The Case Against Flock
The short version: The Civil Rights Lawyer sits down with IJ's Michael Soyfer to lay out the constitutional case against Flock's ALPR networks in Norfolk and San Jose.
Our Take
The pitch for Flock cameras is always the same: safety, solved crimes, saved kids. What rarely gets mentioned is that none of that requires building a permanent, searchable record of where every driver in a city goes, every single day. This interview with Michael Soyfer of the Institute for Justice cuts straight past the marketing and into the actual legal theory — that warrantless, blanket location tracking of an entire population violates the Fourth Amendment, full stop. Credit to The Civil Rights Lawyer for giving this the serious, unhurried treatment it deserves instead of another 90-second hot take.
What makes the Norfolk and San Jose cases worth watching isn't just the outcome — it's that they're forcing courts to say out loud whether 'we only look at it when we need to' is a real legal safeguard or just a policy promise that can change the moment a new police chief or ICE data-sharing agreement shows up. Departments love to frame Flock as passive infrastructure, but a camera network that logs every plate in a city, keeps it for weeks, and lets any agency query it is not passive. It's a surveillance dragnet with a friendly logo, and the courts, not city council press releases, are where that gets tested.
If you want to see how far this has already spread, check our camera map to find the nearest Flock install to you, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps — because litigation like IJ's needs public pressure alongside it, not instead of it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Civil Rights Lawyer, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.