Alasdair Whitney of the Institute of Justice has taken a shameful position on Flock cameras

Our Take

Orwell Day's latest video digs into comments from Alasdair Whitney of the Institute for Justice, who's reportedly staked out a position that Flock Safety's camera network can keep humming along exactly as it does now, scooping up plates and location data on every driver, so long as cops need a warrant to query it. On paper, that sounds like a reasonable compromise. In practice, it's a band-aid on an open wound.

The problem isn't just how the data gets accessed after the fact — it's that the data exists at all, collected on millions of innocent people who've done nothing to warrant (pun intended) government tracking. We've watched agencies promise oversight and then quietly route around it. Edward Snowden didn't expose a hypothetical; he exposed a real program where "warrant required" was treated as a suggestion, not a rule. Flock's own track record of lax audit controls and informal data-sharing between agencies gives us zero reason to think a warrant requirement alone would hold up under pressure. A "shameful position," as the video calls it, might be generous — this is a policy fix for a surveillance problem that needs an infrastructure fix.

If an advocacy group built around constitutional rights is willing to bless mass plate surveillance in exchange for paperwork, it tells you how normalized these cameras have become, and how urgent it is for ordinary people to push back locally. Check our camera map to see what's watching your community, and hit up our take-action page if you want to do something about it beyond hoping a warrant clause saves you.