'Americans deserve answers': Hawley opens Flock investigation with damning new evidence



Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley is not sympathetic to the surveillance state.

With evidence that would frighten any American, Hawley made an announcement on Wednesday that will affect thousands of U.S. neighborhoods.

'The American people want to know who has access to their personal data and how.'

As license plate reading cameras spy from seemingly every corner of the United States, with some even hiding in traffic cones and barrels, Senator Hawley stated on Wednesday that Americans' privacy rights do not stop when they get in their cars.

"Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church," Hawley wrote on X.

With that, Hawley said he is opening an investigation into Flock, the manufacturer behind over an alleged 120,000 cameras across 49 states, a number consistent with license plate camera tracker DeFlock.

"Americans deserve answers," Hawley added.

In letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley, Hawley demanded answers surrounding Flock's safeguards for Americans' data.

Noting that the company conducts "more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month," Hawley said that "the overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong."

Then, Hawley listed some recent horrifying examples of abuse using Flock systems.

RELATED: This state's citizens now oppose Flock cameras — despite agreeing they help police

Just days before Hawley sent the letter, a Missouri man was found to have engaged in "egregious misuse" of Flock's "data system" by using it for personal reasons.

Two weeks prior, prosecutors charged a police officer in Milwaukee for allegedly searching the Flock system for his girlfriend's license plate 124 times, along with her former boyfriend's plate 55 times. He reportedly entered "investigation" as his justification each time.

Other examples cited by Hawley included a Florida woman spending 13 days in jail over eight possible felony counts after she was arrested through a Flock network search.

The charges were eventually dismissed when it was concluded that she was the wrong person.

Moreover, a California police department found that Flock misread license plates in 71% of its issued alerts, leading to the LAPD dropping its contract with the company.

RELATED: What the Flock? Knoxville mayor explains the dark truth about Flock cameras: ‘Not your grandma's license plate readers’

Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Senator Hawley also said there was "uncertainty" around whether or not Flock can sell or use customer data.

"Flock's $8.3 billion valuation comes with enormous pressure to find new commercial applications. Americans demand a full accounting for how their driver data is stored or sold."

Hawley also said, "These camera networks harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search."

"The American people want to know who has access to their personal data and how. This investigation will seek those answers," the letter concluded.

As Blaze Media previously reported, there are also growing concerns about how the license plate readers can be enhanced to to capture any "unique signals" emitted from devices in cars.

The SignalTrace upgrade captures unique identifiers from cell phones, smart watches, Bluetooth devices, earbuds, and Wi-Fi signals and ultimately gives the ability to create a dossier on the driver and all his smart devices.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Cities are kicking out Flock. The surveillance might be here to stay.



Flock Safety spent years selling license plate cameras faster than local officials could ask questions. Now cities are shutting them off. On Wednesday, Tempe, Arizona, shut off all 33 of its Flock license plate readers and announced that it would end its contract. The city won't hire another company to replace them.

That wasn't always the plan. On March 26, the Tempe City Council approved a trial of Axon's Outpost plate readers. The free, 60-day pilot included three fixed cameras and was described at the time as a test of an alternative to Flock. Wednesday's announcement went further. Councilman Bobby Nichols said Tempe needed to "stop looking for other ALPR providers."

'These cameras need to be deactivated immediately.'

So Tempe isn't merely changing the logo on the pole. At least for now, it's walking away from fixed plate readers altogether.

Tempe Mayor Corey Woods (D) acknowledged that the cameras helped police but said the potential for abuse was too great. "For Tempe, that means taking these cameras down," Woods said.

That same day, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) launched a Senate investigation into Flock, demanding records from CEO Garrett Langley about data access, camera placement, retention, and sharing. Hawley gave the company until September 8 to respond.

"Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church," Hawley wrote.

Hawley wasn't alone. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the same day that he would soon introduce legislation to "stop Flock and AI mass surveillance." Sanders warned that the network was pushing the country toward a surveillance state run for the profit of "AI oligarchs."

Flock sold local police departments roadside cameras and connected them to a nationwide system capable of reconstructing where ordinary Americans drive. Most of the people entered into that system aren't suspects. They're going to work, church, school, the gun store, the doctor, or wherever else free people go without asking the government for permission.

