The police surveillance company Flock has built an enormous nationwide license plate tracking system, which streams records of Americans’ comings and goings into a private national database that it makes available to police officers around the country. The system allows police to search the nationwide movement records of any vehicle that comes to their attention. That’s bad enough on its own, but the company is also now apparently analyzing our driving patterns to determine if we’re “suspicious.” That means if your police start using Flock, they could target you just because some algorithm has decided your movement patterns suggest criminality.

Flock appears to offer this capability through a larger “Investigations Manager,” which urges police departments to “Maximize your LPR data to detect patterns of suspicious activity across cities and states.” The company also offers a “Linked Vehicles” or “Convoy Search” allowing police to “uncover vehicles frequently seen together,” putting it squarely in the business of tracking people’s associations, and a “Multiple locations search,” which promises to “Uncover vehicles seen in multiple locations.” All these are variants on the same theme: using the camera network not just to investigate based on suspicion, but to generate suspicion itself.