​In the 1998 dramedy The Truman Show, the title character (played by Jim Carrey) is the unwitting star of a reality TV show he doesn’t know exists.

When Truman makes funny faces in front of the mirrored medicine cabinet, a hidden camera installed behind his pill bottles captures his every silly expression. When he sings to himself in the car, a camera and microphone inside the dashboard radio catch his performance. Truman is tracked by cameras in streetlights, vending machines, traffic signs, and even the ring his father gave him.

The movie follows Truman Burbank as it gradually dawns on him that he has been constantly surveilled all his life, and that his mother, wife, and best friend are all actors, playing roles in a reality show that millions of people watch.

Almost thirty years later, Americans are coming to the dispiriting realization that we are all Truman now, reality TV stars tracked by cameras everywhere. PPSA has reported on the ubiquity of Ring doorbell cameras and the national network of Flock Safety cameras and other automated license-plate readers (ALPRs).

As in The Truman Show, there is so much more.

If you live in a city where robotaxis operated by companies such as Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla are available, the driverless cars you ride in have interior cameras and sensors watching you. Aarian Marshall of Wired reports that questions remain about how companies collect, retain, and use passenger data.

Then there are trash trucks.

An Alabama-based company, City Detect, has contracts to install AI-equipped cameras on sanitation trucks to capture and analyze images of homes and lawns, flagging possible code violations involving tall grass, litter, graffiti, and more serious problems.

The system assigns a “Blight Score” to properties. City Detect says it has flagged 6 million violations nationwide, leading to “courtesy notices” informing residents that an inspector might come to their homes and issue a citation. One resident of a low-income neighborhood in Dallas told a local television news show that he felt the system was “trying to flush us out.”
Cameras are also being installed on city buses in Los Angeles to catch cars illegally parked in bus lanes, and on the sides of school buses in Austin to detect cars that fail to stop when school buses are unloading children.

Each of these uses has a justification. Communities have a right to keep neighborhoods clean and orderly. Buses need clear lanes to make mass transit work. Robotaxi companies need to know if passengers are vandalizing a vehicle or doing something dangerous. And children need to be protected from drivers who whip around stopped school buses.

The problem is that cameras can easily be repurposed. The same cameras that watch for tall grass, parked cars, drunk passengers, and dangerous drivers can also watch the rest of us – adding another layer of public surveillance to that created by Flock and other ALPRs.

As a nation, we are creating a system of ubiquitous surveillance, sometimes without knowing who is watching and why. When St. Lucie County, Florida, ordered Flock cameras removed from county roads, officials discovered 11 cameras with no permits, publicly identified owners, or obvious purpose.

Who installed those 11 road cameras? Who has access to their data? Why the secret surveillance?

In the movie, after Truman learns what is happening to him, he asks the show’s creator, “Was nothing real?”
​
“You were real,” replies the creator, played by Ed Harris. “That’s what made you so good to watch.”

​The federal judiciary is beginning to catch up with how far and how fast technology is taking us from the Constitution and its guarantees of our civil rights.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Chatrie v. United States that the government conducts a Fourth Amendment search when it obtains a target’s cellphone location history through a geofence warrant.

More recently, a federal judge in Oklahoma found that a deputy sheriff’s warrantless search of historical location information collected through Flock Safety’s automated license-plate reader network was unconstitutional.

And little more than a week ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that police use of a cell-site simulator to pinpoint a cellphone’s location constitutes a Fourth Amendment search subject to the warrant requirement. Make no mistake, this is a landmark decision that marks the first time a federal appeals court has squarely resolved that question. 

Cell-site simulators are devices that impersonate cellphone towers, tricking nearby cellphones into transmitting identifying signals. These devices, often called “stingrays” after one brand of simulators, allow police to pinpoint the location of cellphones.

PPSA has long warned that stingrays reach beyond a targeted suspect, sweeping in nearby devices and raising serious concerns about surveillance of peaceful protesters. FBI nondisclosure agreements have also helped conceal their use from defendants and courts. 

The case decided by the Fourth Circuit concerns Baltimore police officers who used a simulator called Hailstorm in 2014 to locate Kerron Andrews – suspected of attempted murder – inside a particular townhouse. Information from his cellphone provider had narrowed his location to several blocks. The simulator took officers to his front door. Its use remained undisclosed to his counsel for a year.

