Driving Shouldn't Expose Us to Constant Surveillance | #aclu #shorts #Flock | ACLU

Our Take

The ACLU's short is right to frame this as a rights issue, not just a tech issue. Flock Safety has spent years selling city councils on the idea that ALPR cameras are just "neutral" tools for catching stolen cars, but the reality is a nationwide grid quietly logging every plate that passes, whether or not the driver has ever been suspected of anything. That's not law enforcement — that's dragnet tracking, and it happens on roads we all have to use to get to work, church, the pharmacy, or a protest.

What makes this especially dangerous is the scale and the silence. Most drivers have no idea their local intersection has a Flock camera feeding data into a searchable, cross-jurisdictional database that police departments hundreds of miles away can query without a warrant. The ACLU is right to push back on the normalization of this — once a surveillance network like this is built, it rarely shrinks, and the temptation to expand its use (immigration enforcement, reproductive healthcare surveillance, tracking activists) only grows over time.

If you want to see how close this surveillance is to your own driveway, check our camera map, and if your city is considering a Flock contract or already has one, use our take-action resources to push back before the network gets bigger and harder to unwind. Credit to the ACLU for putting this plainly — driving shouldn't be a surveillance checkpoint.