On a Wednesday night, September 16, in the Town of East Greenbush in Upstate New York, I had trouble getting into the main room for the public hearing on Flock cameras because it was so crowded. However, from the overflow community room, I was able to listen to the arguments from law enforcement, a representative at Flock, and concerned town residents who wanted to keep their privacy intact. I was encouraged by how many people from within the town and outside of it attended to voice their opinions or show support for those who did, and it makes it seem like perhaps not all is lost when it comes to opposition to the surveillance state. Even Town Supervisor Jack Conway has opposed these cameras from the beginning, and he will continue to use his influence to end the Flock contract the best that he can.
Of course, there was Rensselaer County District Attorney Mary Pat Donnelly, East Greenbush Police Sergeant Michael Herrington, and Flock Public Affairs Manager Karl Bach who gave their reasonings for why Flock technology is safe and effective, arguing that the data is being safeguarded in the town by a public transparency portal and the fact that officers need specific case numbers and legitimate recorded reasons before they are permitted to access the information. The proponents made inferences that the data is safely stored and never sold to anyone outside of the police department and that there is unlikely ever to be cases of abuse by officers in the town. The technology does not violate individuals’ privacy, and the information is deleted a few weeks after it is captured. They read from the typical stories that you would expect about how it helps to solve crimes throughout the county and across the region, and Herrington read a letter of appreciation from one town resident who said that if Flock cameras had not been present in the town, a kidnapped child would never have been recovered (if the cameras alone find missing children and it is not a result of officers’ ingenuity and hard work in cracking cases, what does that say about the success of police departments?).
There are few people who would make the argument that advancements in technology, including with Flock cameras, cannot be useful as law enforcement tools; but that is not the point. In fact, prior to the American Revolution, British soldiers were helping themselves to search people’s homes to ensure compliance with customs and smuggling laws. Yes, Writs of Assistance could prevent crimes as the British government saw fit, but it also was a huge violation of people’s rights and a reason for why the colonists wanted to break free from the empire. Many make the argument that the Patriot Act was a necessary tool to prevent further terrorist attacks on American soil, but if the Fourth Amendment is being desecrated in the process, we have done nothing but determine precedents for future tyranny and stripped away some of the founding principles that many of us hold dear.
Law enforcement officers may argue in favor of Flock cameras similarly to what King George III and his officials advocated for before the American Revolution was sparked, but many residents of East Greenbush and beyond do not want to be subjects of governments (federal, state, county, or municipal). Today, we are expected to accept Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) tracking everyone’s movements for crime investigations, but tomorrow, it will almost certainly be monitoring citizens’ activities to compile a profile on every individual for the purposes of deterring crimes and ensuring compliance with arbitrary laws. I have written about the dangers of the new technology and data centers and how they could be utilized to usher in a surveillance state, but Flock (or Axon or any other brand of ALPRs) may be the tools to keep us surveilled, as data centers are constructed to power the ability of governments to watch everything that we do in public (while our cell phones, smart televisions, etc. monitor us in our homes).
Maybe you are someone who does not believe that technology can be used for sinister purposes and that all cases of abuse of the Flock cameras by law enforcement agents, including that of an Albany County Sheriff’s Office investigator who accessed the cameras illegally 4,000 times for personal reasons (3,000 times to track an ex-girlfriend’s whereabouts), imply just a few bad apples performing dirty deeds. Maybe you trust law enforcement to do the right thing in most cases, and you buy the commonly-thrown-around argument of “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.” Even if stories of Flock cameras being 71% accurate in identifying license plates (meaning that they are wrong 29% of the time) and sometimes causing a swarm of armed-agents surrounding people while they drive (with the occasional police dog biting innocent people who did nothing wrong) because the camera read one number wrong or interpreted a test drive from a dealership as someone stealing the vehicle mean little to you, laws can change.