Judge Nicole Berner, writing for the majority joined by Judge Toby Heytens, explained:

“This technology is akin to sense-enhancing technology that allows the government to peer into a private home, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly held requires a warrant.”

The Fourth Circuit followed the logic of Kyllo v. United States (2001), in which the Supreme Court ruled that police use of thermal-imaging technology to detect heat emanating from a home constituted a Fourth Amendment search. The opinion in Andrews v. Baltimore City Police Department found that using a cell-site simulator to locate Andrews inside a home was similarly invasive.

It didn’t help the government’s case that the police tried to abide by their NDA with the FBI by hiding their use of the cell-site simulator behind a warrant application for a different kind of surveillance, called a pen register/trap and trace device.

The Fourth Circuit underscored the importance of its opinion:

“Despite the ubiquity of cell-site simulators, no federal court of appeals has squarely addressed whether law enforcement’s use of this technology for real-time tracking of a cellphone constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Today, we hold that it does.” 

This was not a personal victory for Andrews. Despite having spent two years in pretrial detention, Andrews’s civil suit against the police department and detectives cannot proceed. The Fourth Circuit ruled that because the constitutional issue was not clearly established in 2014, the police are entitled to qualified immunity. The majority did not decide whether the existing court order, which initially narrowed the search to a few blocks, satisfied the constitutional warrant requirement.

This case is another sign that courts are sharpening constitutional boundaries. Police cannot evade the protections surrounding a home by electronically reaching inside it. And Americans should not have to choose between carrying a cellphone and enjoying their privacy.
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PPSA applauds this ruling. The next step must be meaningful accountability and full disclosure when stingrays are used. A secret surveillance tool must never become a secret exception to the Fourth Amendment.

Imagine police searching every home in a neighborhood because they believe one holds evidence of a crime. Or opening every safe-deposit box in a bank to find one person’s contraband.

The Fourth Amendment forbids that approach. A warrant must particularly identify the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. And the search must be based on probable cause. Investigators cannot search a crowd first and then decide which individuals they had reason to investigate.

That principle runs through PPSA’s amicus brief in Chatrie v. United States, now before the Fourth Circuit, and a similar PPSA brief in New Jersey v. Bryant before the Supreme Court of New Jersey. In the Chatrie case, a geofence warrant required Google to produce records of devices detected within a geographic boundary. In Bryant, a “tower dump” search sought records from cellular providers of devices that connected to a specified group of cell towers during a given period. Both methods exposed the records of people who were not suspected of wrongdoing. 

In Chatrie, the warrant initially returned the location histories of 19 people near a Virginia bank. Officers then selected accounts for wider searches before obtaining identifying information for three users. As PPSA told the Fourth Circuit, “A tailored set of results is not a tailored search.” The government had already searched protected records to decide whose records to examine more closely.

That process reverses the sequence spelled out by the Constitution, under which a neutral magistrate must decide in advance what the government may search. The warrant cannot allow officers to search first and then use what they discover to decide whose records merit another search.

PPSA told the Fourth Circuit that the Constitution’s particularity requirement must be satisfied before the search, not through narrowing after the search. We also told the court:

“This warrant fails at each step because the warrant – not the officer, and not the search itself – must identify the object of the search before the search begins.”

The New Jersey search reversed the constitutional process on a staggering scale. Investigating a home break-in, police sought records from four cellular providers. The resulting tower dumps swept up records associated with 10,477 people, using nearly two dozen towers and 79 antennae across almost 200 square miles.

The search reached devices more than 11 miles away – all to produce two suspects. Those thousands of other people did not become proper search targets simply because their phones connected to one of the specified towers. 

The state compares this sweep to searching a cluttered home, where officers must sort through belongings irrelevant to the purpose of the search. But a warrant to search a home rests on probable cause tied to that home. Encountering irrelevant items inside it does not authorize officers to search thousands of other people’s homes. Likewise, the fact that relevant records may be mixed with irrelevant ones cannot supply probable cause to obtain everyone’s records.

The same error appears in both cases – treating the investigation’s eventual result as proof that its initial reach was justified. Finding suspects after examining thousands of people’s records cannot retroactively make the search particular.

Every new technology will present a new twist. Courts should not invent a new theory of what counts as a lawful search whenever police gain a new technique to collect information. Geofences and tower dumps are searches that remain subject to the Constitution’s enduring requirements of probable cause and particularity.
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Above all, we are telling the courts that officials cannot select their own targets for a search, supply their own justification, and set their own limits. A search warrant cannot write itself.

