AVERY RYAN—On August 31, 2026, the Florida Department of Transportation gave local police thirty days to pull their automated license-plate readers off state roads, citing an exponential rise in deployments and “concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes.” Days earlier, Governor Ron DeSantis called the technology “out of control” and warned he did not want Florida to become a surveillance state. The devices swept up by that order—many of which are made by Flock Safety—raise a question as old as the Republic: how much visibility into ordinary life may the government claim in the name of public safety?
Flock’s operation is straightforward. Cameras photograph every passing car, read its license plate, and record the time and place. Flock then assembles what the company calls a “vehicle fingerprint” by collecting data on the car’s color, make, body style, and even bumper stickers, allowing law enforcement to later trace a vehicle’s prior whereabouts. Police often credit the cameras with recovering stolen cars and locating missing persons. Today, the network has grown to include more than 120,000 cameras in roughly 6,000 communities, while being embraced by cities, homeowners associations, and shopping centers.[NM1]
Counterbalancing Flock’s purported public safety benefits stand the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections. Under the reasonable expectation of privacy test established in Katz v. United States, a person generally has no privacy interest in what he knowingly exposes to the public. Accordingly, courts have treated a car’s movements on public roads—and the plate bolted to its bumper—as exposed in plain view. At its most basic level, a Flock camera bears little difference from an officer recording plate numbers at an intersection.
The Supreme Court deepened the Fourth Amendment analysis in Carpenter v. United States. There, the Court held that assembling phone location records to reconstruct a person’s movements over time constitutes a search requiring a warrant, despite each individual point having been exposed to a third party. The concern here is therefore aggregation. A mosaic of location points can reveal intimate patterns in a person’s life that no single point could. Thus, the question for Flock is whether a dense, networked grid of cameras that can follow a car through a city and share data across state lines is unprotected, plain-view observation or protected, Carpenter-style tracking.
In Norfolk, Virginia, two residents challenged the constitutionality of the city’s 170-plus camera system as warrantless, weeks-long tracking of their movements. The judge allowed the case to proceed, finding the complaint “notably similar” to the facts in Carpenter. But in January 2026, Norfolk’s system was ruled constitutional, at least for now, after the plaintiffs failed to show the network captured “the whole of a person’s movements.” Notably, however, the judge warned that such surveillance “could become too intrusive” as it expands.
The Norfolk plaintiffs are currently appealing the decision, and their argument has strengthened since. In June 2026, the Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States, extending Carpenter’s rule to hold that obtaining a person’s digital location data constitutes a search “even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.” In doing so, the Court rejected the argument that pulling a small piece of a larger dataset escapes the Fourth Amendment’s protections. Commentators expect Chatrie to influence the coming Flock litigation.
Flock’s defenders contend that a driver assumes the risk of being seen in plain view by choosing to drive on public roads; however, Carpenter and Chatrie refused to treat the use of a modern necessity like a cell phone as consent to comprehensive tracking. Driving is no less a necessity, and bearing a license plate is not optional. If the government cannot assemble a phone’s location history without a warrant, it is difficult to explain why it may do so with a car.
The deeper concern for law-abiding citizens is not catching more criminals, but everything else the data enables. Flock built its early business by selling to homeowners associations, where departments could pool their camera feeds, allowing a single query to span across tens of thousands of cameras. In 2025, a Texas sheriff’s deputy searched more than 83,000 cameras to find a woman suspected of a self-managed abortion, including cameras in states where abortion was legal. A [NM2] Washington Post investigation identified more than fifty officers who abused the network to stalk women or acquaintances. In Texas alone, deputies have run particular plates dozens of times. Reports of immigration-enforcement access, California’s suit against El Cajon over out-of-state data-sharing, and congressional investigations have followed. Furthermore, accuracy issues, including in one California city whose cameras reportedly misread plates more often than not, continue to raise legitimate worries.
Despite the constitutional and practical concerns implicit in Flock’s system, many communities have kept them, weighing the tradeoff in favor of public safety. The balance between security and liberty continues to be tested camera by camera and contract by contract, but the question remains: is Flock’s grid plain-view observation or warrantless mass-surveillance? The outcome likely depends on where courts draw Carpenter’s limits post-Chatrie and on whether legislatures and agencies answer first. While the Fourth Amendment does not forbid the government from watching the roads, it does require courts to consider at what point watching everyone, everywhere, nonstop shifts mere observation into the “arbitrary power” the Constitution is meant to restrain.
