 Cities and counties across America are “deflocking” – curbing or removing Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers (ALPRs), with many citizens seeing this technology as a pervasive threat to their privacy. By our unofficial count, almost 50 cities and counties have either terminated their Flock contracts or failed to renew them since 2024. We counted six each in Arizona and California, four each in Washington State and Wisconsin, three in Texas, and many more in 13 other states. Community leaders from coast to coast who are taking these actions are all more or less saying the same thing. “We’ve made clear that we believe Flock systems pose an unacceptable risk to the liberty and privacy of our constituents,” Mike Siegel, a city councilman in Austin, Texas, told KUT News. Flock Safety, backed by $1 billion in venture capital, is clearly reeling from a trend that grew from a squeak of protest into a roar. This is especially true as stories emerge around the country about the misuse of Flock technology by individual police officers for stalking and by Flock personnel for creepy surveillance. Flock is responding. CEO Garrett Langley recently acknowledged and apologized for these shortcomings and announced several operational changes in response. The most salient example is Flock’s reduction of its standard data retention period from a month to seven days. The ACLU, in a sharp but fair analysis of Flock’s changes, conceded that this “may be a step in the right direction.” “Whether this is a real change or just another Flock PR move, however, will depend on how its ‘Evidence Mode’ operates,” the ACLU says. Evidence Mode is a feature that allows law enforcement to preserve specific vehicle and license plate data for ongoing criminal investigations. The ACLU writes: “If ‘Evidence Mode’ only retains hit result data that police determine may be evidence in an active investigation of a specific case, then the change may be a positive one. But if ‘Evidence Mode’ triggers the retention of any ALPR data that is searched, then the new mode could indefinitely retain all of the ALPR data Flock collects and shares nationally.” The ACLU also raised critical questions about Flock’s plans to give communities more control over how their data can be accessed by police in other communities, as well as about the effectiveness of new tools designed to reduce misuse of Flock technology by individual officers. At the same time, it would be a disservice to overlook Flock’s usefulness. In a recent interview with Detroit’s Local 4 reporter Lauren Kostiuk, Langley quoted a Florida sheriff who speculated that the recent national decline in crime might well be attributable to Flock’s never-blinking eye. Langley credited Flock with helping find than 1,000 missing people and identify 22,000 stolen cars across the United States in one month. Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute made similar points in a piece in The Atlantic, “In Defense of Flock.” He wrote that the certainty of apprehension is a powerful disincentive to commit a crime – and that the more surveillance there is, the less crime there will be. Mike Fox, a legal fellow at the Cato Institute, has a trenchant response. “To test Lehman’s thesis, one need only apply his logic to his own doorstep. Imagine if the local police department installed a high-resolution pole camera directed squarely at his front door. By his own logic, Lehman should be elated: The camera would deter prospective burglars and, should an intruder ignore it, capture their every movement in crisp detail to ensure swift apprehension. “Naturally, this arrangement requires government officials to observe every detail of Lehman’s private life. With sufficient resolution, operators could log the packages delivered to his porch, track his every departure and return, note when he walks his dog, and monitor when his children leave for school. Under Lehman’s framework, none of this should disturb him; it is simply the price of crime suppression. His home might never be burglarized, but the cost is continuous state surveillance of his castle.” Even a search of Lehman’s doorstep limited to seven days would be deeply intrusive. Some critics see Flock as an exemplar of surveillance capitalism, although Flock does not own or sell the data its technology generates. (Law enforcement customers own the data.) PPSA has a broader concern, one illustrated by Mike Fox’s thought experiment scaled up to a national system of 120,000 Flock cameras across 49 states. Whatever Flock’s policies and safeguards, our nation is building out a network that could be used by the government to track anyone throughout their daily life. While there is no federal portal into Flock, tracking data in the hands of local law enforcement and perhaps regional “fusion centers” could wend its way upward to politically influenced agencies in Washington, D.C. The greatest danger is that such data could fall into the hands of officials and agencies eager to create dossiers on Americans by tracking our political, business, romantic, and religious associations. In short, Flock could take us down the road to a Russian or Chinese-style surveillance state. That danger is all the more reason for Congress to step in and prevent such an evolution by subjecting the use of data generated by ALPRs to safeguards grounded in the First and Fourth Amendments. Congress should consider requiring warrants before ALPR data may be used to track individual Americans. Congress should also explicitly ban the use of Flock data to monitor how Americans exercise their speech and associational rights in politics, religion, and other sensitive areas. 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