Welcome to America, where apparently standing around is now enough to have your movements searched through a nationwide surveillance network.
Records obtained from the Plano, Illinois Police Department reveal more than 1,200 searches involving the category “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.” That is from cameras controlled by ONE small police department, with law enforcement agencies elsewhere accessing those cameras as part of their searches. Additional audit records collected around the country show hundreds more searches under the same category. Flock has more than 120,000 cameras spread across 49 states, and its network has expanded into thousands of communities. This is no longer some camera sitting outside a convenience store recording a robbery. They have constructed the infrastructure to reconstruct where ordinary people travel, and police departments across jurisdictions can search that information.
This is precisely what I wrote about when I said, “Your Car Was Never the Target.” License plate readers were sold as a tool to find stolen vehicles and dangerous fugitives. Then the systems began recording the make, model, color, location, and movements of vehicles. Now Flock is developing AI systems capable of doing considerably more. Its newer investigative technology can combine camera information with police records, dispatch logs, and commercial identity databases, while other tools can search camera networks using written descriptions. Once you combine AI with a nationwide camera network, you are no longer investigating a crime after it occurs. You are constructing the machinery necessary to search the movements and associations of an entire population.
Flock’s newer AI tools can allow police to continuously search cameras in a defined area for someone matching a written description. A Texas deputy previously searched tens of thousands of cameras looking for a woman who had obtained an abortion. Officers have been accused of using Flock to track former romantic partners. Illinois discovered that federal immigration agents had gained access to state camera information despite restrictions. Now we learn the system is being searched for loitering and vagrancy. Yet they continue telling us not to worry because safeguards are coming. Flock has announced shorter default retention periods, case codes, auditing, and other controls. Fine. None of that changes the fundamental question: Why should government possess the ability to reconstruct the movements of millions of innocent people in the first place?
The Fourth Amendment was not written with an exception saying government may watch everyone so long as a private corporation owns the cameras. I wrote earlier this year about the FBI admitting that it purchases commercially available location information on Americans. This is the loophole they have discovered. Government does not always need to build the surveillance system itself anymore. Private corporations collect the information, construct the databases, and develop the technology. Government simply purchases access or contracts for the service. The private sector builds the cage and government gets the key.
People keep saying, “I have nothing to hide.” That is perhaps the most dangerous response imaginable. Liberty was never based upon proving to government that you have nothing to hide. Government was supposed to prove that it had probable cause to investigate YOU. We have turned that principle upside down. Everyone is monitored first, the information is stored, and government searches the database later when it decides somebody has become interesting. You do not need to commit murder. You do not need to rob a bank. You apparently do not even need to steal a car. You can be searched because somebody decided you were loitering.
We are all criminals now. That is where this mentality inevitably leads. Every citizen becomes a potential suspect because every citizen generates data that can be searched. Your car identifies where you travel, your phone identifies where you sleep, your credit card identifies what you buy, your bank identifies who you pay. Facial recognition identifies where you appear in real time. AI can connect information that once required hundreds of investigators and months of work in seconds. Governments of the past could only dream of possessing this kind of power.
This is how a surveillance state is created. There is no announcement from Washington declaring that privacy has ended. There is no single law abolishing the Fourth Amendment. It happens camera by camera, database by database, emergency by emergency, until one day people realize that anonymity in public has effectively disappeared. The government will insist that only criminals need to worry right up until the definition of “criminal” includes standing somewhere too long.