I get that this comment is meant to warn about the creeping government overreach and a curtailment of free speech, by comparing the US against a society where government surveillance is already commonplace.

I wonder if it does a disservice to readers to not make that same comparison against more similar countries instead (UK, Germany, Australia to name a few examples)?

UK police simply do not have warrantless access to any system anything like as broad in scope as Flock.

Much of the American hysteria about the UK as a surveillance state is profoundly misapprehended based on dramatisations, built in part on a misunderstood and misleading article about King’s Lynn back in the late 80s.

There is no mass seamless CCTV network available to UK police, at all. It is myth. We are not at all trackable from door to door. They only fully control a couple of hundred cameras in London, for example. In the town where I live I don’t think there are any police controlled cameras, and only a handful of council controlled cameras (some ANPR to control a complex traffic flow and catch drivers abusing a pedestrian section, presumably the shopping mall security cameras since the council now owns the mall), some speed cameras that are only capable of stills.

Almost all CCTV footage British police do get is either from council controlled traffic cameras (with a warrant) or private, fully closed circuit cameras (usually by knocking on doors and asking, sometimes with a warranted request to a CCTV provider). There’s a pretty extensive legal framework for what access they do have.

Local councils do operate more cameras, for road management etc. and for some shopping streets with serious shoplifting. They also operate some cameras around historic sites. But the police have a process to go through to get this.

With Flock and Ring (and Shotspotter before it) the USA has quietly built a surveillance system that is vastly more powerful and less accountable than anything the UK has, for real. Because you don’t hold your police accountable or restrict them in any meaningful way.