With Great Power Comes Great... Surveillance?!

Seven years ago, Peter Parker inherited a surveillance and drone network built by his recently passed billionaire mentor Tony Stark, and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) treated this as a problem. Iron Man’s posthumous gift, EDITH, granted him access to this network, and the entire film treats this as an incredibly dangerous power to have. The movie’s villain weaponizes it and turns the entire world against Spider-Man. By the end, the technology isn’t destroyed, only handed to someone more trustworthy, but at least the question of whether anyone should have this kind of access was raised.

In this year’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, this question doesn’t get asked at all. Peter doesn’t build a surveillance network or inherit one; it’s already there. Peter’s AI tool, plugged into New York’s own camera grid, runs facial recognition to track criminals, and, more troublingly, a mutant who poses no criminal threat.

Debate sparked particularly from the scene where Spider-Man tells a detective he has “every camera in New York running a facial recognition scan” to track down a villain, and later uses the same method to locate Jean Grey, a mutant who’s committed no crime. Online, fans nicknamed him “Peter Thiel Parker” and “Palantir Parker,” a pointed reference to Palantir, the data-analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel that holds an active, ongoing relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense built on its AI software.

A March 2026 poll found that nearly three-quarters of Americans are concerned about how their personal data is handled by the government, a stark contrast between what people are concerned about and what is portrayed as normal on screen. The audience’s reaction is not the more useful place to look; it’s the infrastructure that allowed Peter to do this.

Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers (ALPRs) have spread through American neighborhoods over the past several years with little public debate, until this August, when backlash finally caught up. That month alone, 141 cities, counties, sheriffs, and institutions terminated, suspended or declined to renew their Flock contracts, a nearly sixfold jump from July. ALPRs create a searchable record and share this data across police departments. This is pitched to residents as necessary efficiency and safety technology, and is then often rolled out with little oversight once in place. In Pflugerville, Texas, the city eventually shut its Flock cameras off entirely after discovering hundreds of unapproved users had access to residents’ driving data.

A Washington Post investigation found that at least 50 U.S. law enforcement officers have been charged with or accused of misusing ALPR systems (or, rather, using them to their full extent), and Flock’s equipment was involved in 46 of those 50 cases. More than half involved an officer tracking a current or former romantic partner. 

Some of these cases are worth sitting with. A Georgia police chief resigned and was arrested after women seeking protective orders accused him of using Flock cameras to follow them and send them maps of their own movements; he had reportedly searched one woman’s plate roughly 600 times. On a similar note, in Texas, a sheriff’s deputy used Flock’s cross-jurisdictional “national lookup” tool, searching more than 83,000 cameras nationwide, to track down a woman who had taken abortion medication. The search was prompted by her abusive partner, who had contacted the sheriff asking him to locate her. The sheriff publicly described the search as a welfare check, telling reporters that her family feared she would bleed to death and that she was never a suspect. However, the lead detective’s sworn affidavit describes the case throughout as a death investigation into a “non-viable fetus,” and records that deputies asked the district attorney’s office whether she could be criminally charged, before being told she couldn’t. That mismatch between the official explanation and the internal record is itself worth noticing, a glimpse into how these systems get retroactively justified.

ICE has also reportedly used Flock data to locate people in cities and states that legally prohibit local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement.

This isn’t a uniquely American story, and isn’t a hypothetical for readers here. The Netherlands has run its own version of this system since 2019, when the Dutch Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) Act came into force. Police cameras across the country continuously log the license plates and locations of every passing vehicle (regardless of suspicion!) and store this data for four weeks in a central database.  

Researchers studying local data surveillance call this “function creep,” which is when systems introduced for one narrow purpose gradually expand into something much broader. ANPR cameras in the Netherlands were first justified as a traffic-enforcement tool to read plates to catch speeders or to enforce environmental zones. They’re now a standard part of criminal investigation and policing more broadly, with little public debate about the transition from one use to the other.

This raises an important question: why now? It’s tempting to say the technology simply did not exist ten years ago, but that’s only half true. Facial recognition and networked cameras aren’t new inventions. The thing that changed is appetite. Local police departments now buy ALPR subscriptions the way they’d buy any other software service; by mid-2026, Flock’s own count put its law enforcement customer base at over 5,000 agencies. At the same time, companies with defense contracts have made building surveillance infrastructure for governments a normal business rather than a controversial one.

That shift in appetite doesn’t stop at the neighborhood level. The same willingness to fund and normalize domestic surveillance tools shows up alongside a broader comfort with expanding enforcement and defense capacity generally, such as in new investment in policing technology and in border and defense contracting. ALPRs and growth in defense spending aren’t the same phenomenon, but they share a common root: a political climate where visible expansions of state power, at home and abroad, no longer require the kind of justification they once did.

Seven years ago, Spider-Man at least pretended that a surveillance network was something to be wary of, something a villain could seize, something the hero eventually gave up. Brand New Day doesn’t ask its hero, or its audience, to sit with that question at all; it can depict a hero accessing a city’s camera network without having to explain it, because audiences aren’t expected to find it strange. The technology isn’t a problem anymore. It’s just there, the same way ANPR cameras are on the roads of the Netherlands, quietly logging every plate that passes, and the way we’re, increasingly, being asked not to notice.