In Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight, Batman has too much power.
Bruce Wayne’s research and development guy, Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman, develops a technology that essentially allows Batman to “see” and hear throughout all of Gotham. In the film, it is more of a sonar-type ability, but for a Bat-man this is ideal! Freeman/Fox says to Batman, “This is wrong.” Batman responds that he has to find the bad guy, played excellently by Heath Ledger, and Freeman/Fox replies, “At what cost?” You can see a clip of the exchange on YouTube.
Quite literally, Batman made the choice to trade individual privacy for the safety of the populace. Yet, Batman, like Freeman/Fox, realized that this was a terrible idea and, spoiler alert, the device is set to destruct after its singular usage, rather than to allow a rise of a surveillance state.
Citizens around the United States are protesting the rampant use of Flock cameras. The cameras can read license plate numbers at high speeds and thus track the movements of our vehicles. These cameras, combined with increasingly high-quality facial recognition technology, make tracking individuals much easier and much more dangerous. In at least 12 states so far, police officers have been accused of misusing the technology for their personal use, including stalking of ex-wives and girlfriends. We also know that Flock’s executives misuse the cameras, and this was covered in a satirical but newsworthy manner by John Oliver in the last month.
Combine the Flock technology with the ShotSpotter technology, and we have cameras and microphones capable of recording video and sound stationed throughout our community. In Oakland, California, and elsewhere, ShotSpotter audio clips already appear in court cases, where audio clips recorded people shouting the nicknames of the shooter and, in another instance, a person shouting, ‘Why did you shoot me?’ The prescient use and misuse of this kind of technology in The Dark Knight was meant as a warning, a literal ‘blind(shot)spot’ for our society. Instead, the Ostrich effect occurred, and most people buried their heads in the sand of the busyness of life.
Now, there is a growing Monkey Wrench type movement afoot to ‘deflock’ America.[i] Americans are not enjoying the new surveillance state even as they purchase their own cameras and, in some cases, blithely give over control of those very cameras to law enforcement.
The protests range from holding things up to obstruct the camera view to giving instructions on YouTube, ostensibly of what not to do, to destroy the cameras, to the actual destruction and vandalism of the devices. In Washington and Oregon, people have flooded systems with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to see what data is gathered and how, in ways that judges have ruled must deactivate the cameras. Readers should note that in South Bend, Indiana, and elsewhere, governments have recently added large fees and other barriers to getting FOIA requests, as another impediment to corporate-owned taxpayer information being accessible to the citizenry.
Local and state governments should be hyper-diligent to ensure that citizens have access to publicly funded information, and anyone attempting to obstruct that process should be penalized and considered an enemy of the people.
The protests should not come as a surprise. Americans are feeling particularly disenfranchised and pushed around by government and others, and there is an increasing mistrust in government, law enforcement, and ‘the systems’ that are supposedly in place to offer more security to us as a society.
The rise of AI should make us all more suspect of government capacity to track citizens. We should be increasingly aware of who holds this power—as we’ve already seen individuals repeatedly abuse these systems, especially when private companies control the devices and the data. Just the hackability of surveillance technologies by individuals as well as malevolent groups should give citizens pause as more of these technologies roll out across the land. It’s not that we should be afraid; that isn’t the message. The message is we need to rein in the government and hold politicians, police forces, and corporations accountable for the use and misuse of technologies and policies that keep us from seeing the full scope of those technological forces.
If we cannot learn from Batman, let’s at least learn from the abuses of these technologies and the corruption of government and corporate policies that keep us from accessing our own public information.
[i] Young people, read Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang to really understand an exact brand of civil disobedience
© 2026 Brian S Collier. All opinions are those of the author. The author reserves All Rights and Copyrights. To request permission to reprint any or all of this article, contact the author.
This story previously appeared on the author’s Substack account https://substack.com/@cowborian
Reprinted with permission of the author.
Logan Foster
Logan Foster is the founder and editor of Redress South Bend, an independent news outlet covering local government, courts, and public institutions in South Bend and St. Joseph County, Indiana. He reports from primary documents: public records requests, court filings, state audit reports, and campaign finance disclosures. His reporting has examined city and school district payments made without competitive bidding, school board spending, and the records of candidates in county races. Redress South Bend obtained the South Bend Police Department's ShotSpotter coverage map after the department initially denied public access. The outlet is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Online News Association. Reach him at info@redresssouthbend.com
