I've been thinking about Flock cameras lately, although not because I have some particularly strong opinion about them. I'm actually pretty cynical about the whole camera argument. We could tear down every Flock camera in America tomorrow and there would still be God knows how many thousands of traffic cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras, dashcams, parking lot cameras and privately owned cameras recording us every day that may or may not be accessible to law enforcement. Like your Ring camera can be accessed via court order - from your door. I see a lot of posts and bumper stickers, videos of just morons tearing down cameras and giving/returning them to police (which just proves you are the one to damage and steal private property - regardless Flock or not) but my question is what police can legally do with that information, and at what point ordinary observation in public turns into government surveillance that runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment.
Somewhere in that discussion, inevitably, somebody quotes Benjamin Franklin:
Like pretty much anything online or otherwise these days; I wondered if this really had to do with surveillance or something else. It's like ripping out a bible verse that fits your sanctimony at the time - does it really apply? I'll talk about that later, but I'll give you a hint - it's from 1755 so probably not.
What Does a Flock Camera Actually Record?
The familiar Flock Falcon cameras are automated license plate readers, usually called ALPRs. Calling them "license plate readers" understates what they record a little. According to Flock's own policies, an ALPR detection can contain the license plate image, an image of the vehicle, the plate number and issuing state, vehicle characteristics such as color and make, the date and time, and the location of the camera. Conceptually, a record might look something like this:
Do that repeatedly and you don't just have photographs of license plates anymore. You have a searchable collection of observations showing where a particular vehicle has appeared. Flock says its standard ALPR system does not collect driver names, addresses, facial-recognition information or biometric identifiers. I also went looking for evidence behind a rumor that the cameras secretly collect Bluetooth or Wi-Fi MAC addresses from passing cars and phones, and I couldn't find credible evidence that the standard Falcon ALPR does that.
Interestingly, there are hobbyist projects that detect the radio signatures of the Flock cameras themselves. That may be part of where the rumor became confused. Your device can potentially recognize wireless signals associated with a Flock device, but that isn't evidence that the Flock camera is collecting your phone's MAC address. Flock also makes other products, including conventional video surveillance and acoustic gunshot-detection systems, so statements about what "Flock collects" depend somewhat on which Flock product we're talking about. For the ordinary roadside ALPR, however, the important information is essentially vehicle + plate + photograph + place + time. But as far as we know, *adjusts foil hat* they. might and we just haven't been told.
The focus is on Flock for some reason - not all of the other private companies doing the same thing in similar jurisdictions. Even I had a thought of setting up ALPR of my own to try to find stolen cars. I don't like car thieves. Had a car stolen from me once and they got away. Didn't make me feel good - still doesn't make me feel good. They even had the tenacity to put a "Drive it like you stole it" sticker on the back window. Brazen!
What About All Those Regular Traffic Cameras?
This led me sideways into another question. Around Gilbert, Arizona amongst thousands of other places, there are white cylindrical traffic cameras hanging from traffic lights everywhere, often several at a single intersection. Couldn't those effectively become Flock cameras too? Technically, yes. A camera is ultimately producing imagery, and software can analyze imagery. An existing traffic-camera feed could theoretically be fed into software that identifies vehicles, locates license plates, reads the characters and stores the resulting observations.
That doesn't mean Gilbert is doing that with every traffic camera. Traffic-detection cameras are generally installed to do things like determine whether vehicles are waiting at an intersection so the traffic-control system knows when to change a signal. Their resolution, angle, shutter speed and nighttime capabilities may also make them substantially worse at reading plates than a purpose-built ALPR. The interesting part technologically is that the intelligence increasingly doesn't have to reside in the camera. It can reside in the software watching the camera.
A traffic system looking at a video feed and reporting, "There are 17 vehicles waiting northbound," is fundamentally different from software examining exactly the same video and creating a permanent record saying, "Arizona ABC123 passed northbound through Higley and Warner at 10:42:17 AM." The camera hasn't changed at all. What changed is what the computer extracts from the image, what gets stored, and what someone can search later. That distinction becomes important when we start talking about the Fourth Amendment.
If you're driving around in public, do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy?
