either charged with or accused of using the plate readers to track girlfriends, exes, even people they’re interested in. The false sense of certainty the new tech provides has also led the police to make boneheaded errors, arresting or drawing weapons on verifiably innocent people. But these one-off abuses are less of an issue than what the Flock cameras seem to represent to their opponents: a meaningful step toward the creation of a high-tech police state.
Any jurisdiction paying for Flock can simply retrieve its own data, but there’s another, more alarming, option. The cameras also feed into a larger, searchable network that is made up of many jurisdictions’ data and accessible only to those that choose to share their data with others. Most jurisdictions that use Flock cameras opt in. Such a network means that your movements could, in theory, be tracked without a warrant across much of the continental United States and Hawaii; even if the network is not being misused in this way by law enforcement now, it certainly could be in some dark future.
Flock, for its part, says that such a scenario is not possible. The default setting for data retention is just 30 days, though its customers can make it longer or shorter. (The company recently changed the default retention window to seven days.) Flock has also introduced safeguards to ensure the police are not using the search for extracurricular purposes. (According to MIT Technology Review, these are easily circumvented.)
And besides, no one believes any of this. TikTok is awash in anger at, and conspiracy theories about, the cameras: They violate your Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search (very unclear); they are not being installed in Jewish neighborhoods (not true); the data will be fed to Palantir to create an A.I. police state (not yet, anyway).
Living in New York, it’s tempting to find the concerns slightly quaint. We’re quite accustomed to license plate readers, thanks to the sheer number of tolls we pay by A.L.P.R. for the privilege of driving into Manhattan gridlock. There are speed cameras all over the city, constantly reading license plates and occasionally sending me tickets. Plenty of New York drivers vandalize their own plates to evade speed cameras and tolls; I hardly think of them as freedom fighters. And the cameras have assisted in criminal investigations without turning New York into a totalitarian state. (Indeed, what many people notice is that police officers here spend an unusual amount of time seemingly distracted by their phones.)
But these Flock cameras are now towering over small towns where there are no Battery Tunnels and no congestion pricing, where going anywhere means using your car, where you can’t blend into a crowd, and where these decisions were made with little or no public discussion. Instead they were revealed to the public on social media, by entrepreneurs battling for attention and sometimes even flogging products that supposedly counteract the cameras: laser pointers to overwhelm them, sensors to let you know if any sort of recording device is nearby.
But more consequentially, the anti-Flock mania has produced a crowdsourced map of A.L.P.R.s called DeFlock. And this seems to be aiding a rising wave of vandalism against the cameras. TikTokers now film themselves destroying the cameras or offer coy guides on how not to destroy them. There is, naturally, much that can go wrong: being caught by another A.L.P.R. on the way to or from the task, or being filmed by the Flock camera as you destroy it. And afterward, you might also decide to share documentary evidence of yourself committing a crime on the internet.
But the approach is strikingly different from Mann’s, and seems to reflect a widespread, bipartisan pessimism about the future of technology and the powerful people it seems to serve. When paired with distrust in official narratives, this pessimism fuels spectacular backlashes. In this sense, the anti-Flock mania is more similar to the nascent movement against data centers than to a fight over civil liberties.
A movement against surveillance per se would have to contend with it in all its forms: not just A.L.P.R.s, but also the surveillance we do on one another — as well as the more imminent threat to our privacy, which is the enormous amount of information we’ve entrusted to the devices we use to amuse ourselves for hours a day. Sometimes by watching strangers canoodling on a park bench.
There’s something faintly absurd about watching a TikTok about taking a buzzsaw to a license plate reader while staring directly into a device with a camera and a microphone and GPS and facial recognition technology and your credit card and your browsing history and your photographs and your entire social graph and nearly every message you’ve sent to anyone, ever, encrypted or otherwise. The paranoia feels almost comically displaced. Because if the state and Palantir and whoever else want to violate the Constitution and abuse novel technologies to track our every movement and ensnare us in a totalitarian police state, they don’t need you to first get in your car and drive by the camera installed outside the Burger King. There’s a much simpler way to do it. You’re probably looking at it right now.
Source images for illustration above: Svetlana Repnitskaya/Getty Images; Frazao Studio Latino/Getty Images; Cavan Images/Getty Images; SOPA Images/Getty Images.
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