Patel defends Flock cameras in areas of 'no reasonable expectation of privacy' for investigations
The short version: FBI Director Kash Patel says Flock cameras are fine because public roads carry "no reasonable expectation of privacy," a legal fig leaf for mass tracking.
Our Take
Credit to KBAK-KBFX Eyewitness News in Bakersfield for getting FBI Director Kash Patel on record defending Flock Safety's ALPR network. His argument is the same one law enforcement has leaned on for years: you're on a public street, so you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, therefore the camera can watch you. That legal doctrine was built for a single officer glancing at a passing car, not for a nationwide grid of cameras logging every plate, every time, and stitching it into a searchable timeline of where you've been.
The sleight of hand here is treating a network effect like it's the same thing as a cop's eyeball. One camera on one corner is a snapshot. Thousands of cameras networked together, shared across agencies and sometimes with federal partners, is a movement-tracking system. The Fourth Amendment's "reasonable expectation of privacy" test was never meant to bless that kind of persistent, aggregated surveillance just because it happens in public — courts have already wrestled with this exact tension when it comes to cell-site location data and GPS trackers.
When the FBI director is publicly vouching for a private company's camera network, that's a signal this technology is becoming permanent infrastructure, not a temporary pilot program. If you want to see how far that infrastructure already reaches, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch it happen, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KBAK - KBFX - Eyewitness News - BakersfieldNow, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.