Flock Cameras EXPOSED? Alejandro Ramos Warns of Privacy & Government Surveillance Risks on KURV

Our Take

Local talk radio isn't where you'd expect a sharp surveillance policy breakdown, but that's exactly what happened on KURV's 956 Drive Home when Alejandro Ramos of the Ramos Research Institute sat down to unpack Flock Safety's automated license plate readers. Credit to DeSimone Booking and the show for giving this issue airtime outside the usual tech and civil liberties circles — ALPR expansion is a Rio Grande Valley story just as much as it's a Washington or Silicon Valley one, because these cameras are going up block by block in towns that never held a public vote on them.

What stands out is Ramos framing this as bipartisan, not a left-vs-right culture war fight. That's the correct read. Nobody, regardless of party, signed up for a private company building a searchable, retained log of everywhere their car has been, accessible to whichever agency asks nicely or whichever employee decides to peek. The safeguards Ramos calls for — real access controls, defined investigative purpose, short retention windows, audit trails — are the bare minimum, and the fact that most Flock deployments in this country still lack them is the actual scandal, not some hypothetical future misuse.

If you want to see how far this network already reaches, check our camera map to find deployments near you, and if your town hasn't had a real public debate about this yet, our take-action page has the tools to force one.