Knox County may be next

In Tennessee, the Knox County Sheriff's Office has operated Flock cameras since 2020 and now has 143 of them, according to reporting by the Knoxville News Sentinel. The department planned to install another 270 with state grant money.

County officials then started asking basic questions. Is there a valid contract? Who approved it? Where are the cameras? Who can search the data?

Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs (R) says the original agreement expired in 2024 and that there's no valid service contract governing the current cameras. Records reviewed by county officials also showed the sheriff's office repeatedly purchasing Flock equipment in batches priced just below the threshold that would have triggered mayoral review.

RELATED: When did we agree to be watched?

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

"These cameras need to be deactivated immediately," Commissioner Kim Frazier said during an August 24 meeting. "You don't have an active agreement."

Jacobs has told Flock that the county will not renew the deal even if the company maintains that it is valid. Existing cameras remain active for now, but installation of new ones has stopped. The County Commission is scheduled to vote August 31 on an ordinance regulating the cameras. A proposed amendment would order Flock's equipment removed within 30 days, though its sponsor says final passage would require a second reading in September.

Knox County hasn't pulled the plug. Yet. But the county installed 143 cameras before commissioners could get straight answers about whether the contract was valid, where the cameras had been placed, or who inside the sheriff's office controlled them. That should bother even people who like the cameras.

The cancellations are piling up

By mid-August, the Associated Press reported that more than 50 agencies or jurisdictions had canceled, suspended, rejected, or deactivated a Flock system since the beginning of the year, according to a tracker maintained by the anti-Flock group DeFlock.

The day before Tempe's announcement, the Asheville City Council voted 5-2 to terminate its Flock contract, remove the hardware, and stop employees from accessing or sharing the data.

In Missouri, the St. Charles County Police Department discontinued Flock and began terminating its contract after an audit found that a civilian employee had searched the system for a personal, non-law-enforcement purpose. The employee resigned after receiving notice of termination.

Arizona has become a particularly bad market for the company:

The Josephine County Sheriff's Office in Oregon canceled its contract and deactivated 10 cameras after residents objected on Fourth Amendment grounds. The sheriff's office said the technology had helped solve crimes but conceded that much of the county was not willing to accept it.

In Massachusetts, Salem declined to renew its contract, citing insufficient protections for locally generated data. Salem plans to replace Flock with a system that keeps the data under local control, which is an improvement but hardly the end of automated plate tracking.

Stoughton, Wisconsin, shut the whole thing down. Its council unanimously terminated a two-year contract only months after the cameras were installed. The resolution called for shutting down and removing the cameras, deleting collected data, and barring the city from buying a replacement without a new public oversight process.

RELATED: Student accused of destroying Flock cameras — his community comes out to defend him

L-R: Monongalia County Sheriff's Office press release; Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Redmond, Washington, canceled its contract in a unanimous July vote and ended the city's plate-reader program after deactivating the cameras months earlier. The LAPD stopped using Flock when its agreement expired, pending stronger terms for data ownership, privacy, security, and sharing. Officials left open the possibility of a new contract. Denver and Colorado's Douglas County are replacing Flock with Axon.

Flock's loss may be Axon's gain

Axon has noticed the opportunity. CEO Rick Smith told investors that the company was seeing "a significant number of agencies" switch from other plate-reader systems to Axon. While Knox County is debating getting rid of its 143 Flock cameras, in January, the Knoxville City Council approved a $9.4 million expansion of the police department's Axon contract. The package included plate readers along with additional body cameras, in-car cameras, and drones. The Knoxville Police Department now says it operates 19 fixed Axon plate readers and 30 mobile readers built into police dashcams. It keeps plate data for 30 days. Searches must be tied to an incident report number and are logged for auditing.

Those controls are better than a free-for-all. They don't make the cameras stop recording innocent drivers.

Axon's fixed Outpost cameras combine plate reading, vehicle identification, and live video. In July, the company also began rolling out cross-agency ALPR sharing. Axon's version isn't identical to Flock's national network. Sharing is off by default, initiated by the agency that owns the data, and subject to offense categories and audit logs. But an agency can still let another department search its plate records.

Flock built the network first and the guardrails later

Flock now says it operates more than 120,000 cameras across roughly 6,000 communities. Together, they produce about 20 billion vehicle scans every month.

