Flock

Other Courts Should Heed a Federal Judge's Warning About Flock-Enabled Mass Surveillance

Car-tracking cameras, like cellphones, generate vast amounts of sensitive data.

Jacob Sullum | 10.14.2026 12:01 AM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Paul Weaver/Zuma Press/Newscom/Flas100/Oleg Dudko/Doreen Salcher/Dreamstime/Midjourney/Fatima Ruiz)

Back in 1983, the Supreme Court declared that "a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another." That increasingly doubtful proposition underpins a nationwide network of more than 144,000 AI-assisted cameras that track the travels of innocent motorists across the country billions of times each week.

So far, state and federal courts have almost uniformly rejected constitutional challenges to automated license plate readers (ALPRs) installed by companies such as Flock Safety. But in a decision that could signal a shift in the legal treatment of Flock cameras, a federal judge in Oklahoma recently recognized that they enable "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance."

ALPRs are much more sophisticated than the technology that the Supreme Court considered in 1983, when it approved the warrantless use of a radio transmitter that helped police tail........

© Reason.com