In a word: You.

Allow us to explain.

On Tuesday, Jack Smith, the former special counsel who investigated Donald Trump for possible crimes connected to the January 6 riots and the mishandling of classified information, was grilled before the Senate Judiciary Committee. At issue was Smith’s decision to subpoena the call records of eight senators and one congressman.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley revealed in July that Smith’s office also subpoenaed the National Archives and Records Administration to provide the text messages and toll records of 44 Members of Congress from both parties for a period covering almost four months.

We’ve long complained about Smith’s reliance on grand jury subpoenas instead of probable-cause warrants that a judge would scrutinize for their constitutional implications. Judicial scrutiny would surely have evaluated Sen. John Kennedy’s (R-LA) claim that the surveillance of Members’ metadata was a blatant violation of the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause, which immunizes Members from being questioned about their legislative acts.

Senators and representatives are understandably incensed about being spied upon. But it bears saying that what happened to them happens all the time to many of us who are not protected by a special clause in the Constitution.

Every year, tens of thousands of Americans have their communications records scrutinized by the government without ever learning that their private records have been searched.

The bipartisan NDO Fairness Act, which passed the House for the third time in August, offers a practical and overdue reform of a surveillance practice that has grown out of control.

This legislation would place meaningful limits on the government’s use of non-disclosure orders (NDOs) – the gag orders often served alongside warrants compelling technology companies and cloud providers to hand over data without telling their customers. These orders can prevent Americans from learning that the government has accessed their emails, files, messages, or other digital records.

Unlike the senators and representatives, these Americans never learn that the government has snooped into their most sensitive personal information – including communications about their health, financial transactions, and personal relationships.

The NDO Fairness Act would require the government to notify people whose accounts have been surveilled within 90 days. Judges could extend these non-disclosure orders based on written, fact-based justifications provided by prosecutors, replacing the current practice of simply issuing and extending boilerplate gag orders.

Tuesday’s hearing was highly partisan and contentious, with one senator calling Smith a “dirt bag.” At a time when public approval of Congress is low – just 10 percent, according to Gallup – why not do something popular for the people?

In its reporting on the hearing, Politico noted a “bipartisan moment” of the hearing: a pitch by Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Chris Coons (D-DE) for the NDO Fairness Act.

These senators realize that now would be a smart time for the Senate to follow the House’s example and pass the NDO Fairness Act. It would be a welcome reform, arriving just in time for the election.

We’ve long suspected that political coordination is taking place between supposedly non-political Intelligence Community officials and their champions on Capitol Hill in opposing surveillance reform.

It is one thing to suspect such coordination. It is another to see a request for it in black and white in an official document.

PPSA received a batch of partially redacted documents in response to our June 2024 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for communications between Members of Congress and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

The Deputy General Counsel for Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, emailed an ODNI Legislative Liaison Officer in 2024 about The Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act. The bill would restrict federal agencies from buying Americans’ private digital records from data brokers to obtain records they would otherwise need a warrant to access.

Rep. Himes’s lawyer wrote:

“Our immediate need is two to three simple unclass sentences (that we can attribute to ODNI/DNI) expressing how harmful this bill, if adopted, would be to IC activities.”

Soliciting an agency statement framed around how “harmful” the bill would be warrants scrutiny. That request raises a serious question: How much of the opposition presented to lawmakers as an intelligence assessment was solicited and provided to help defeat the legislation?

This crosses the line for both Rep. Himes and for the agency. The request is for political spin from the officially neutral bureaucracy to be used politically to kill a proposition in a legislative debate on the House floor.  

Despite the opposition, The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act handily passed the House of Representatives in April 2024. A few days later, the Senate rejected an amendment to attach the measure to a surveillance bill. This email gives surveillance reformers a concrete reason to scrutinize how intelligence agency officials seek to influence debates over any limits on their agencies.

The takeaway for surveillance reformers and our champions on the Hill is that the full force of the intelligence community is backing those who – like the anti-reform senators who made sure that The Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act died in 2024 – are determined to stop any efforts at placing guardrails on the widespread surveillance of the American people.

George Anibowei is an immigration attorney in Texas whose many clients include people facing removal proceedings brought by the Department of Homeland Security. Like most lawyers, many of his confidential communications with clients occur over the phone.

Between 2016 and 2024, border agents searched Anibowei’s phone without a warrant at least five times as he returned to the United States from abroad. During the first search, agents copied all the data on his phone, including confidential client communications. The government retains a copy of that data to this day.