This was my first instinct about the whole issue. If I'm driving down a public street, I don't have a reasonable expectation that nobody can see my car. A police officer can look at my license plate, write it down or photograph it. The plate itself is something the government requires me to display publicly on my vehicle. So if a camera sees my plate while I'm driving down Highway 69, my two-cent law degree says: kick stones. I was in public. If someone so wanted to, they could hire a private investigator to tail me all day and record all of my movements - that's perfectly legal.
Broadly speaking, current Fourth Amendment law agrees with that premise. Observing a visible license plate on a public road ordinarily isn't considered a Fourth Amendment search. A police officer doesn't need a warrant simply to observe a vehicle traveling down a public road, and automating that observation with a camera doesn't automatically change the constitutional analysis.
So the gripe that everyone has has been poorly articulated. It's not so much that a camera can see you in public - which is not a forth amendment violation - but rather they're recording everyone's movements to be searched for later without any suspicion. I can see both sides to this too. I don't feel fuzzy knowing all my movements are recorded somewhere - although I had already pretty much expected it. At the same time, if someone kills my grandma and steals my kid and there's a record of my grandmas stolen car - all of a sudden this database because VERY useful to ME, right?
One Observation Versus 10,000 Observations
Suppose a police officer sees my vehicle at an intersection at 3:15 in the afternoon. There's not much of a privacy argument there. Now suppose a computer can instantly tell that officer that Monday morning I drove toward work, Monday evening I went to a bar, Tuesday afternoon I went to a doctor's office, Wednesday evening I went to a church, Thursday night I visited someone's house, Friday afternoon I drove to a political rally, and Saturday morning I crossed into another state. Every single one of those observations happened in public, but collectively the information begins to describe my life.
That is where the Fourth Amendment question becomes considerably less obvious. The Supreme Court dealt with a related technological problem in Carpenter v. United States in 2018. That case involved historical cell-site location records rather than license plate cameras, so it isn't a ruling that Flock cameras are unconstitutional. The principle is important, though. The Court recognized that people don't surrender every expectation of privacy simply by going into public, and it recognized a privacy interest in what it described as the "whole" of a person's physical movements.
Before computers, police could follow somebody around town. Following somebody everywhere for months was another matter. It required officers, cars, shifts, gasoline, time and a ridiculous amount of manpower. Computers completely change that equation. What once required an entire surveillance team can potentially become a database query that takes a few seconds.
Arizona Has Already Considered This
This isn't entirely theoretical here in Arizona. In 2024, the Arizona Court of Appeals decided State v. Sidor, a case involving historical automated-license-plate-reader information. The court did not find a Fourth Amendment violation on the facts before it, but importantly, it didn't simply say, "License plates are public, therefore there can never be a Fourth Amendment problem."
Instead, the court recognized that sufficiently widespread ALPR surveillance could eventually begin to resemble the comprehensive tracking that concerned the Supreme Court in Carpenter. The court included a particularly interesting observation:
That word yet is doing a lot of work. The unanswered question is where that constitutional line actually exists. Is it five observations? Fifty? Five thousand? One day of history? Thirty days? A database covering Prescott Valley? Arizona? The entire country? The Supreme Court hasn't handed us a mathematical formula.
What About False Arrests?
Another argument against Flock I've seen involves people who have been falsely stopped or arrested because of erroneous ALPR information. That's obviously a serious problem for the person it happens to, but legally I think it's important to separate the issues. False arrests existed long before anybody invented a digital camera. Police have arrested the wrong person because of bad eyewitness identifications, incorrect warrants, mistaken identities, erroneous database records, bad informants and simple human error.
An ALPR can introduce another source of bad information. Flock itself acknowledges that plate translation can occasionally be incomplete or inaccurate and says users should confirm a computer-generated plate translation before acting on it. The relevant legal question in a particular false-arrest case is therefore likely to involve what information police had, what they did to corroborate it, whether they had reasonable suspicion or probable cause, and whether their actions were reasonable. "Computer said so" shouldn't magically turn bad evidence into good evidence, but neither does a machine occasionally being wrong establish that the underlying technology is unconstitutional.
What If a Cop Uses It for Personal Reasons?
There have also been stories about law-enforcement officers improperly using government databases for personal reasons. The fact that we hear about officers getting caught doing it gives me at least some confidence in an important part of the system: auditing. A system that records who searched for what, when they searched for it and why they claimed to be searching makes abuse discoverable in a way that completely unlogged surveillance wouldn't be. The nefarious nature that people seem to have over these cameras would seem a lot more nefarious to me if there weren't all of these YouTube videos and Reddit stories about cops getting busted and fired for using the data without law enforcement reasons. Again my mind screams there's all kinds of database to be abused anyway, then again - not with such personal and recent data.
