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Flock Cameras Are The New Patriot Act

Congress responded to 9/11 with a domestic architecture of preventive surveillance that is why an AI-powered camera may be on your street.

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In 1995, I worked on the 65th floor of the World Trade Center. A childhood neighbor of mine worked a few floors up. He never came home on Sept. 11, 2001. What that day built in this country wasn’t just two wars abroad. It built a permanent domestic architecture of preventive surveillance and 25 years later, that architecture is why an AI-powered camera on your street corner can log your daily movements into an interconnected, nationwide database that law-enforcement can search without a warrant. Flock maintains that participating agencies control their own data and sharing settings. In practice, that data can be searched through an extensive interagency network — including, in many cases, a nationwide lookup feature that state and federal agencies can query.

The Patriot Act, passed 45 days after the attacks, tore down the legal wall that had kept intelligence and law-enforcement personnel from sharing information. Its Section 215 gave the FBI the authority to collect Americans’ business records simply because they were “relevant” to a terrorism investigation. That same year, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 created a new federal department and, with it, the Homeland Security Grant Program, which still funnels money to state and local police for “terrorism prevention.” That grant program, run through DHS-supported intelligence “fusion centers,” is today one of the primary funding channels state and local agencies use to buy automated license-plate readers. Section 215, notably, did not survive. It expired in March 2020 when Congress failed to renew it, along with two related Patriot Act authorities — the only time before this year Congress let a major post-9/11 surveillance power simply expire (a brief earlier lapse occurred in 2015 before reauthorization).

The centerpiece of Congress’ response to 9/11 is Section 702 of FISA, created by the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which lets the government collect foreigners’ communications abroad without a warrant. Because Americans talk to foreigners, their messages get swept into the same database, and the FBI can........

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