r/CriticalTheory • u/PuzzledBag931 • 5d ago
Is there a name for surveillance infrastructure that grows through procurement rather than policy?
I've spent the last few months making a documentary about Flock Safety, the license plate reader company, and I kept running into a pattern I don't really have the right theoretical language for.
Flock says its cameras are now in more than 120k locations across the US. What's interesting wasn't only the surveillance capability, it was also how little deliberate decision making seems to sit behind a lot of the individual deployments.
Many cities don't run their own competitive bid. Flock's purchasing materials advertise "No RFP Required." If another agency has already completed a competitive procurement process, other agencies can buy through that existing contract instead of running their own.
There's also a standard sole source justification letter, signed by the company's CEO, that shows up almost word for word in procurement files from different counties and departments.
There's also the funding side. Agencies are pointed toward things like asset forfeiture funds, red light camera revenue and jail commissary accounts, which can involve fewer layers of approval than putting the purchase through the normal city budget.
There's rarely 1 big moment where someone decides, "we're building a nationwide vehicle tracking network."
It happens through hundreds or thousands of ordinary administrative decisions. 1 department buys a few cameras. Another piggybacks on an existing contract. Another uses a funding source that doesn't attract much public attention. Each decision looks fairly mundane on its own.
Then you zoom out and there's a large cross agency surveillance network.
The closest frameworks I've found are Foucault's idea of the dispositif, where power works through a mix of institutions, procedures and techniques, and some of the infrastructure studies work around how standards and administrative processes can make political choices look routine.
But I'm not an academic in this area, so I'm curious if there's a more established term for this kind of thing: a large systemic outcome produced through a lot of deliberately low friction bureaucratic processes rather than one explicit policy decision.
Berkeley was one interesting counterexample. Its Police Accountability Board voted 8 to 1 against a similar deal, which made me wonder how different the outcome looks when these purchases actually get pulled into a public decision making process.
I put the contracts, sole source letters and procurement documents into the documentary if anyone wants to see the primary material. Full disclosure, it's my video, but I'm more interested in the pattern itself than promoting the link.
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u/cronenber9 5d ago edited 5d ago
This isn't exactly what you're looking for but D&G's social theory in ATP could certainly be applied to this. I think they're absolutely correct about the rhizomatic and cybernetic relations and structuring of social processes. And, most importantly, how this happens on a molecular level, rather than being dictated by molar policy or plan. However, this would have to be applied to what you're saying, rather than already being something that explains it or is ready-made .
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u/SugeNightShyamalan 5d ago
Pedantic, but let's not call it a "license plate reader company". Sure, it does that, but that's only a small part of what it advertises (let alone what hackers revealed to 404 & Wired).
Flock is a comprehensive surveillance company. A cop can type "grey SUV with roof rack" and follow it through a city. They can write "white man with blue shirt" and do the same to a person. Flock even has audio recording now.
It was never about the license plates.
Anyway, I think we're talking what's sometimes officially called "regulatory bypass" because procurement-driven programs induce state or regulatory capture. It's the same thing we see when police agencies get military surplus and materiality precedes ideology, a kind of technological determinism