A Washington Post investigation found at least 50 officers who had been charged with or accused of misusing automated plate-reader systems, often to track current or former romantic partners.

One former Georgia police chief allegedly searched for his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times. In Wisconsin, an officer allegedly searched plates connected to his ex-girlfriend and her partner 179 times, including checking whether she had visited an abortion clinic.

Flock's CEO has said human misuse is inevitable and that the company's job is to provide tools that catch it. In August, the company announced new safeguards that will make several previously optional controls mandatory by January 1. Law-enforcement customers will have to tie searches to case numbers, use software intended to flag abnormal search behavior, and review emergency overrides. Flock also shortened its standard retention period from 30 days to seven, though customers may configure it differently under their own laws and policies. The Associated Press has a useful summary of the changes.

Any check on abuse is better than none. But Flock added these rules only after its network was recording billions of vehicle movements every month. Local officials were sold a crime-fighting tool. What they got was access to a national location-search system. Its limits depended on company policy and department rules, plus the honesty of every employee handed a login.

There isn't a clean partisan story here. Hawley and Sanders agree on very little, but both are now calling for federal action against Flock. Asheville, Tempe, and county sheriffs in Arizona and Oregon have reached similar conclusions for different reasons. A government camera network that records everyone by default and sorts out abuse afterward has the presumption backward.

Most of these towns never had a real debate until the cameras were already watching them. They should have.

When did we agree to be watched?



It wasn't Washington that made me think about it. It was a quiet drive through Florida.

I had spent several days helping my son unpack after his move to Fishhawk Ranch. Like every mother, I was doing what mothers do: organizing closets, opening boxes, trying to make an unfamiliar place feel like home. From there, I drove north to Brooksville to interview someone for an article.

The most dangerous surveillance system isn’t the one we reject. It's the one we eventually stop noticing.

Somewhere along that drive, I began noticing them.

Cameras.

One after another. Traffic cameras. Speed-enforcement cameras. License-plate readers mounted on poles. They weren't hidden. They weren't pretending not to be there. They stood over the road as casually as streetlights, silently recording the movements of every passing driver.

I caught myself wondering something that should concern every American: When did we decide this was normal?

Not when did governments decide. When did we?

Because I don't remember anyone asking. I don't recall a statewide debate. I don’t remember voting to create a society where our daily movements are cataloged, stored, shared, analyzed, and, in many cases, retained long after we've gone home.

Somewhere between “it's just for traffic” and “it's just for public safety,” America quietly became one of the most surveilled free societies in the world.

And hardly anyone noticed.

The Fourth Amendment wasn't written because America’s founders feared technology. They feared government.

British authorities used “general warrants” and “writs of assistance,” legal instruments that allowed officials to search broadly without individualized suspicion. Those practices became one of the sparks of the American Revolution.

The Fourth Amendment was a direct rejection of that kind of generalized intrusion. It was not merely about protecting homes. It was about preventing government from searching and tracking people without particularized cause.

Today's surveillance technology raises a modern version of the same question.

No police department could assign an officer to follow every American every day. A computer can.

RELATED: Flock around and lose your rights

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Across the country, automated license-plate reader systems capture billions of vehicle scans every year. A single observation tells almost nothing. But millions of observations stitched together over months or years can reveal where we worship, whom we visit, what doctors we see, what political meetings we attend, and what causes we support.

One camera watches traffic. A network watches lives.

That distinction matters.

The Supreme Court has already begun recognizing it.

In United States v. Jones (2012), the court ruled that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle’s movements constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment.

Then, in Carpenter v. United States (2018), the court held that police generally need a warrant to obtain historical cell-site location information because prolonged tracking can reveal what Chief Justice John Roberts called the “privacies of life.”

The principle emerging from those cases is straightforward: Technology can change the constitutional analysis. What once would have required hundreds of officers working around the clock can now be accomplished automatically, cheaply, and at enormous scale.

That is why large license plate databases deserve serious scrutiny. Civil liberties groups have challenged warrantless access to them, arguing that mass collection can enable exactly the sort of suspicionless tracking the Fourth Amendment was designed to restrain.

The ACLU has likewise warned that these systems sweep up information about millions of innocent people whose only "crime" is driving to work, church, school, or the grocery store.

Those aren’t fringe lefty concerns.

The issue isn’t the existence of cameras. It is the absence of meaningful limits.

