Flock Cameras, The Constitution and The New Era of Government Surveillance | Tahmineh Dehbozorgi
The short version: EmpowerU America's Tahmineh Dehbozorgi breaks down the Institute for Justice's Norfolk lawsuit, showing how Flock's camera network may violate the Fourth Amendment.
Our Take
Credit to Tahmineh Dehbozorgi and EmpowerU America for putting a legal lens on something most city councils wave through without a second thought. The Institute for Justice's Norfolk case is the one to watch: it argues that blanketing a city with Flock cameras that track every car's movements amounts to a warrantless search under the 'mosaic theory,' the idea that even if each individual camera snapshot seems harmless, stitching thousands of them together into a timeline of someone's life is exactly the kind of persistent tracking the Supreme Court flagged in Carpenter v. United States.
This is the core problem with ALPR networks that gets lost in city council presentations about 'solving crime faster.' Nobody votes on a warrant requirement, nobody opts in, and nobody outside the department has real visibility into how long that data sits around or who else gets to query it. A lawsuit like Norfolk's forces the question courts have been dodging: at what point does 'public road, no expectation of privacy' stop being a real legal shield and start being a loophole for dragnet surveillance.
Litigation moves slowly, and in the meantime these systems keep going up block by block. That's why knowing what's already deployed near you matters — check our camera map to see what's nearby, and if your city is considering a Flock contract or renewal, our take-action page has tools to help you push back before the next camera goes up.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of EmpowerU America Classes, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.