Patel defends Flock cameras in areas of 'no reasonable expectation of privacy' for investigations
The short version: FBI Director Kash Patel defends Flock ALPRs by invoking the 'no reasonable expectation of privacy' doctrine, but that legal shortcut ignores what mass, networked tracking actually does.
Our Take
When the head of the FBI goes on camera to defend a private surveillance company's product, that's newsworthy in itself — and credit to KUTV 2 News Salt Lake City for getting Kash Patel on record. His argument boils down to a familiar legal move: you have no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street, so cameras photographing your plate are no big deal. That logic works fine for a single officer glancing at your car. It falls apart when you're talking about thousands of networked cameras building a searchable, retained history of everywhere you drive.
The 'public street' framing is doing a lot of work to distract from the actual product being sold: not a single snapshot, but a pattern-of-life database that agencies can query without a warrant. Courts have started to recognize that aggregated location tracking is categorically different from one-off observation — that's the whole point of cases like Carpenter v. United States. A federal official waving away those concerns doesn't make the underlying Fourth Amendment questions go away; it just tells you how comfortable Washington has gotten with the technology.
If Flock cameras are already watching your commute, you deserve to know it. Check our map to see what's been deployed near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR expansion in your city, our take-action page has concrete next steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KUTV 2 News Salt Lake City, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.