By John & Nisha
Whitehead
July 13,
2026
“You had to live—did live, from
habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every
sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every
movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell,
1984
While Americans remain transfixed by the
political circus—cheering for their preferred party,
jeering at the opposition, obsessing over every manufactured
outrage and waiting for the next spectacle—the
Surveillance State continues its steady march
forward.
The government
is watching.
It watches where you go, whom you
meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit,
what political rallies you attend, what protests you join,
what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes
you support.
It watches through your phone, your car,
your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social
media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads
you travel every day.
This is how freedom dies in the
digital police state: not always through dramatic
declarations of martial law or soldiers stationed on every
street corner, but through the gradual construction of a
technological dragnet—an electronic concentration
camp—so pervasive that privacy becomes impossible and
anonymity becomes suspicious.
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Enter Flock
Safety, a private surveillance technology company whose
automated license plate readers have spread throughout
thousands of American communities.
These cameras,
which do much more than photograph license plates, represent
the
next evolution of the government’s public-private
surveillance partnership.
They document the time
and location of every passing vehicle and record identifying
characteristics such as its make, model, color, damage, roof
racks, bumper stickers and other distinctive features. That
information can then be placed in a searchable database and
used to retrace a vehicle’s movements over time.
Yet
the real power—and the real danger—of Flock does not
come from the cameras alone.
It comes from artificial
intelligence.
A camera can photograph a car. Flock’s
AI-powered platform can identify and categorize a vehicle,
compare an observation with stored records, generate alerts,
identify connections and help police reconstruct where that
vehicle has been.
AI is what transforms a photograph
into the building blocks for a suspect society.
With
AI, every driver becomes a data point. Every data point
becomes a pattern. And every pattern becomes a
suspicion.
This is how ordinary movements become
potentially suspect and subject to government scrutiny. It
allows law enforcement agencies to search not only for a
complete license plate number but also for partial plates
and physical descriptions such as vehicle color, make,
model, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other
identifying characteristics.
A police officer might
ask the system to locate every red pickup truck with a
ladder rack seen near a protest, every vehicle that
repeatedly visited a particular address, or every car
observed traveling between two locations.
The
artificial intelligence does the sorting. The database
supplies the history.
The government receives a list
of potential suspects.
This is no longer surveillance
conducted by individual officers following particular leads.
It is surveillance conducted at machine speed, across entire
populations, with algorithms deciding whose movements merit
further scrutiny.
Consider the scale of what is taking
place.
License plate cameras now log
approximately 20 billion vehicle scans every
month.
Twenty billion.
That is not
targeted policing. That is mass collection.
The
overwhelming majority of those scans do not involve stolen
cars, wanted suspects, kidnappings or violent crimes. They
document ordinary people carrying out the ordinary
activities of daily life: driving to work, taking children
to school, visiting friends, attending church, keeping
medical appointments, participating in protests or simply
going home.
Yet each of those innocent journeys
becomes part of a searchable police database.
At 20
billion scans a month, Flock is not searching for particular
suspects and then attempting to follow them. It is recording
the movements of everyone so police can decide later whom
they want to follow.
That is the digital equivalent of
assigning a government agent to trail every driver in
America—and preserving the agent’s notes in case the
government someday finds them useful.
Yet mass
collection is only the first stage of the AI surveillance
state. The next is merging those billions of observations
with everything else the government and its corporate
partners know about us.
Flock is also part of a much
larger shift toward AI-powered
“data fusion,” in which license plate records are
combined with facial recognition results, surveillance
video, police reports, social media activity, commercially
purchased information, gunshot-detection alerts and other
government databases.
The danger is no longer merely
that one system can track a car. It is the merger of
previously separate streams of information into a single
system capable of mapping a person’s movements,
relationships, habits and associations.
These systems
increasingly do more than provide officers with information
to evaluate. They assign significance to associations, flag
supposed threats and generate investigative leads—often
through proprietary algorithms that neither the accused nor
the public can examine.
Artificial intelligence does
not eliminate human prejudice, institutional bias or bad
information.
It industrializes them.
Feed
a flawed system inaccurate data, biased arrest records or
constitutionally suspect surveillance, and AI can reproduce
those defects at a speed and scale no individual police
officer could match.
Once the computer labels someone
suspicious, moreover, officers may treat the algorithmic
conclusion as objective fact.
