Somewhere in Texas right now a Flock Safety camera is reading a license plate, and for once that bothers everybody roughly equally. The Times has a piece on the automated plate readers now spread across thousands of law enforcement agencies, and in Texas of all places, liberals and conservatives have landed on the same complaint: neither wants to be tracked. That’s rare enough this year to be worth sitting with for a second.

The interesting part isn’t the privacy argument — that one’s obvious. It’s how the technology got everywhere before the disagreement caught up. Nobody votes on Flock cameras the way we vote on, say, the SAVE America Act, which still doesn’t have a Senate floor vote scheduled before recess, months after it cleared the House, because getting Congress to agree on anything takes roll calls and press conferences and enough defections to make a headline. A camera just needs a department with a line item and a vendor with a sales rep. No debate stage, no primary, no slow crawl through the news cycle. It shows up on the pole, and then it’s just there.

Police like Flock because it’s genuinely useful — stolen cars, suspects, real cases closed. That’s not nothing. But “useful to whoever’s holding the camera” and “acceptable to whoever’s being filmed” are different tests, and the second one got skipped, department by department, until enough people noticed at once to call it a consensus.

I keep noticing how rare an uncaptured issue is these days. Give this one six months and somebody will find a way to make it partisan too.

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