Foiling Flock – the company that is getting paid by your local government (meaning, being paid by money taken from you by your local government) and other percolations of the panopticon being installed behind every bush (and atop every traffic signal) to track and mulct us in real time – is the new game of the mid-2020s.

It is fundamentally the same as the Spy vs. Spy game depicted in the long-gone Mad Magazine comic books – except we're the ones being spied upon and we have no interest in spying on others. That's the game of the government-corporate nexus. This thing uses what's styled "public-private partnerships" to do what government either can't afford to do by itself or is precluded from doing itself by having corporations do it on government's behalf – using money extracted by government or by using the threat of government. The public-private partnership that exists between the government and the insurance mafia is an obvious case-in-point but far from the only one.

Another one are these ALPRs you have probably heard or read about. The acronym stands for Automated License Plate Readers – and they do more than just that. Reading is the beginning. The ALPRs are also transmitting what they are reading – to a computer network that ostensibly exists to "flag" Bad Guys, such as car thieves but which, in fact, records the comings and goings of everyone who drives a car in view of an ALPR. This data about you is used to create a profile of you. They – the people who control the ALPRs – want to know all about you. These ALPRs will be extremely handy – to those people – when the time comes to "lock us down" again, for our own good, of course. For now, they are used to enforce toll-mulcting on roads already paid for by the tax cattle who drive on them, who pay every time they fill up their tanks.

Those Flock cameras you see sprouting all over the place are of a piece only more sophisticated. They are capable of noting other identifying details about your vehicle, including such things as bumper stickers and dents. It is almost as creepy as John Wayne Gacy's clown suit.