Trump On Flock Cameras: 'I LIKE THEM!'

Our Take

When a sitting president casually praises a private company's license plate reader network on camera, that's news — and credit to Krystal and Saagar at Breaking Points for catching it amid the midterms polling talk. It would've been easy to let the Flock comment slide as a throwaway line, but it's exactly the kind of moment that shows how normalized this surveillance has become across the political spectrum.

This is the pattern we keep seeing: politicians on the left praise Flock for 'solving crimes' and politicians on the right praise it for 'border security' and 'law and order.' Nobody in power is asking the harder questions — who's watching the watchers, how long is this data kept, who can access it, and what happens when it's inevitably misused or breached. A presidential thumbs-up doesn't change the underlying math: thousands of cameras logging every vehicle's movements, feeding databases that outlast any single administration or use case.

If elected officials aren't going to push back, it falls to citizens to know what's actually watching their streets. Check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to do something about it, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level, where these fights are actually winnable.