On another return from abroad, agents held Anibowei for three hours while reviewing his texts, WhatsApp messages, and emails. He eventually had to stop traveling with his work phone to avoid exposing his clients’ communications to the agency opposing those clients’ interests.

PPSA is now urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case and resolve a split among courts on the legality of warrantless searches of digital devices at the border. As our brief explains:

“The purpose of a border search is to ask what people, goods or cargo are entering the country. A general search of a traveler’s phone asks a different question: What has the traveler done and said?”

As a U.S. citizen, Anibowei has a right to enter the country. These phone searches served no apparent customs or entry purpose. After all, criminals do not smuggle exotic animals or drugs in a digital format. But these searches did expose Anibowei’s communications and records, including what the Supreme Court has called “a digital record of nearly every aspect” of his life.

A Circuit Split and a Ripe Question

The Fifth Circuit nevertheless upheld the searches because they occurred at the border. The courts of appeals have split 7-2 over whether agents ever need a warrant to search a cellphone at the border. The issue recurs often. Customs and Border Protection conducted more than 55,000 electronic-device searches in fiscal year 2025, including a growing number involving U.S. citizens.

Anibowei directly challenges the directives authorizing these searches. As the Fifth Circuit itself recognized, the case “turns squarely and solely” on whether the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant to search a phone at the border. That makes it a clear opportunity for the Supreme Court to settle the question.

The Court has already explained why rules designed for physical objects cannot simply be applied to digital devices. As PPSA’s brief puts it, “A phone is not one more container.” Treating it as one, the Court said in Riley v. California, is “like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon.” A phone search can reveal “a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form.”

A Fly on the Wall

The stakes extend beyond the privacy of individual travelers. Jake Laperruque of the Center for Democracy and Technology reports that CBP retains border data for 15 years. As of 2022, approximately 2,700 DHS personnel were authorized to access that database. Laperruque warns that automated scanning could let DHS mine sensitive information from tens of thousands of copied devices “in a manner previously inconceivable.” 

CBP is actively seeking AI tools to scan, sort, and analyze data from phones and other devices. Laperruque points to Cellebrite, a company with CBP contracts, whose Pathfinder tool promises investigators the ability to be a “Fly on the Wall” and reconstruct what someone did on a device at a given time. He warns that database searches lack judicial oversight and limits on their purpose – an easy pathway to politically motivated abuses.

A border exception designed to catch possible contraband entering the country should not become a means to collect and search Americans’ digital histories. The Supreme Court should hear Anibowei’s case and make clear that, for Americans, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t end at the border.

​Sen. Cory Booker: “We Are Out of Control”

The CEOs of four surveillance technology companies – Flock Safety, Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada – declined Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) invitations to his Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.

Their absence left the spotlight on Sen. Hawley’s star witness, Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman with a heart-rending story. Investigators used images from Flock cameras to trace her car while pursuing a fatal crash, then wrongly arrested her. She faced three counts of vehicular homicide and three counts of leaving the scene of a deadly crash. Isaacs spent 13 days in jail while facing charges that could have carried a life sentence.

Threat to Constitutional Rights

Sens. Hawley, Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) voiced concerns shared by the other witnesses about these Automated License-Plate Readers (ALPRs): that such pervasive surveillance poses a direct threat to Americans’ constitutional rights. Early in the hearing, Sen. Hawley noted that recording Americans’ movements enables the government to track our “patterns of life.”

“They could easily put these cameras in front of a gun store or gun show or a range, or you could put them in front of a pregnancy care center,” Hawley said.

Chad Marlow of the American Civil Liberties Union replied, “the only thing incorrect you said was ‘could,’ when it is ‘are.’”

Sen. Cory Booker added:

“We have gone way out of balance now … violating the average Americans’ sense of fundamental rights to privacy, speech, and to be moving without government surveillance … We are out of control for any government, state local or federal, to easily abuse the fundamental rights that we all assume we have a right to.”

Nor is government surveillance the only threat to Americans’ privacy. Benn Jordan, a cybersecurity engineer, described security vulnerabilities in surveillance cameras that could expose their feeds to outsiders. He testified that one pan-tilt-zoom camera could follow pedestrians and capture what appeared on the screens of their smartphones.

