Why You Should Still Have Hope for America | ACLU

Our Take

Credit to the ACLU and Mike Zamore for threading Frederick Douglass's defense of a flawed-but-redeemable Constitution into a modern civics pep talk. It's a six-minute mark where they name the thing we track every day: freedom from mass surveillance. That's not a throwaway line. Automated license plate readers like Flock Safety's network are exactly the kind of government-adjacent power grab that doesn't wait for a court ruling or a new law — it just gets bolted to a pole at your intersection and starts logging where you drive, when, and how often.

The video's larger argument — that constitutional promises only mean something when people demand they be honored — applies directly to ALPR sprawl. Nobody voted on whether their local PD should build a searchable database of every car that passes through town. Most city councils approved these contracts with little scrutiny, and plenty of residents still don't know the cameras exist. Accountability doesn't happen by accident; it happens when people show up to council meetings, file records requests, and push back.

If Douglass could hold the government to a standard it hadn't yet earned, we can hold our city halls to the same test. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your block, and hit take action for concrete steps to push your local government toward transparency instead of unchecked expansion.