How long is the data kept? Who can search it? Can federal agencies access local databases? Can private companies? Can information collected for one purpose quietly be used for another?

Those questions deserve public answers.

Because history teaches an uncomfortable lesson: Governments rarely surrender surveillance powers voluntarily. They expand them.

RELATED: College student accused of destroying Flock cameras — and the community comes out in droves to defend him

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

That brings me back to Florida.

I recently read proposals to place cameras on municipal garbage trucks to identify possible zoning or code-enforcement violations while they move through neighborhoods.

Supporters see efficiency. Perhaps they are right.

But constitutional government is not built on efficiency alone. It is built on restraint.

Every surveillance tool arrives with a reasonable explanation: traffic safety, crime reduction, code enforcement, public health, national security. Individually, each sounds sensible. Collectively, they can create something the founders would instantly recognize and deeply distrust: a government capable of watching everyone.

Rather than abandon technology, the better answer is to insist that constitutional limits evolve alongside it.

If governments want to deploy large-scale surveillance systems, they should do so through open public debate and legislative approval. They should adopt strict retention limits, require warrants before searching historical movement data except in genuine emergencies, publish regular transparency reports, and impose meaningful penalties for misuse.

Citizens have tools too. Public records laws can reveal contracts with surveillance vendors, data-sharing agreements, retention policies, and audit logs. City council meetings and county commission hearings are often where these systems are approved. State legislatures can require judicial oversight, transparency, and meaningful limits on how surveillance data is collected and used.

Technology should serve a free people. Free people should never quietly become subjects of technology.

The most dangerous surveillance system isn’t the one we reject. It's the one we eventually stop noticing.

The College Transparency Act Is Another Form Of Big Government Surveillance

The CTA is fundamentally antithetical to Americans’ reasonable expectation that the federal government shouldn't track their life choices

TATTLETALE EXPRESS: School buses may soon become America's largest mobile surveillance network



Parents accepted cameras on school buses for a simple reason: catching drivers who illegally pass a stopped bus and endanger children.

What they weren't told is that the same technology could eventually become something much bigger: a nationwide surveillance network.

Cities have explored mounting AI-powered cameras on garbage trucks to identify property-code violations.

Spy school

According to leaked internal documents obtained by 404 Media, BusPatrol — the nation's largest provider of school bus stop-arm camera systems — plans to transform those buses into a nationwide network of Automatic License Plate Readers. Instead of activating only when a stop-arm violation occurs, the cameras would reportedly record the license plate, location, date, and time of every vehicle they encounter before sharing that information with law enforcement databases.

If fully deployed, the system would operate on more than 40,000 school buses across 24 states, creating what could become the largest mobile license-plate reader network in the United States — a system capable of documenting the daily movements of millions of law-abiding drivers.

School buses are an obvious platform for expanding surveillance. They already travel nearly every neighborhood twice a day, five days a week. Building that kind of street-level network from scratch would cost billions and almost certainly provoke public opposition. But here, the buses, cameras, and routes already exist; only the mission changes.

Safety dance

The leaked documents also describe a data-sharing partnership between BusPatrol and Axon, the law enforcement technology company known for body cameras and digital evidence systems. Under the proposal, information collected by school buses could become part of a broader investigative network used by police agencies. Privacy advocates argue that transforms a child-safety program into a system capable of tracking the routine movements of people who aren't suspected of any crime.

Those concerns aren't hypothetical.

The Institute for Justice has documented multiple cases in which law enforcement officers allegedly misused license-plate reader databases for personal reasons. In Milwaukee, an officer reportedly searched the movements of a woman he was dating and her former partner nearly 180 times while claiming the searches were part of official investigations.

In Idaho, a sheriff searched his wife's vehicle more than 700 times in three months, describing the searches as "tests." In Georgia, a police chief was arrested after allegedly using ALPR systems to stalk private citizens. None of those incidents were automatically flagged by the systems themselves.

RELATED: We're winning the fight against Flock — but the surveillance isn't going away that easily

The Washington Post/Getty Images

Usual suspects

School buses also appear to be only one piece of a broader trend. Cities have explored mounting AI-powered cameras on garbage trucks to identify property-code violations because sanitation vehicles, like school buses, already drive every neighborhood on regular routes. Cape Coral, Florida, abandoned its proposal after public opposition, but similar ideas continue to surface elsewhere.