Law Enforcement’s Unexplored Culpability

The hearing also left room for a closer look at how police use ALPR leads. Sen. Hawley criticized the role of Flock’s system in Isaacs’s arrest. Flock cameras recorded her vehicle’s movements, but Florida Highway Patrol troopers drew the wrong conclusion from those images. Witnesses gave conflicting descriptions of a fleeing Durango, and a later investigation found paint evidence linking the crime to a maroon vehicle. Isaacs’s Durango was black. Photographs presented by her lawyer showed no damage consistent with a crash. Indeed, the car was in pristine condition.

Another witness, Sheriff Ross Teeple of Pinal County, Arizona, came to the hearing to set an example of local leadership. Despite the drug-trafficking challenges his department faces, Sheriff Teeple decided to cancel his department’s Flock contract. He explained: “If my deputies need a search warrant to put a physical tracker on a vehicle, where is the line for camera systems that build an identical, AI-driven map of a citizen’s life?”

One Piece of the Surveillance Mosaic

Perhaps Benn Jordan made the most profound point in the hearing, calling ALPRs the “canary in the coal mine.”

Other surveillance systems raise related privacy concerns. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits targeting of foreign threats abroad, but also collects Americans’ international communications. Government agents can search that data using Americans’ personal identifiers. Federal agencies also purchase commercially available personal data, potentially gaining access to revealing records without a warrant.

Combined with ALPR records and analyzed with AI, such data can easily help the government quickly assemble dossiers on Americans’ movements and private lives.

“We’ve got to find a way to protect and enforce the Bill of Rights and the basic personal liberties of every law-abiding citizen in this country no matter what the technology is,” Sen. Hawley said.
​
We think the senator got that exactly right.

​As the November election approaches, this is an ideal time to ask candidates for federal – and, in some cases, state and local – office what they will do to prevent new technologies from being woven together to create the infrastructure for an American surveillance state.
 
Automated license-plate readers record where we drive, revealing our personal, political, and religious associations and activities.
 
Section 702 can “incidentally” collect Americans’ international communications, enabling government agents to use our identifying information to search for those messages.
 
Data brokers assemble revealing dossiers from location, financial, health, and internet data – and sell them to a dozen federal agencies, ranging from the FBI to the IRS.
 
And an expanded definition of “electronic communication service provider” obligates a broad range of businesses and even houses of worship to secretly spy on their customers and congregants.
 
These systems operate under different legal authorities. But together, they raise a fundamental question: Can the government reconstruct a person’s movements, communications, associations, and private life without first obtaining a warrant, as required by the U.S. Constitution?
 
Here are some pointed questions about these surveillance practices to put to candidates at town halls, campaign appearances, debates, and in constituent emails.
 
Flock Safety and other Automated License-Plate Readers (ALPRs)
 
ALPRs capture license plates and visual characteristics of passing vehicles, creating searchable records of their drivers’ movements. This gives the government the ability to create a dossier of Americans’ private movements – whom we visit, where we organize politically, conduct journalism, worship, or meet business or personal associates.
 
Ask:
 

• Should police need a warrant to search historical Automated License Plate Reader records showing where an American has traveled?

 

• How long should ALPR data be retained when it is not connected to any suspected crime? (Flock Safety suggests seven days.)

 

• Should police be permitted to give federal agencies access to locally collected driving records? If so, under what circumstances?

 

• Will you require public disclosure of every agency, private company, and fusion center that can access your community’s ALPR data?

 

• Should every search be logged and independently audited? When an officer supplies a frivolous or false justification, what should the consequences be?

 

• Do you support legislation preventing ALPR data from being used to monitor lawful political protests, religious services, or other constitutionally protected activities?

 
Warrantless Section 702 Searches
 
Section 702 authorizes surveillance targeting foreign intelligence targets abroad. Americans’ international communications can nevertheless be collected, after which agencies may search the resulting databases using Americans’ names, email addresses, or other identifiers.
 
Ask:
 

• Should the FBI and other agencies obtain a probable cause warrant before searching Section 702 data for an American’s communications?

 

• If you oppose a warrant requirement, what standard would you impose, and why should it be lower than the standard for searching an American’s email account directly?

 

• Should Americans who are prosecuted with evidence derived from Section 702 surveillance be told how that evidence was obtained so they can challenge it in court?

 

• Will you insist that significant opinions of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court be released publicly, with necessary national security redactions?

