Flock's Creepy Surveillance System Coming to a City Near You
The short version: Institute for Justice spotlights Norfolk residents suing over Flock ALPRs, showing how routine drives become a permanent, searchable government record.
Our Take
Credit to the Institute for Justice for putting real faces on this fight. Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington aren't hypothetical plaintiffs worried about abstract privacy theory — they're two Norfolk residents who found out that every time they leave their driveway, a network of Flock cameras is logging where they went, when, and how often. That's not policing a crime. That's building a permanent movement history on people who've never been suspected of anything.
This case matters because Norfolk isn't unique. It's a preview. Flock's pitch to city councils is always the same: it's just for looking up stolen cars, it's just for hits on hot lists. But the architecture doesn't care about intent — it captures everyone, indiscriminately, and stores it long enough to reconstruct a person's daily life without a warrant. IJ's framing of this as a Fourth Amendment issue is exactly right: the question isn't whether the tech catches bad guys sometimes, it's whether the government should be allowed to track innocent people by default just because it's technically possible.
If you want to see whether this dragnet already exists on your street, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for your own lawsuit to find out how deep it goes, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the city council level before the cameras go up, not after.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Institute for Justice, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.