Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don't

Regardless of the benefits (of which there are a few, despite what fellow detractors may say), I am completely unwilling to submit myself to mass surveillance. Once that kind of power is obtained by the state, it will be abused. The article already cites several instances of this, including a police officer using it to stalk someone. And let alone the malicious usage, what if there are simply errors in the software or mistakes made by human operators? I don't trust police departments and public officials to implement this capability competently.

Its commonly said by people who seem to love this tech that we don't get to have a right to privacy in public spaces (anywhere but shut inside our houses with the window blinds drawn) but it appears now we also don't have a right not to be surveilled intensely, our every movement recorded, tracked and noted down permanantly, analysed with Algorithms & scrutenized for potential crimes.

Land of freedom they say.

There is no benefit of tracking for citizens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUNZZWq1dXM

Paying a private company to record everyone's phone calls and texts and emails and putting them in a searchable database will also help solve some crimes. Should we do that? How is this any different?

Interestingly "Police love them, citizens don't" also applies to police themselves

The most aggressive anti-surveillance legislation we can muster in the US seems to be "30 day retention".

How is this a reasonable compromise?

I don't want surveillance cameras at all, but a neutral position might sound something like "sure, put up cameras everywhere, and once you get a warrant or probable cause (sigh), you can punch in the plate number and police will get notified when they see that car."

Now, obviously it's a surveillance state that's ripe for abuse and relies on trust in government and process, but at _least_ it's predicated on some level of suspicion.

"Record and catalog every piece of movement all these cameras see, store it for a long time, hand it over to whatever person with access to the system feels like searching it, send huge amounts of data secretly in response to National Security Letters, and while we're at it, just |tee the whole feed to the CIA. Maybe tracking everyone all the time will come in handy some day!" just seems _batshit insane_. It's not even in the REALM of possibly-constitutional from where I sit.

And yet the judge in the Norfolk, VA case said "well, this technology COULD represent a 4th amendment violation in the future, but 200 cameras in our town isn't so bad". What???

Related video report format: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000011056273/the-surveil... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250660)

Might be time for a "Take your license plates off" day of protest.

Care to take a guess who wins when an issue comes down to citizens vs police?

non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/us/flock-cameras-can-trac...

Unpopular opinion: I’m fine with cameras if they can be shown to solve crimes and lower the crime rate. No, I’m not ok with ICE surveillance, or secret police punishing free thinkers, but the extreme anti position simply cedes the technology to the authoritarians. So basically, if you’re promising London safety and the freedom and safeguards of the UK, I’m all for it!