 
The “Make Everyone a Spy” Provision
 
Two years ago, Congress expanded the category of organizations that can be compelled to assist the NSA’s international surveillance. Critics warn that this broadened “electronic communication service provider” definition requires commercial landlords, businesses, and churches that offer access to communications equipment, like Wi-Fi, to spy on their customers and congregants for the government.
 
Ask:
 

• Will you support narrowing the definition so ordinary businesses, commercial landlords, and churches cannot be forced into spying on their customers and congregants?

 

• Should a private organization that receives such a surveillance directive be allowed to challenge it before an independent court?

 

• Should Congress require regular public reporting on how often this authority is used and what categories of entities receive these surveillance directives?

 
Government Purchases From Data Brokers
 
Federal agencies purchase commercially available information from companies that collect and resell personal data. This exposes Americans’ most personal information – what we search for online, the websites we visit, and with whom we communicate – to a dozen federal agencies, which can then review that data without a warrant.
 
Ask:
 

• Should an agency be allowed to buy information it would need a warrant to obtain directly from a cellphone provider, bank, or technology company?

 

• Will you support a warrant requirement for government purchases of Americans’ location, communications, internet, financial, and health-related data?

 

• Will you require every federal agency to disclose which brokers it uses, what information it buys, how much it spends, and how the information is searched and shared?

 
Put these questions to your candidates. Check their grades on surveillance and privacy from their floor votes from the previous session of Congress on our PPSA Scorecard. And don’t hesitate to convey your questions and views to Members of Congress – Representatives here and Senators here – by email.

A hit-and-run driver fled the scene of a chain-reaction crash that killed three people in DeBary, Florida, north of Orlando, in October 2025. All the police had to go on was a tip from a witness who told them that the fleeing driver had been in a Dodge Durango.

So the police went to work, scouring hours of surveillance footage recorded by Flock Safety cameras. They found that a Dodge Durango had been three miles away from the scene of the fatal crash. Even more incriminating, it was moving in the direction of the accident. On this basis, they arrested the owner of the car, 23-year-old Lindsey Brooke Isaacs. Authorities slapped her with eight felony charges, including three counts of vehicular homicide.

As Joe Wilkins at Futurism put it, Isaacs was “treated like a hardened criminal.” She spent almost two weeks in jail, the first few days in solitary confinement, contemplating the possibility that she might be sent to prison for the rest of her life.

At the heart of this case was Flock’s automated license plate readers (ALPRs). That technology demonstrated the power of ALPRs to match cars with crimes. What it also demonstrated is that there is no technological solution to stupid.

Had the police bothered to examine Isaacs’ Dodge Durango, they would have found that it didn’t have a scratch on it. How can you hit another car and kill three people without leaving a scratch on your own vehicle?

A later investigation revealed maroon-colored paint left behind by the fleeing vehicle. Isaacs’ car was black. As evidence of Isaacs’ innocence piled up, prosecutors released her on the 13th day of her incarceration.

“This took and is going to take maybe years to get better mentally, physically, emotionally,” Isaacs said. We can only imagine. Being held in jail separates an accused person from their job and family. It is a taxing ordeal that should not be imposed carelessly.

This story illustrates how police can become overly dependent on technology – whether facial recognition or ALPRs – leaping to conclusions of guilt without taking the time to perform a few easy checks.
​
Flock enables pervasive and unconstitutional surveillance that is fundamentally changing how law enforcement operates. As this case demonstrates, reliance on technology can encourage shoddy police work, with devastating consequences for innocent Americans. Legislators must recognize that Flock is a major driver of the self-assembling surveillance state – and enact guardrails to keep it within constitutional boundaries.

How’s this for a prompt for ChatGPT or Claude: “Give me a list of people who’ve criticized the regime in the last several months.”

Artificial intelligence helps small teams accomplish work that once required large organizations. Unfortunately, that now includes secret police units in repressive regimes around the world.

According to the London-based, dissident-run Iran International news site, the AI company Anthropic discovered that Iranian paramilitary and security units had used its Claude AI model to monitor Iranians’ social media posts to identify opposition and diaspora accounts.

One Iranian unit analyzed hundreds of thousands of social-media posts and identified 39 opposition accounts to track. Other actors used Claude to develop tools for identifying and profiling users, including a malicious Firefox extension disguised as a prayer-times utility.

Iranian units also used Claude to develop or improve a centralized surveillance case-management system. AI was not merely collecting information. It was helping the state organize its surveillance bureaucracy and decide whom to watch.