The machine accuses. The
police act. The
citizen is left to prove that the machine was
wrong.
Despite the extraordinary reach of this
technology, Flock continues to portray its system as a
limited, carefully controlled crime-fighting
tool.
Flock insists that its cameras collect
information about vehicles rather than people, that agencies
control access to their own data, that searches are logged
and that information is generally deleted after 30 days. Yet
these assurances largely amount to distinctions without a
difference.
Vehicles are extensions of the people who
drive them.
Track a vehicle long enough, and you know
where its owner sleeps, works, worships, shops, socializes,
seeks medical treatment and participates in political
activity.
You know when someone leaves home, when they
return, whom they visit and how often.
You may not
know the contents of their conversations, but you know
enough to construct an intimate portrait of their
life.
That is surveillance.
It does not become
less invasive merely because the government has outsourced
the cameras, databases and algorithms to a private
corporation.
Nor does it cease to be surveillance
because police claim that the information may someday be
useful in solving a crime.
Indeed, that is the sleight
of hand that has allowed the surveillance state to expand so
rapidly.
The government no longer has to install every
camera, maintain every database or directly collect every
piece of information.
It merely encourages private
companies, businesses, homeowners’ associations, schools
and individual consumers to create an interconnected
surveillance ecosystem—and then asks for
access.
This public-private arrangement allows
government agencies to acquire capabilities they might never
receive public approval or sufficient funding to build on
their own.
It also makes accountability almost
impossible.
When abuses occur, local police blame the
technology provider. The technology provider insists that
local police control the data. Federal agencies claim they
merely requested access. Local officials say they were
unaware that information could be shared beyond their
jurisdiction.
Everyone points
elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the American people remain under
observation.
Flock has become especially controversial
because its network can transform what appears to be a
collection of local cameras into something far more
powerful: a searchable surveillance system that permits law
enforcement agencies to look far beyond their own
jurisdictions.
Flock says data sharing among agencies
is optional and controlled by its customers. Yet the entire
value of such a system lies in its
interconnectedness.
A camera in one town is a
traffic-monitoring device.
Thousands of cameras
connected through searchable databases constitute a
movement-tracking network.
The danger is not simply
that police might search for a stolen car.
The danger
is that the system permits government officials to begin
with a location, a description or a fragment of information
and work backward until someone emerges as a
suspect.
That reverses the traditional order of
constitutional policing.
Under the Fourth Amendment,
police are supposed to develop individualized suspicion,
establish probable cause and then apply for a warrant to
search for evidence connected to a particular person or
crime.
Mass surveillance systems begin by collecting
information on everyone.
In the process, every
innocent person is treated as a potential suspect whose
movements must be recorded just in case the government
someday decides they are relevant.
This is guilt by
algorithm.
It is also the same constitutional
inversion at the heart of geofence warrants, which allow
police to demand information identifying every cellphone
that happened to be near a particular location at a
particular time.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent
decision in Chatrie v. United States may signal
that constitutional scrutiny is finally beginning to catch
up with the surveillance state.
The case involved a
geofence warrant used to obtain Google location records for
cellphones near the scene of a robbery. Rather than
beginning with an identified suspect, police demanded
information about devices that happened to be within a
designated area during a particular period and then worked
backward to identify their owners.
The Supreme Court
held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they
obtain an individual’s cellphone location history from a
technology company.
That conclusion matters.
It
rejects the government’s increasingly convenient argument
that intimate information loses constitutional protection
merely because a private corporation collected, stored or
analyzed it.
The Court did not rule on Flock cameras
or automated license plate databases. Nor did it decide that
every geofence demand is necessarily unconstitutional. The
justices left it to the Fourth Circuit to determine whether
the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s
probable-cause and particularity requirements at each stage
of the search.
Nevertheless, the constitutional
principle at the heart of Chatrie extends far beyond
cellphones.
The government should not be able to evade
the Fourth Amendment by outsourcing mass surveillance to
private technology companies.
It should not matter
whether the location trail comes from Google, Flock, a
cellphone provider, a data broker or an interconnected
network of privately owned cameras.
A detailed record
of a person’s movements does not become less revealing
because it follows a vehicle rather than a phone. The
government should not be permitted to accomplish through
Flock what it could not constitutionally accomplish by
assigning police officers to follow millions of Americans
everywhere they drive.
