Warrantless Tracking The Dark Side of Surveillance Tech

Our Take

Project Next's Sarah Blessing sits down with Tim Deeringer, a former police chief now running for sheriff in Clark County, for a refreshingly candid conversation about Flock Safety cameras and the warrant question. It's rare to get a law enforcement veteran on camera willing to even engage with how ALPR systems work, and credit to Project Next for pressing on the details most local news coverage skips entirely.

The core issue the interview surfaces is one we've been flagging for years: these cameras don't require a warrant because courts have largely treated license plate data as having no reasonable expectation of privacy, even though in aggregate it can map out exactly where you go, when, and how often. That's not a technicality — it's the whole ballgame. A patchwork of thousands of networked cameras feeding a searchable national database isn't the same thing as a cop writing down a plate number by hand, and treating it that way lets mass surveillance scale up with zero judicial oversight.

Whoever wins sheriff in Clark County will decide how aggressively this technology gets deployed and whether any guardrails get attached to it. That makes races like this one worth watching everywhere, not just locally. If you want to see how many of these cameras are already watching roads near you, check our map, and if you want to push back on unchecked deployments in your own community, our take-action page has a place to start.