Private companies are expanding these networks as well.

Flock Safety has built a nationwide system of AI-powered cameras that identify license plates along with vehicle make, model, color, decals, and bumper stickers. According to Forbes, companies including FedEx, Lowe's, Simon Property Group, and Kaiser Permanente have participated in information-sharing arrangements involving Flock's network. Civil liberties advocates argue those partnerships expand vehicle tracking while operating outside many of the transparency rules that apply to government agencies.

Each program is introduced as a narrow solution to a specific problem — protecting schoolchildren, solving crimes, enforcing property codes, or improving security. Over time, however, they begin to overlap. School buses, garbage trucks, private security cameras, and commercial fleets become pieces of a much larger network that records where Americans travel and stores that information for future use.

Protecting children should never be controversial, and neither should giving police the tools they need to investigate legitimate crimes.

But turning 40,000 school buses into rolling surveillance platforms is a very different question.

Before that happens, Americans deserve an honest debate about where the line between public safety and routine government tracking should be drawn.

16-year-old arrested for shooting and killing 15-year-old girl and her 9-year-old brother, Maryland police say



Maryland police say a teenager shot and killed a 15-year-old girl and her younger brother in their home days after he possibly celebrated the Fourth of July with the family.

Police have been investigating the lethal shooting that happened July 7 at the family's home on Talles Road in Randallstown.

'This is obviously an unspeakable tragedy.'

On Wednesday morning, police arrested Keith James Jr. at his West Baltimore home. He was charged with two murder counts and a gun charge, according to Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough.

Police believe James had some kind of relationship with Giovanna Myrie, the older victim, but did not say whether it was romantic in nature.

Charging documents indicate that Myrie sought help because James had threatened to kill her if she "messed around" with other males.

Police say James shot and killed Myrie, who was found in her bedroom, and her 9-year-old brother Steve Allen, who was found in a hallway.

Their mother found their bodies at about 7:20 a.m. and contacted police.

"This is obviously an unspeakable tragedy. Our hearts and sympathies are with the victims and their families," defense attorney Brian Thompson said.

Investigators used witness accounts, surveillance video, and cellphone records to place James in the area of the shooting. They believe he used mass transit to get from his home to the victims' home.

"He was on camera in several ways throughout the community," McCullough said. "He had been in the area prior to the crime, and of course, he was in the area after the crime."

Police say a friend of Myrie's indicated that she saw James holding a handgun while on a FaceTime call with the girl at the home.

RELATED: Elderly couple hired 17-year-old to do odd jobs at their home — before he robbed and brutally murdered them, cops say

The suspect's attorney requested that he be placed into a juvenile facility, but that was rejected by the judge. He is being held without bond.

"I would ask everyone to reserve judgment, afford my client his constitutional right to the presumption of innocence, and reserve judgment until the actual evidence is presented in a courtroom," Thompson added.


Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

America’s newest jail has no walls



Americans are looking for safety in an increasingly chaotic country. Mass immigration, collapsing social trust, and weakening civic bonds have transformed many communities from places where neighbors knew one another into anonymous zones governed by suspicion.

Technology promises an escape from the consequences of those political and cultural failures. Flock Safety cameras appear to offer law and order at the push of a button. In the hands of the ruling class that manufactured the crisis, however, they are more likely to produce tyranny for citizens.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system.

Municipalities are buying Flock’s automated license plate readers. The company did not invent plate cameras, but its artificial intelligence radically expands their reach.

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and record license plates, makes, colors, damage, bumper stickers, and identifiers. A single camera means little. A citywide network collecting thousands of images every day creates something powerful.

The cameras send their information to an AI database in real time. Police and other municipal employees can search for vehicles nearby. They can place cars on “hot lists” and receive alerts whenever those vehicles appear.

The system effectively places a GPS tracker on every moving car. Police ordinarily need a warrant to attach a tracker to your vehicle. Flock can reproduce the same surveillance through a network of cameras, often without probable cause, due process, or meaningful legal restraint.

The benefits are obvious. Perfect information about every vehicle makes suspects easier to find. Police can recover stolen cars, locate fleeing murderers, and respond faster to crimes.

