Public safety is important. Police officers should have modern tools to find stolen vehicles, locate dangerous suspects and respond quickly when a serious crime has been committed. But public safety should not become a blank check allowing the government—or a private company working with the government—to record the movements of every law-abiding citizen.
That is precisely the concern raised by Flock Safety cameras.
These automated license-plate readers photograph vehicles traveling on public roads. They record license plates, locations, dates and times, and may also identify characteristics such as a vehicle’s color, make, model and distinguishing features. That information is placed into a searchable database that law-enforcement agencies can use to reconstruct where a vehicle has been seen.
They seem to be on every street corner in urban and suburban areas.
Supporters say the cameras do not use facial recognition and merely photograph vehicles already visible in public. That explanation sounds reassuring until we consider the size and reach of the system.
A police officer occasionally seeing your car on a public street is one thing. A network of cameras systematically recording where thousands of people travel is something entirely different. One observation is fleeting. A searchable database can reveal a pattern of someone’s life.
It might show that a person regularly visits a doctor, church, political meeting, union office, addiction-treatment center or someone else’s home. None of those activities is illegal. Many involve some of our most personal choices and constitutionally protected freedoms.
Americans should not have to surrender that privacy simply because they drive on public roads.
The fundamental problem is that Flock cameras generally collect information about everyone, not merely people suspected of committing crimes. The government traditionally investigates a person after developing evidence or reasonable suspicion. Mass license-plate surveillance reverses that principle: collect information on everybody first and decide later whose movements are worth investigating.
That is dangerously close to treating every driver as a potential suspect.
There is also the matter of government accountability. When communities install these cameras, residents deserve clear answers. Who may search the records? How long is the information retained? Which neighboring agencies can access it? Can federal authorities use it? Are searches audited? What happens when an officer misuses the system? Can information be obtained by private parties or exposed in a data breach?
Too often, the public hears about a camera system only after it has already been approved or installed.
Mistakes are another concern. A plate may be entered incorrectly, reported stolen after a paperwork error or attached to the wrong description. An innocent motorist can then face a frightening traffic stop, possibly involving drawn weapons, because a computer produced an alert. Technology may assist police officers, but it is not infallible—and its errors carry real-world consequences.
The constitutional question is still developing. Courts have long held that people have a reduced expectation of privacy in what they knowingly expose in public. But modern technology allows the government to collect, combine and search information on a scale the authors of the Fourth Amendment could never have imagined.
There is a meaningful difference between noticing a car pass through town and constructing a detailed record of its movements over days, weeks or months. The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches must remain meaningful in the digital age. Otherwise, technology can gradually erase freedoms that government could never have taken all at once.
This does not mean police should be denied every use of license plate readers. A narrowly controlled system used to search for a recently stolen vehicle, an abducted child or a clearly identified dangerous suspect may be reasonable. But safeguards should come first, not after abuses occur.
Any community using these cameras should require strict retention limits, warrants for historical searches except in genuine emergencies, detailed audit logs, public reports, penalties for misuse and firm restrictions on sharing data outside the agency. Elected officials, not a private surveillance company, must determine the rules.
Even with safeguards, residents are justified in asking whether the benefits outweigh the loss of privacy.
Civil liberties are rarely taken away in one dramatic act. More often, they disappear gradually, one camera, one database and one “reasonable” exception at a time. Each new intrusion is defended as a small price to pay for security.
Eventually, however, the price becomes a society in which the government can retrace our movements without a warrant, without our knowledge and without evidence that we have done anything wrong.
Flock cameras may help solve some crimes. But a free country should not build a permanent record of everyone’s travels in hopes of catching the relatively few who break the law.
We should assist police in pursuing criminals. We should not place every citizen under continuous electronic suspicion to do it.
