We Demand an End to this Unacceptable Government Surveillance | #aclu #shorts #privacy | ACLU

Our Take

When one of the country's biggest civil liberties organizations uses its platform to call out Flock Safety by name, it's worth paying attention. The ACLU's short is blunt: 20 billion license plate scans a month, feeding a network that police departments across the country can tap into. That's not a typo-level exaggeration, it's the scale Flock itself advertises to investors and municipalities. When surveillance infrastructure grows that fast with that little public debate, the people footing the bill and living under the cameras are the last to find out.

What makes this system so unsettling isn't just the number of plates scanned, it's the pattern of movement it builds on every driver, whether or not they're suspected of anything. Local police departments often sign up for Flock without meaningful council oversight, and data-sharing agreements between agencies mean a scan logged in one town can be queried by cops hundreds of miles away. The ACLU is right to call this unacceptable, and credit to their team for putting it in front of a mainstream audience in under a minute.

We've been documenting exactly where these cameras are going up, block by block, because most residents have no idea their commute is being logged in a searchable database. Check our camera map to see what's near you, and if you want to push back on your local government's contract with Flock, our take-action page has the tools to get started.