There was a quaint period in American history when the government had to actually follow you if it wanted to know where you went.
This required a police officer.
A police car.
Gasoline.
Coffee.
And—most inconveniently—some reason to be interested in you.
Technology has solved this terrible government inefficiency.
Welcome to the age of automated license-plate readers, where cameras can photograph passing vehicles, record the plate, time and location, note vehicle characteristics, and make those observations searchable later.
One of the biggest names in this business is Flock Safety.
So, with apologies to polite society:
Flock you.
Not because catching criminals is bad.
Because Americans ought to be extremely suspicious whenever government acquires the ability to watch everybody simply because technology makes it possible.
YES, THEY CAN DO GOOD
Let’s get the obvious argument out of the way.
Stolen car?
Find it.
Amber Alert?
Absolutely.
Vehicle fleeing an armed robbery?
Track the bastard down.
These systems can be tremendously useful law-enforcement tools.
That’s precisely why we need rules.
History’s dangerous government powers rarely arrive wearing a black cape and announcing:
“GOOD EVENING, CITIZENS. WE HAVE COME FOR YOUR LIBERTY.”
They usually arrive because somebody has identified a legitimate problem and invented an extremely efficient solution.
Then somebody discovers the solution can do other things.
“BUT YOUR LICENSE PLATE IS PUBLIC!”
Correct.
So is my face when I walk down Main Street.
So are my shoes.
So is the fact that I drove to church Sunday morning, stopped at the gun club afterward, visited my doctor Monday and attended a political meeting Tuesday.
A police officer observing any one of those things from a public road is one thing.
A computer potentially reconstructing those movements afterward is something considerably different.
There’s a world of difference between:
Officer Bob saw Dave’s truck downtown Tuesday.
and:
Computer, show me every place this vehicle has been observed.
One is observation.
The other begins looking remarkably like surveillance.
And Americans should decide where that line belongs before somebody quietly moves it while we’re watching Netflix.
THE FOURTH AMENDMENT HAS ENTERED THE CHAT
The Founders never imagined artificial intelligence, cloud databases or automated license-plate recognition.
They didn’t imagine attack helicopters either.
Fortunately, constitutional principles don’t expire every time Best Buy gets new inventory.
The Fourth Amendment protects:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…”
There is no technological exemption at the bottom reading:
“Void where government owns really cool software.”
The Supreme Court has already recognized that modern technology can change the constitutional equation.
In United States v. Jones, GPS tracking of a vehicle produced a major Fourth Amendment decision.
Then came Carpenter v. United States, where the Court held that obtaining extensive historical cellphone-location information generally requires a warrant.
The broader lesson matters.
Seeing somebody somewhere once isn’t necessarily equivalent to electronically reconstructing where that person has been over time.
That’s exactly the question Americans should be asking about enormous networks of automated plate readers.
THEY DON’T SELL YOUR DATA! But is that entirely true?
Flock says customers own their data and that it doesn’t sell customer license-plate-reader data commercially. Sure… I believe you.
But selling isn’t the only privacy question.
Who can search it?
How many agencies can access it?
How long is it stored?
Can agencies share access?
What justification is required for a search?
Are searches audited?
What happens when somebody abuses the system?
Can an officer hundreds of miles away search cameras in my hometown?
Those are the important questions.
Because:
“Don’t worry, nobody SOLD your location history”
is considerably less comforting when you’re wondering who can SEARCH it.
TRUST US. YOU’VE GOT NOTHING TO HIDE.
Then comes perhaps the dumbest argument in the history of civil liberties:
“If you’re not doing anything wrong, what are you worried about?”
Wonderful.
Let’s put government cameras inside everyone’s homes.
Relax.
They’re only looking for criminals.
You aren’t committing crimes, are you?
Obviously that’s absurd.
And that’s the point.
Privacy isn’t something innocent people must surrender to prove they’re innocent.
Privacy exists because government isn’t supposed to have unlimited authority to investigate people in the first place.
Traditionally, government suspects you committed a crime.
Government establishes probable cause.
Government goes before a judge.
Government gets a warrant.
Government investigates.
That’s inconvenient.
It was deliberately designed to be inconvenient.
The Constitution is absolutely loaded with inefficient government procedures.
Due process is inefficient.
Warrants are inefficient.
Jury trials are inefficient.
Free speech is spectacularly inefficient.
Dictatorships are much more streamlined.
THE COMPUTER NEVER GOES HOME
Here’s what makes modern surveillance fundamentally different from Officer Bob sitting beside the highway.
Officer Bob gets tired.
Officer Bob forgets things.
Officer Bob stops for lunch.
Officer Bob eventually goes home.
The database doesn’t.
Cameras can watch twenty-four hours a day.
Computers can retain observations.
Software can search enormous datasets in seconds.
Algorithms can identify patterns that once would have required an entire surveillance team.
That’s an extraordinary law-enforcement capability.
It’s also an extraordinary temptation.
Whenever government acquires extraordinary power, Americans should ask the question our ancestors understood remarkably well:
What happens when the wrong bastard gets control of it?
Because constitutional rights aren’t primarily designed to protect you from politicians you trust.
They’re designed to protect you from the ones you don’t.
RIGHTS REQUIRE EXERCISE
People often say:
“If you don’t exercise your rights, you’ll lose them.”
Technically, constitutional rights don’t evaporate because nobody invoked them last Tuesday.
Practically?
There’s a great deal of truth in that statement.
Rights nobody understands aren’t vigorously defended.
Government practices nobody challenges become normal.
Normal becomes expected.
Expected becomes institutionalized.
And twenty years later somebody asks:
“Why are you upset? We’ve always done this.”
No.
We haven’t.
That’s how liberty often disappears.
Not dramatically.
Not with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Not with stormtroopers kicking down your door.
Sometimes liberty gets nibbled to death by convenience.
Sometimes it arrives through an app.
And sometimes it’s bolted to a telephone pole.
SUPPORT THE POLICE. LIMIT THE GOVERNMENT.
This shouldn’t be difficult.
You can support law enforcement and demand constitutional restraints on law enforcement.
Those ideas aren’t enemies.
Good cops should want clear rules.
Citizens should want criminals caught.
Communities should want stolen cars recovered.
Everyone should want missing children found.
And everybody should also want safeguards preventing powerful surveillance technology from becoming America’s largest electronic neighborhood busybody.
Limit retention.
Control access.
Audit searches.
Punish misuse.
Establish strict sharing rules.
Require judicial oversight where appropriate.
Tell citizens what government is collecting.
And make government periodically justify why it still needs it.
That’s not anti-police.
That’s pro-Constitution.
FLOCK YOU VERY MUCH
America is building surveillance capabilities King George III couldn’t have created with every Redcoat in the British Empire.
That technology can protect us.
It can also watch us.
The difference isn’t the camera.
The difference is who controls it, what they may do with the information, and what happens when they cross the line.
So the next time somebody tells you:
“Don’t worry. If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.”
Smile politely.
Wave at the camera.
And ask:
“Then what probable cause do you have to look?”
The Fourth Amendment isn’t an outdated inconvenience standing in the way of modern policing.
It’s one of the operating instructions for the Republic.
And unlike the Terms of Service on your phone, our ancestors actually expected us to read the damn thing.
Flock you very much!
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