They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Mass surveillance doesn't check party registration before it watches you. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal nonprofit, and the ACLU, are rarely aligned on much but both are actively fighting warrantless ALPR searches. Conservative-leaning towns and progressive cities alike have voted to cancel Flock contracts once residents learned what the cameras actually do; South Kingstown, Rhode Island's town council voted unanimously, 5-0, to terminate its Flock contract this year. Whatever your politics, the core question is the same: should every driver be tracked, permanently, without suspicion? That's not a left or right question. It's a "do you believe in the Fourth Amendment" question. 

You don't have to be a suspect for a Flock camera to log your car. Every single vehicle that passes gets photographed, timestamped, and filed away. Plate, make, model, color, even bumper stickers and roof racks. Flock's own network reportedly processes over 20 billion data points every month, and works with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide. That means your commute, your doctor's appointments, your kid's school pickup line, your visit to a friend's house; all of it, quietly compiled into a searchable record, whether or not anyone ever had a reason to look at you twice. 

Flock has publicized a claim that its cameras help solve roughly 10% of reported crime in the U.S. According to reporting by 404 Media, the study behind that number was written by two Flock employees, with outside academics attached mostly for appearances. Independent research tells a much less flattering story: real academic studies of plate-reader patrols have found no meaningful deterrent effect on crime. In other words, the primary justification for blanketing your town in cameras, that it makes you safer, doesn't hold up once you look past the company's own marketing. 

This isn't a hypothetical risk. It's a documented, ongoing pattern. The Institute for Justice has tracked at least 28 separate cases of police officers using ALPR access to stalk current or former romantic partners and that count keeps climbing. A handful of examples:

• In Kechi, Kansas, a police lieutenant pleaded guilty to stalking his estranged wife after using Flock cameras to track her movements and texting her "you were spotted."
• In Orange City, Florida, an officer allegedly ran his ex-girlfriend's plate at least 69 times, and her parents' plates dozens more times, over several months.
• In Georgia alone, a wave of internal audits has led to at least 20 officers being arrested or disciplined in a single year for misusing Flock access for personal reasons.
• CNN's reporting confirms this is a nationwide pattern, not an isolated bad actor — cases have surfaced in Wisconsin, Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, and beyond.

Every one of these people had legitimate access to the system. The abuse happened anyway.

According to an Electronic Frontier Foundation analysis of ten months of nationwide Flock search logs, more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies including U.S. Border Patrol, ran hundreds of searches tied specifically to protest activity, including the "No Kings" demonstrations. In some cases, agencies targeted specific activist groups by name in their search logs. Separate reporting found California agencies searching Flock data for people present at anti-ICE protests, with one department logging searches for "Protest ATI Vehicle" and "Immigration Protest" that lined up with arrests that followed. Attending a lawful, peaceful demonstration, your right protected by the First Amendment, can put your license plate into a police search tied to that protest, indefinitely searchable by any agency in the network. 

These systems and their fledling "AI" systems misread plates. When they do, the consequences aren't a paperwork error, they can be a felony traffic stop. According to EFF's reporting on the human toll of ALPR errors, a woman in San Francisco was pulled from her car at gunpoint after a plate-reader mismatch. In a separate case reported by Gizmodo, a Black family was held at gunpoint after their car was misidentified as stolen. Neither family had done anything wrong. A camera and an AI system made a mistake, and human beings paid for it with terror they never should have experienced.  Worried about AI being used nefariously in the future? The future is already here in Newport.

China's system of ubiquitous camera networks, license plate tracking, and centralized citizen databases didn't appear overnight. It was built one camera, one contract, one "public safety" justification at a time. Eventually the infrastructure for total tracking was already in place, and the only thing left to decide was how it would be used. That is the trajectory this technology puts American towns on: a permanently growing, increasingly interconnected network that logs where every driver goes, shares that data across state lines and even internationally, and grants access with essentially no warrant requirement and, as the cases above show, only loose control over who gets to look at it and why.

This is America. We are supposed to be the country where the government needs a warrant before it tracks you, not one where a camera on every corner already has just in case you're ever interesting to someone. The infrastructure for a surveillance state doesn't have to be modeled after China's to lead to the same place. It just has to keep expanding, unchecked, one town at a time. Whether that continues to happen here in Newport is still, for now, a decision your local council gets to make.