Some estimates suggest that Americans inadvertently commit an average of three felonies per day because there are so many laws on the books that no citizen going about his or her everyday business could possibly know (the United States has approximately 25% of the world’s prison population, far exceeding that of even the official authoritarian state of China). What if you are doing something that is technically illegal but you have no idea that it is? Are you going to continue claiming that you had “nothing to hide” in that scenario? When the Flock camera flags you for breaking the law and you have to answer for it even though you were ignorant, will you still support cameras solving the minor crimes that you have unwittingly committed? When it becomes illegal tomorrow to do something that you have been innocently doing for years (say, drinking alcohol or smoking weed or buying a certain type of firearm), will you happily give up the conduct because lawmakers decided you should no longer take a certain action? Do not worry, though, because the Flock cameras (across multiple jurisdictions) will be able to determine that you took a gun that was legal months ago across state borders, and now, you trafficked an illegal firearm. Do we really want to live in a police state where you have to fear whether any of your actions might be conceived of as criminal and land you in a cage for practicing what you believed to be acceptable behavior?
Regardless of one’s views, privacy is 100% protected by the Fourth Amendment, and there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that your license plate should be continuously tracked. When you are in public, you have no guarantee of privacy on the streets, but voluntarily walking past a store that may have a camera up to deter theft and willingly holding a cell phone in your pocket are completely different from a government installing cameras to take hundreds or thousands of pictures of your license plate to determine every location that your car went within a period of time or a mileage radius. This is not even close to the same thing, and we the people never had a say in any of these Flock camera installations. They largely went up in secrecy by governments to avoid scrutiny. The lack of transparency is frightening in and of itself, but the fact that you must live in fear because multiple cameras may flag you for something just for simply driving past them when traveling from one location to another is telling of how governments have no regard for our rights.
Even if none of this were convincing to you and you still insisted that security trumps privacy rights, consider the Flock audit that was conducted in Troy (the county seat of Rensselaer County where East Greenbush is located). You may not be surprised to know that local police accessed the twenty-six cameras 19,000 times, but the same Flock cameras within the city limits were also searched tens of millions of times (in a two-year period ranging from April 2024 to March 2026) by 5,000 agencies and departments that were outside of New York State. This included: 2,714 searches by Border Patrol, 531 searches by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigation, 49,909 searches by the United States Postal Inspection Service, and 1.1 million searches by the Houston Police Department (why is a local government in Texas searching the Flock data of a city of 50,000 in Upstate New York?). It has been reported that out-of-state and federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), accessed Flock cameras in San Francisco 1.6 million times in a seven-month period, and in Oregon, 404 Media found that ICE was regularly accessing Flock data for federal immigration cases.
These are only small snippets of the activity that is going on around the country, but you can guarantee that if Troy and San Francisco are partnering with the federal government for investigations, East Greenbush and almost every city and town in the United States most likely are as well. You might like the idea of aiding federal agents now, but what happens when someone you know personally becomes the target of some investigation (maybe even you)? What if the agents get the information wrong and charge someone with a crime that he or she did not commit? What if speech or what you post online (today it may be opposition to President Donald Trump, but tomorrow it could be opposition to Gavin Newsome or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) becomes evidence for a federal investigation? Not only are you having your right against unreasonable searches and seizures violated, but your right to free speech becomes threatened as well.
If you think that governments will not use Flock cameras to track people who have posted about anti-government topics, you might want to think again. Governments can label anyone as a terrorist and grant themselves justification to investigate his or her life. As mentioned before, people can commit crimes without knowing it, so if the government wants you to stop speaking, it can use Flock cameras as a tool to find some crime that you committed and silence you for unrelated actions.
How can we trust that these federal agents will uphold the law and the Constitution and not abuse their power? Even if the police officers in East Greenbush would not violate our trust, they may not be able to prevent federal agents from doing the same. We do not want federal, state, county, or local governments monitoring us for any reason. We are supposed to be a free country, so we should act like it.
Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.