In a high-trust town, every grandmother on the porch once knew which cars belonged and which did not. Flock offers a technological imitation of that lost social awareness.

But imitation carries a price. Grandma knew her neighbors and exercised human judgment. The database knows everyone and answers to government employees.

Flock is not alone in selling technological substitutes for social order. Cities have used gunshot-detection systems. Networks of acoustic sensors identify gunfire and triangulate its location, allowing police to respond faster.

The engineering may be impressive. The governing theory is primitive: If authorities watch and listen to everyone constantly, they can prevent more crimes and solve more cases.

RELATED: We’re winning the fight against Flock — but the surveillance isn’t going away that easily

Andrii Yalanskyi/iStock/Getty Images

A surveillance panopticon may work. People who know they are always being watched behave differently. Americans have resisted that bargain for good reason.

The Fourth Amendment exists because efficient policing is not the highest political good. Government must possess evidence and follow procedures before invading the privacy of citizens. New technology should not erase old constitutional limits.

Britain offers a warning. Closed-circuit television cameras have become ubiquitous across the United Kingdom. Some estimates suggest that the average British resident appears on camera dozens of times each day.

Britain has no written equivalent of the Fourth Amendment, and its political culture places fewer obstacles before constant public surveillance. Yet cameras did not prevent the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal or protect thousands of vulnerable girls from organized abuse.

Officials ignored or concealed the crimes for years because confronting them threatened the ruling class’s multicultural ideology. When public anger finally erupted, the surveillance state proved far more competent at identifying and punishing citizens who protested the cover-up.

That is the anarcho-tyranny trap.

Conservative thinker Samuel Francis used the term to describe a regime that tolerates disorder while imposing suffocating control on peaceful citizens. Authorities fail to punish criminals, then use the chaos created by that failure to justify new powers over everyone else.

Americans have already seen the pattern.

The government possessed enormous amounts of video from the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Businesses burned, neighborhoods were looted, and citizens were assaulted. The system showed little appetite for using every available image to identify and prosecute everyone involved.

After January 6, the same government used surveillance footage, facial recognition, financial records, and digital communications to pursue participants with extraordinary intensity. Officials punished many who entered the Capitol and investigated people who merely stood nearby.

RELATED: Flock Safety CEO: It’s ‘terroristic’ to want to know where we put our spy cameras

Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg/Getty Images

During the pandemic, technology companies yielded to government pressure, censored disfavored speech, and turned over user information. Neither the administrative state nor its corporate partners have earned the benefit of the doubt. They have repeatedly demonstrated that enforcement depends on the target.

I am less hostile to state power than many conservatives. A government that cannot control its borders, remove violent criminals, or maintain public order is not a serious government.

But power must be directed toward the common good. The officials asking for universal surveillance are the same officials who refuse to use ordinary authority against illegal immigration, organized crime, urban disorder, and politically favored mobs.

Giving them a database that tracks every American driver will not correct their priorities. It will magnify them.

Supporters will insist that only criminals need to worry. That argument assumes surveillance will remain limited to serious crime and that government will apply its powers impartially. Recent history destroys both assumptions.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system. A hot list can identify a murder suspect, an immigration protester, a gun owner, a church attendee, or anyone traveling to a disfavored rally.

The danger does not require a secret conspiracy. Bureaucracies naturally expand their missions. Politicians redefine threats. Private vendors seek new contracts. Once the infrastructure exists, every crisis supplies another justification for using it.

America’s disorder has obvious political causes. Elites imported cheap labor, weakened borders, excused criminality, and dissolved the social bonds that once allowed communities to police themselves informally. Citizens now feel like strangers in their own homeland.

Technology cannot repair that betrayal.

The difficult answers remain immigration restriction, deportation, competent policing, equal enforcement, and the restoration of families, neighborhoods, and civic trust. Cameras may assist legitimate police work, but they cannot substitute for political courage.

Flock promises safety without social repair. The bargain is tempting because rebuilding order is difficult.

Americans should refuse it.

Rewarding the people who created the crisis with the power to monitor every movement will not restore a high-trust society. It will lock law-abiding citizens inside an open-air prison while the disorder continues beyond the cameras’ reach.

We're winning the fight against Flock — but the surveillance isn't going away that easily



Imagine driving a manufacturer-provided press vehicle for a road test and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by police because a license-plate reader misidentified your temporary tag.

