Cory Booker: AI Surveillance Can Track Women Crossing State Lines To Seek Reproductive Care
The short version: Sen. Cory Booker warned a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that Flock ALPR networks could track women crossing state lines for abortion care, spotlighting bipartisan unease over the surveillance dragnet.
Our Take
When a sitting U.S. Senator stands up in a Judiciary Subcommittee hearing and says the quiet part out loud — that a license plate reading network blanketing the country could be used to trace someone's trip across state lines for reproductive care — that's not fearmongering, that's just reading the spec sheet. Flock's own pitch to police departments has always been about pattern-of-life tracking: where you went, when, how often. Cory Booker just said what privacy advocates have been shouting for years, except this time it's on the congressional record, credit to Forbes Breaking News for getting the clip out.
This matters because ALPR systems don't ask what you're doing or why before they log your plate. A trip to a clinic in a neighboring state looks identical in the data to a trip to the grocery store — until a prosecutor, a bounty hunter, or a vengeful ex-partner with database access decides it isn't. Post-Dobbs, that's not hypothetical paranoia, it's the exact scenario state AGs and civil liberties groups have been warning about since these camera networks started cross-pollinating data between thousands of agencies with zero federal guardrails.
A hearing is a start, not a solution. Cameras are still going up in towns that never had a public vote on it, and data-sharing agreements are still being signed without meaningful oversight. Check our map to see what's already watching your routes, and if you want to push back locally, our take-action page has the tools to start that fight in your own city council meeting.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Forbes Breaking News, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.