ACLU Expert Tells Congress: Flock is DANGEROUS and Must Be Banned| ACLU

Our Take

When the ACLU puts a named expert in front of Congress to say a surveillance company's product is dangerous, that's not activist hyperbole — it's a credentialed civil liberties organization using its institutional capital to say the quiet part loud. Chad Marlow's testimony, as described here, lines up with what local organizers, journalists, and ordinary residents have been documenting camera by camera for years: Flock's network wasn't built with meaningful guardrails, and it's being deployed faster than lawmakers can understand it.

What makes ALPR networks like Flock's different from a single traffic camera is scale and retention. One camera watching one intersection is a nuisance. Thousands of networked cameras logging every plate, every time, searchable by thousands of agencies and shared across jurisdictional lines, is a tracking system — full stop. Congress hearing that plainly from an ACLU expert matters because it moves the conversation from 'is this a privacy concern' to 'how fast can we pull this back.'

We don't expect Washington to act quickly, and we don't expect Flock to slow down while it waits. That's why local pressure still matters most: knowing which cameras are near you, who operates them, and what your city council has or hasn't approved. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your neighborhood, and head to our take-action page if you want to push back where it counts — at the local level, before the next contract gets signed. Credit to the ACLU for getting this on the record in Congress.