Ex-FBI special agent: There is no expectation for privacy here.

Our Take

Ex-FBI agent Nicole Parker and attorney Josh Ritter trot out the line that's been used to justify every expansion of government surveillance since the dash cam: you're on a public road, so you have no expectation of privacy. Technically true for a single plate at a single moment. But that's not what Flock Safety and similar ALPR networks actually do. They log every car, every time, at thousands of intersections, building a searchable timeline of where you've been for weeks or months. Courts have started to recognize that this kind of aggregation is a different animal — that's the whole point of the Carpenter v. United States decision on cell-site data. A panel segment that collapses 'no privacy in one glance' into 'no privacy in a permanent, networked surveillance grid' is doing a lot of legal sleight of hand in under two minutes.

Credit to Fox News Clips for putting the debate on air at all, since most local coverage of these systems just parrots the police department press release. But 'law enforcement finds it useful' has never been a constitutional standard, and it conveniently skips who else gets access to that data — other agencies, federal partners, sometimes private companies — and how long it sits in a database waiting to be queried, hacked, or abused.

If you want to see whether this dragnet has already rolled into your neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for cable news to sort out the Fourth Amendment questions, head to our take-action page to push back locally.