The cameras record everyone who passes. Police should need a warrant before turning that mass collection into a searchable history of your movements.
Cities and states are moving quickly in response to concerns about governments’ expanding use of public surveillance cameras, automated license plate readers, audio detection devices, and similar tools. That is healthy. The country needs a serious debate over when crime prevention becomes pervasive surveillance.
Flock Safety says its AI-assisted network includes more than 120,000 cameras in 49 states and processes some 20 billion license plates each month, along with other vehicle characteristics. Public resistance has grown just as quickly.
On Monday, the Douglas, Massachusetts Police Department announced it was discontinuing Flock cameras and immediately deactivated its monitoring accounts, citing a “divisive atmosphere” around the technology.
Other communities have restricted, suspended, or removed the cameras in Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. Similar fights are under way in Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York.
Congress has joined the fight, with lawmakers describing Flock cameras as emerging in a rare bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and two other House Republicans introduced a bill last month to bar the federal government from purchasing Flock cameras or similar technology.
Critics warn that mass license-plate collection can become a surveillance system for people who have not been accused of any crime. AI dramatically expands what authorities can infer from otherwise ordinary observations by making huge quantities of location data searchable, sortable, and easy to combine.
Promises about retention limits deserve skepticism. The Institute for Justice has found 170 cases involving alleged misuse of automated license plate reader data and related systems.
Recent cases have involved officers or government personnel in Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, and Kentucky. Some incidents included thousands of searches for personal purposes.
The legal question is not simple. Courts have long held that people generally have less privacy in public than at home, but the Supreme Court has recognized limits when technology allows government to reconstruct a person’s movements in extraordinary detail.
That distinction is crucial. The constitutional permission to observe something in public does not automatically justify collecting every observation, storing it, cross-referencing it, and making years of movement searchable at the touch of a button.
States and local communities are entitled to decide that the risks outweigh the benefits.