So Is Flock a Fourth Amendment Violation?
As the law stands today, simply photographing a visible license plate on a public road generally isn't a Fourth Amendment search. Storing ALPR observations isn't automatically unconstitutional either. But the concern about creating a massive historical database of people's movements isn't merely paranoia or a vague feeling about "Big Brother." There is a genuine constitutional issue involving aggregation.
The technology can eventually transform "I saw Freddy's Jeep at this intersection Tuesday" into "Show me everywhere Freddy's Jeep has been for the last six months." Those statements may be built from exactly the same individual observations, but they aren't necessarily the same thing constitutionally. That's what makes retention periods, geographic coverage, inter-agency sharing, search requirements, audit logs and warrants potentially more important than the camera itself.
And Then There's Benjamin Franklin
This brings me back to the quote everybody uses in these conversations:
I've heard that quote my entire life as essentially meaning, "Anyone willing to trade freedom for security deserves neither." That's not really what Franklin was talking about. The quote comes from a 1755 response by the Pennsylvania Assembly to colonial Governor Robert Hunter Morris during the French and Indian War. Franklin served on the committee that drafted it and is generally credited as substantially responsible for the language.
Pennsylvania needed money to defend frontier settlements. The Assembly wanted to raise the money by taxing property throughout Pennsylvania, including the enormous estates belonging to the Penn family, the proprietors of Pennsylvania. The Penns didn't want their estates taxed, and their governor kept rejecting legislation that would tax them. The Assembly was essentially being presented with a bargain: resolve the immediate defense problem while surrendering an important principle concerning the elected legislature's authority to tax and govern.
That's the "essential Liberty" Franklin was talking about. It wasn't specifically privacy, police searches or government surveillance, and it wasn't really an argument that government shouldn't take action in the name of public safety. In fact, Franklin and the Assembly very much wanted the government to defend the population. They were trying to fund the defense. The argument was over whether they should surrender an important principle of representative self-government in order to get that immediate protection. Even the word purchase wasn't nearly as metaphorical as it sounds today. This was quite literally a fight involving money, taxation and funding the defense of Pennsylvania.
That Changes the Quote for Me
The original context doesn't make Franklin's statement irrelevant to modern surveillance. If anything, I think it makes it more interesting. What I don't think it supports is the bumper-sticker interpretation that giving up any freedom in exchange for safety is inherently wrong. We make those tradeoffs constantly. We submit to airport screening. Police can execute warrants. Courts can authorize wiretaps. We display license plates. Dangerous criminals can be imprisoned. Customs officers can conduct searches at international borders under rules that would be extraordinary in other circumstances. Civil society necessarily gives government some authority that individuals would not otherwise possess.
The interesting Franklin question isn't simply, "Are we trading liberty for safety?" A better question is:
Those adjectives matter: essential liberty and temporary safety. They tend to disappear when people shorten Franklin's quote for a meme, and without them the quotation becomes a much broader political statement than the one Franklin was actually making.
Where I Land on Flock
I still don't have a strong opinion that Flock cameras are inherently good or inherently bad. I certainly don't subscribe to the idea that law enforcement shouldn't use modern technology because criminals have privacy rights. Criminals have constitutional rights, as they should, but freedom shouldn't become a tool specifically designed to make legitimate law enforcement impossible. The criminal landscape has changed dramatically, and it seems unreasonable to expect law enforcement alone to operate with eighteenth- or twentieth-century technology.
At the same time, "it catches criminals" can't be the end of the analysis either. There's an enormous difference between police investigating a murder searching a short-term ALPR database for the suspect's vehicle, with every query logged and subject to audit, and a government permanently recording everybody's movements and allowing officials to pull up years of somebody's travels whenever they feel like it. Those two systems could use exactly the same cameras. The difference is what happens to the information afterward.
That's probably where I've landed after digging into all of this. I'm not particularly worried that a camera saw my Jeep drive through an intersection. I'm considerably more interested in who can search that observation, how many other observations they can combine it with, how long those observations are retained, whether a legitimate investigative reason is required, whether searches are audited, and what happens when someone abuses the system.
The camera itself may not really be the constitutional question. The database might be.