Indeed, Flock may present an
even more troubling inversion of constitutional
policing.
Geofence searches generally begin with a
particular crime, location and period. Flock continuously
collects information on millions of vehicles before any
crime has occurred and before any individual is suspected of
wrongdoing.
Police can then reach backward into that
stored history and reconstruct a person’s
movements.
The surveillance comes first. Suspicion
comes later.
A warrant, when one is sought at all, may
arrive only after the government has already built the
database it intends to search.
Chatrie may
provide constitutional ammunition for challenging this
arrangement, but no
single court ruling will dismantle the machinery of mass
surveillance.
The technology is already embedded
in thousands of communities.
The databases are already
being populated.
The agencies are already
connected.
And the companies profiting from this
infrastructure will fight to preserve
it.
Unfortunately, constitutional protections have
rarely kept pace with the government’s appetite for
surveillance.
The dangers are no longer
theoretical.
Flock data has reportedly been used in
investigations far removed from the serious violent crimes
routinely invoked to justify these systems.
This is
the inevitable trajectory of every surveillance technology.
First, it is introduced as an emergency measure. Then it is
justified as a crime-fighting tool. Then it is expanded to
lesser crimes. Then it is used for administrative
enforcement, political monitoring, immigration
investigations and personal purposes.
Eventually, it
becomes part of the background machinery of government—a
permanent feature of daily life that no longer attracts
attention because everyone has become accustomed to being
watched.
That
is how mission creep works.
Surveillance powers
created to find kidnappers and violent criminals do not
remain limited to kidnappers and violent
criminals.
Databases built to locate stolen vehicles
do not remain limited to stolen vehicles.
Government
agencies cannot resist the temptation to use whatever power
is available to them, especially when the use of that power
is cheap, easy and largely hidden from the public.
The
technology’s potential for error makes this even more
dangerous.
License plate readers can misread plates,
rely on inaccurate hot lists or associate an innocent
vehicle with a crime. Once the system issues an alert,
officers may treat the computer-generated result as
fact.
The individual on the receiving end may be
pulled over, surrounded by armed police, handcuffed,
searched or detained before anyone discovers that the
machine was wrong.
This is not justice. It is
automated suspicion.
Flock is only one component of a
surveillance ecosystem that includes doorbell cameras,
facial recognition, drones, cellphone tracking, biometric
databases and real-time crime centers.
The result is
360-degree
surveillance.
A person may leave a home monitored
by a smart doorbell, drive past a network of license plate
readers, enter a business equipped with facial recognition,
carry a phone broadcasting location data and return home
along streets monitored by police cameras and private
security systems.
At no point does the government need
to physically follow that individual, because the
infrastructure does it automatically.
Algorithms sort
the information. Databases preserve it. Private companies
monetize it. Government agencies search it.
All of
this is taking place while the country remains locked in an
endless partisan cage match.
Both parties have
contributed to the Surveillance State. Both parties have
expanded it. Both parties have exploited fear to convince
the public that freedom must be sacrificed for
safety.
The targets may change depending on who is in
power, but the machinery remains.
Once the
infrastructure exists, there is no guarantee that it will be
used only against people you dislike or with whom you
disagree politically.
That is the lesson Americans
repeatedly refuse to learn.
A surveillance tool
created by one administration will be inherited by the next.
A database assembled for one purpose will inevitably be used
for another. A system established to monitor “them” will
eventually be turned against “us.”
Communities
across the country are finally beginning to recognize the
danger.
Some cities have terminated or declined to
renew their Flock contracts. Others have paused deployments
or demanded stronger restrictions on data sharing, retention
and federal access.
This resistance is long
overdue.
We cannot afford to become so distracted by
the theater of politics that we fail to notice the
architecture of tyranny being assembled around us.
The
surveillance state does not care which party you support. It
does not care whom you voted for.
It does not care
whether you believe you have nothing to hide.
The
cameras are watching. The databases are growing. The
networks are connecting.
And as I make clear in Battlefield
America: The War on the American People and its
fictional counterpart The
Erik Blair Diaries, unless we act now, there may
soon be nowhere left to go without the government knowing
exactly where we have been.
WC:
2515
Constitutional attorney and author John W.
Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford
Institute. His latest books The
Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield
America: The War on the American People are
available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at
johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive
Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The
Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