The stakes of Iran’s domestic surveillance are deadly. Medical networks, whistleblowers, and unofficial leaks estimate that thousands of Iranian dissidents and protesters, most of them young men and women, have been killed in the streets or executed just before the beginning of the U.S.-Iranian war earlier this year.

To its credit, Anthropic has aggressively countered this misuse of its product. In the Iranian operations, it identified and unplugged 16 Claude accounts operated by two units associated with Iranian paramilitary and domestic security agencies.

Iran is far from alone in its authoritarian abuse of AI. Axios reports that government-linked actors in China and Mali have also used Claude to automate surveillance.

A consultant working for Malian security authorities reportedly created a system that gathers information from mobile operators and builds dossiers on individuals. In China, an intelligence office dedicated to spying on religious organizations once required large teams of analysts in many offices. AI consolidated it to a single office capable of producing thousands of investigations each month. Chinese authorities also used Claude to evaluate politically sensitive social-media posts and identify people for “control” – potentially including coercive questioning and closer monitoring of their movements and communications.

Anthropic says it banned every account associated with the surveillance operations that it uncovered and strengthened its safeguards. But the company acknowledges the limits of any response. In the case of Mali, authorities simply transferred their surveillance platform to locally operated AI models.

The danger is therefore larger than one company or chatbot. As Anthropic threat-intelligence chief Jacob Klein told Axios, AI is making state surveillance cheaper and more efficient. A lone official or contractor can increasingly perform work that once required whole teams of programmers and intelligence analysts.

Authoritarian governments have always wanted to monitor dissidents, journalists, religious minorities, and political opponents. AI is abolishing the practical constraints that once limited human surveillance.

George Orwell’s nightmare vision of totalitarian surveillance in 1984 always faced the practical constraint of recruiting enough watchers to monitor people around the clock. For every subversive comment or passed note, the watchers of 1984 would have had to sit through thousands of hours of people eating breakfast, brushing their teeth, and walking to work.
​
But AI repression doesn’t get bored. It needs no lunch breaks or naps. And it is here.

Flock Safety cameras and other automated license-plate reader (ALPR) systems have become a national flashpoint in debates over surveillance, policing, and privacy. Even data centers poll better than Flock cameras.
 
Now a former police chief is proposing a detailed framework intended to preserve the investigative uses of Flock and other ALPR systems while imposing new rules governing how police departments operate them.
 
Tom Weitzel, who served as police chief in Riverside, Illinois, has released a position paper on automated license plate reader systems, including the cameras made by Flock Safety. Weitzel, a 37-year law-enforcement veteran, writes that he has seen technology improve policing – and seen its misuse damage public trust.
 
In a letter published by Patch, Weitzel explains what prompted his proposal:
 
“I keep watching the debate and feel stuck between two bad options: leave these systems running with no real oversight or rip them out altogether. I don’t accept either option. I’ve seen ALPR data recover stolen vehicles, locate missing people, and crack violent crime cases that otherwise would have gone cold. Walking away from that capability doesn’t make anyone safer.
 
“At the same time, I won’t defend a system that can’t demonstrate it’s being used honestly.”
 
Weitzel proposes that communities adopt:
​

• An independent civilian oversight board with subpoena power

 

• Mandatory written justification and case numbers for every search

 

• Immutable audit logs

 

• A 30-day retention limit for data that does not produce a “hit” on an investigative “hot list.”

 

• A public discipline matrix with zero tolerance for personal misuse.

​
We note that Weitzel’s suggested 30-day retention period for “non-hit” data – images of vehicles not related to any law-enforcement hot list – exceeds the 7-day retention period now recommended by Flock CEO Garrett Langley. We would also recommend including an explicit prohibition against tracking individuals solely on the basis of their religious, political, or journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment.
 
His paper also proposes transparency measures, including a dashboard that reports aggregate searches, criminal-activity hits, usage audits, and disciplinary actions against officers. He proposes a public portal called “Explain My Stop,” and the selection of community members by lottery to participate in audits.
 
Weitzel would also institute an annual “State of Surveillance” town hall and independent academic reviews. Other elements include a plain-language explanation of ALPR policies, public accounts of cases solved with ALPR assistance, optional alerts for residents whose plates are searched repeatedly, and independent compliance certification for programs.
 
Weitzel’s framework provides a detailed set of ideas for lawmakers in Congress and state legislatures, police departments, and communities to consider as they debate whether – and under what conditions – to continue using ALPR systems