Patel defends Flock cameras in areas of 'no reasonable expectation of privacy' for investigations

Our Take

KOMO News caught FBI Director Kash Patel doing what officials always do when Flock Safety cameras come under fire: reach for the 'public street, no reasonable expectation of privacy' defense. It's a legal argument, sure, but it's also a dodge. Nobody's arguing that driving down a public road is private. The concern is what happens when thousands of those public moments get stitched together into a searchable, retained, cross-jurisdictional database that can reconstruct where you've been, when, and how often — without a warrant, without notice, and often without your city council ever voting on it.

That's the sleight of hand baked into the 'no expectation of privacy' framing: it treats mass, persistent tracking as legally identical to a cop glancing at your car once. Courts have started to push back on that logic in other surveillance contexts (think cell-site location data), and the same reasoning should apply here. A single plate scan is nothing. A nationwide network feeding federal agencies is something else entirely — and having the FBI director publicly defending it should worry anyone who thought this was a local traffic-safety tool.

Credit to KOMO News for getting this on the record. If you want to see how far this network already reaches near you, check out our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch this expand quietly, our take-action page has concrete steps you can bring to your next city council meeting.