Michael Soyfer: Flock Safety, Mass Surveillance, & the Right to Privacy – #38

Our Take

When a public interest law firm starts asking hard questions about Flock Safety, it's worth paying attention. Michael Soyfer of the Institute for Justice sits down with the Yeoman Podcast to unpack how city councils sign off on networks of automated license plate readers with little debate, almost no public input, and vague promises about 'public safety' standing in for actual policy. That's the pattern we see over and over: a vendor demo, a quiet vote, and suddenly every car entering town is logged and timestamped in a database most residents don't know exists.

The conversation matters because it reframes ALPR expansion as a legal and constitutional issue, not just a tech trend. Institute for Justice has a track record of challenging government overreach, and treating Flock's camera networks as a Fourth Amendment question — not a procurement footnote — is exactly the kind of scrutiny these systems have dodged for years. Soyfer's point, as we understand it, is that mass location tracking doesn't need a warrant to feel like a search when every trip you take is recorded by default.

Credit to the Yeoman Podcast for giving this issue real airtime instead of treating it as settled. If you want to see whether your own neighborhood has been wired up this way, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a lawsuit to slow this down, our take-action page has steps for pushing back at the local level.