Police Are Surveilling You Without a Warrant. Here's How to Fight Back.
The short version: Eliza Orlins spotlights EFF's decades-long fight against warrantless power meter, Ring, and vehicle surveillance — a fight that includes the license plate readers we track every day.
Our Take
Eliza Orlins' rundown of EFF's work is a solid primer on how the surveillance state gets built one 'convenience' at a time — your smart meter, your neighbor's doorbell cam, your car. Notice the pattern: none of it required a warrant, and most of it happened because a private company made data-sharing with police the default setting. That's the exact playbook behind Flock Safety's ALPR network, which quietly turns entire towns into tracking grids without anyone voting on it.
EFF's Sacramento power-meter lawsuit and their work reining in Ring's police portal prove something we harp on constantly: these fights are winnable, but only when someone bothers to show up in court, file records requests, and make noise. Flock cameras aren't magic or inevitable — they're contracts signed by city councils that can be un-signed, audited, or killed outright if residents push back.
Credit to Orlins for making this digestible. If it gets you fired up, go see what's actually watching your street on our camera map, then use our take-action page to start asking your local officials the questions they'd rather you didn't.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Eliza Orlins, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.