They Put a Tracker on Every Road

Flock cameras were sold as a way to find stolen cars. They are becoming a searchable national map of where Americans go.

JC and Carolyn Herron were taking their three-year-old granddaughter to a doctor’s appointment when police stopped them at gunpoint. A Flock camera read the letter O in their personalized plate, “LOVEY,” as a zero. A bad machine read, combined with stale police information, turned a family trip to the doctor into an armed police stop. Their granddaughter sat in the back seat while adults with guns acted as though an algorithm could not be wrong.

Flock Safety sells automated license plate readers, which are cameras that record a vehicle’s plate, visible details, time, and location. Flock says it does not use facial recognition and deletes plate data after thirty days by default, but the system still lets authorities search by plate, color, make, partial plate, and other visible features. Flock’s own policies recognize that agencies can download and store images before the thirty days are up. The company can delete its copy, but it cannot erase the copy a police department already pulled into its own files.

Flock did not show up in a country that had fiercely protected privacy. After 9/11, Democrats and Republicans spent years building a surveillance state that kept asking Americans to give up more freedom in exchange for safety. They expanded the power to watch, collect, search, and share information about ordinary people, then called every new intrusion necessary. Flock takes that same rotten system and makes it cheaper, easier, more local, and harder to see. It does not need a secret wiretap or a federal court order. It needs a black camera on a pole, a contract signed at City Hall, and software that turns scattered sightings into a map of your life.

Flock says it has partnerships across every state except Alaska through thousands of contracts with police departments, towns, schools, businesses, apartment complexes, and homeowners’ associations. Nobody held a national vote on whether America should have a giant searchable vehicle tracking system. It was built quietly, one local purchase at a time, while most people had no idea that a camera outside a shopping center, an apartment complex, or a private neighborhood could feed into a far larger police network.

That matters even more under an administration that has already shown how willing it is to weaponize private information. A federal judge found that the IRS unlawfully gave ICE confidential taxpayer addresses about 42,695 times under a data sharing arrangement meant to help immigration enforcement. In Illinois, a state audit found that Flock allowed Customs and Border Protection to access license plate data even though state law was supposed to stop that kind of sharing. This is how authoritarian power works. Government collects information for one reason, then finds a new excuse to use it against people it wants to hunt, intimidate, punish, or deport.

The danger is already here. In Texas, a Johnson County official searched Flock for a woman after a self-managed abortion and wrote, “had an abortion, search for female.” One search reached 6,809 networks and 83,345 cameras. The sheriff’s office and Flock first called it a welfare check, but records showed deputies opened a death investigation, read the woman’s text messages, and asked prosecutors whether they could charge her. Prosecutors said Texas could not charge her for taking abortion medication. The man who reported her was later charged in connection with assaulting her. They used a system sold as a tool for stolen cars to track a woman whose partner had allegedly brutalized her.

One federal judge gave Norfolk, Virginia’s Flock system a green light after two residents learned their cars had been photographed about 475 and 325 times over four and a half months. The judge ruled that the city’s 176 camera network had not gathered enough information to reconstruct their whole lives, and the case is now on appeal. That is the legal trick holding this system together. Break the tracking into hundreds of separate pictures, call each one a harmless moment, and pretend the computer never stitched those moments into a detailed trail.

These systems never stay limited to the crimes used to sell them. Reviews of Flock searches found police using the network for school residency checks, background checks, and loud music complaints. A system marketed as a way to catch kidnappers and carjackers became another lazy shortcut for school bureaucracy, petty complaints, and everyday police convenience. Surveillance always spreads when those in power discover that watching people is easier than doing the real work.

A camera can help find a stolen car or locate a missing child in a real emergency. Nobody is asking police to be blind. But a camera cannot become a standing warrant to search the movements of every person who drove past it. When police want to dig through weeks of someone’s life, they should have to go before a judge and show probable cause. That rule should block nationwide fishing expeditions, abortion investigations, immigration dragnets, and secret data sharing schemes hidden behind the words “public safety.”

Flock’s promises about safeguards are getting harder to believe because the safeguards keep collapsing when they are tested. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Flock told city officials its system could not create a heat map showing where a vehicle had traveled, then admitted it could show where that vehicle had been captured over a month. The city revoked approval the next day. In San Francisco, an audit found 299 improper searches of Flock data for federal and out of state agencies through an intelligence sharing arrangement. Nobody hacked the system. Somebody with authorized access opened the side door and let them in.

Flock has not merely installed cameras. It has sold the next stage of America’s surveillance state, built through local blind spots and ready to be used by people who already believe private information is another weapon of government power. The camera does not need your face. Once it knows your plate, where you were, where you went next, and how often you returned, the people in power already have a file on your life.

They call it safety because “a tracker on every road” would make Americans understand exactly what has been done to them.

*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky @tonywriteshere.bsky.social

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