Nathan Johnson on Texas Flock cameras and the fight over privacy

Our Take

When local CBS affiliates start asking whether license plate readers give police "too much power to track people," you know the conversation has shifted. Credit to Nathan Johnson and the CBS Texas team for putting the question plainly to a broad audience instead of burying it in tech-blog jargon. Texas is a big proving ground for Flock Safety, and how this plays out there will shape the debate in plenty of other states.

What usually gets lost in these segments is the sheer scale of it. A single Flock camera isn't just watching for stolen cars — it's logging every plate that passes, building a searchable history of where you drive, when, and how often, often shared across multiple agencies and jurisdictions with little public oversight. That's not a hypothetical "could be misused" problem; it's the baseline function of the system. The real question isn't whether Flock helps solve some crimes — it's whether we're comfortable with permanent, blanket surveillance of everyone as the price of it.

If you're in Texas or anywhere else, check our map to see how many of these cameras are already watching your own neighborhood, and visit our take-action page if you want to push back on your local council or police department before this becomes just another accepted fact of American life.