A young woman bought a new car.
Days later a Flock camera flagged her vehicle as having an insurance issue. She was pulled over. She showed proof of insurance. She was still issued a ticket. The next day in a different county the same thing happened. Another stop. Another alert. Another ticket.
The problem was that her recent car purchase had not yet been updated across the government databases that feed the Flock system. The camera was operating in real time on outdated information. And the burden fell on her to prove that the system flagging her was wrong.
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Over 5,000 police agencies have signed on to the Flock camera network. Georgia alone has more license plate readers per capita than any other state. Every time you drive past one of these cameras your plate is photographed, your vehicle is catalogued, and the information is uploaded to a database that law enforcement agencies across the country can search without a warrant.
Rand Paul put it plainly.
“Over 5,000 police agencies have signed on to a camera network that treats every driver like a suspect first and a citizen second. That is not how the Fourth Amendment is supposed to work.”
He is right. The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable searches. The founders did not write it to apply only when a specific crime was suspected. They wrote it because they understood what it feels like to live under a government that monitors its citizens without cause and uses that information as a tool of control.
The Flock system does not require suspicion. It does not require a warrant. It photographs every vehicle that passes every camera automatically. All of it stored. All of it searchable. And as the Georgia family discovered, all of it capable of generating false alerts that pull innocent people over and place the burden of proof on them rather than on the system that flagged them incorrectly.
An Emory professor who studies this put it clearly. We built a system that uses data sets that have not been updated. And errors spread just as quickly as valid alerts. We have to fix those before we can trust these systems.
But the cameras keep going up. The database keeps growing. The 5,000 agencies keep expanding the network. And nobody is asking whether any of this is constitutional.
Nobody except Rand Paul.
21 days until November 3rd. The senator who fights for your Fourth Amendment rights needs colleagues in Congress who will do the same.
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