Mayor Glenn Jacobs, AKA Kane, exposes Flock cameras for what they are: Anti-American.

Our Take

It's not every day a sitting mayor — let alone one who once hurled opponents off a steel cage — steps up to call mass license plate tracking un-American. Young Americans for Liberty's sit-down with Farragut Mayor Glenn Jacobs is worth a watch simply because it shows this isn't a fringe, coastal, or purely partisan issue. When a small-town Tennessee Republican mayor and a libertarian youth organization land on the same page as civil liberties groups on the left, that's a signal the Flock debate has outgrown the usual left-right boxes.

The core of the argument, as we hear it echoed by officials across the country, is simple: a government or its vendor logging every car that passes a camera, building a searchable history of where you've been, isn't a minor inconvenience — it's a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between citizens and the state. You don't need a warrant, you don't need suspicion, and increasingly you don't even need a local police department's buy-in, since these networks share data across jurisdictions and sometimes with federal agencies. Framing that as 'anti-American' isn't hyperbole; it's a pretty direct read of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to prevent.

Credit to Young Americans for Liberty for putting a local elected official on record pushing back, because that's exactly the kind of pressure that gets ordinances rewritten or contracts cancelled. If you want to see whether your own town already has these cameras installed, check our map, and if you'd rather not wait for your mayor to notice, our take-action page has steps for raising it at your next council meeting.