That's exactly what happened recently to an automotive journalist Joel Feder, who says officers tracked the vehicle for days before stopping him in a parking lot over a plate-reading error.

Some license-plate readers have also been installed near businesses that sell firearms, creating records of vehicles visiting those locations.

It isn't an isolated case.

Armed and dangerous

We've covered Flock cameras before. They were sold as precision crime-fighting tools that could quickly locate stolen vehicles and help police solve serious crimes. But mistakes continue to happen. Similar errors have led to innocent families, used-car buyers, and other drivers being subjected to high-risk traffic stops. In some cases, officers have even drawn their weapons.

At the same time, residents are pushing back.

Dozens of cities and towns have allowed Flock contracts to expire or removed cameras altogether after residents questioned the systems' accuracy, privacy implications, and data-retention policies. Public pressure is making a difference.

Before anyone declares victory, however, there's another side to the story.

The surveillance network itself isn't disappearing. In many communities, Flock is simply being replaced by another vendor.

Different vendor, same spying

Companies such as Axon, Motorola Solutions through Vigilant Solutions, Rekor Systems, Genetec AutoVu, and ELSAG — now part of Leonardo — are stepping in to compete for the same contracts. They may promise stronger privacy controls or improved technology, but the basic model remains the same: photograph passing vehicles, record where they were seen, and store that information in searchable databases.

The debate is no longer whether these systems should exist. It's who gets to operate them.

Privacy advocates argue that building long-term databases showing where people travel raises serious Fourth Amendment questions, particularly as courts have become increasingly skeptical of warrantless collection of detailed location information.

The concerns extend beyond highways and intersections. Some license-plate readers have also been installed near businesses that sell firearms, creating records of vehicles visiting those locations. Critics argue that this raises additional questions about lawful activities protected by the Second Amendment.

RELATED: Flock Safety CEO: It's 'terroristic' to want to know where we put our spy cameras

Timothy Fadek/Boston Globe/Getty Images

DeFlock delivers

One of the most effective responses has come from ordinary citizens.

An independent project called DeFlock.org maps known automated license-plate reader locations across the country, allowing residents to see where cameras have been installed. Armed with that information, people have attended city council meetings, questioned local officials, and in some cases convinced communities to remove cameras or reject new contracts.

Technology companies will continue improving these systems because there's money to be made, and police departments will continue looking for tools they believe help fight crime.

The real question is where communities decide to draw the line.

Every time you leave your driveway, these systems collect another data point about your movements. If everything works perfectly, most drivers never notice. When something goes wrong, however, innocent people can find themselves explaining a database error to police officers on the side of the road.

Changing vendors doesn't necessarily change that reality. It simply changes whose logo is on the camera.

Digital memory card dropped at store leads to discovery of hundreds of thousands of child porn files



Law enforcement officials said a search warrant of a 40-year-old man's devices led to the discovery of hundreds of thousands of child porn images and videos.

The disturbing discovery was made after the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department was contacted by workers at a Stater Bros. grocery store in the picturesque mountain town of Lake Arrowhead.

Surveillance video from the store allegedly showed Quinn dropping the microSD memory card.

A worker found a microSD memory card and turned it over to police in June 2026.

Deputies reviewed the card and found "thousands of digital media depicting child pornography" that included "infants and juveniles performing sexual acts." Some of the media was generated by artificial intelligence, but others were real.

Investigators were able to connect the card to Adam James Quinn, a resident of Lake Arrowhead. Surveillance video from the store allegedly showed Quinn dropping the microSD memory card.

Deputies then performed a search warrant at Quinn's residence and seized other microSD cards as well as hard drives, flash drives, laptops, other computers, and his phone.

They allegedly found hundreds of thousands of child porn files on the devices.

Quinn was arrested on Wednesday and charged with possession of child pornography.

RELATED: 4 teachers and 1 cop in small Alabama town arrested over child pornography, police say

Lake Arrowhead. Don Kelsen/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Police released his booking photo in hopes of obtaining other information from the public that might help their investigation.

Lake Arrowhead is a small town with about 12,000 residents located in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Let Your Kids Grow Up Without A Homing Signal

By constant monitoring, we’re not just giving up freedom for temporary safety, we’re raising kids to think the surveillance state is normal.