Tell Congress: Get the Flock Out| #flock #aclu #shorts|ACLU

Our Take

When Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders, and the ACLU all point at the same surveillance system and say 'this has to go,' that's not partisan noise — that's a signal. The ACLU's short is brief by design, but the point lands: Flock Safety's network of automated license plate readers has grown so large, so fast, and with so little oversight that it's become one of the few things left-right coalitions actually agree on. That almost never happens in Washington, and it should tell you something about how far this has drifted from 'a few cameras helping solve crimes' into a de facto national tracking grid.

We've said it before on this site: the danger isn't just that Flock cameras log your plate, it's that they log everyone's plate, everywhere, all the time, and store it for departments to search, share, and sometimes misuse without a warrant. Local police chiefs sign contracts without public debate, data flows between agencies and states with wildly different privacy laws, and ICE has had access to local Flock data in multiple documented cases. That's the scenario civil liberties groups have been warning about for years — ambient, networked surveillance infrastructure that outlives any single use case it was sold on.

Credit to the ACLU for putting this in front of a short-form audience that might never read a policy brief. If this clip makes you want to know how close this is to home, check our map of known ALPR locations, and if you want to do something about it, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the city council and congressional level.