1. United States
2. Ind.
3. Letter

Automated license-plate surveillance is not just bad policy—it is an outsourced Fourth Amendment workaround. Flock Safety built a business model on doing what the government cannot legally do without probable cause: conduct warrantless, persistent tracking of the public. By placing the cameras and harvesting the travel data themselves, private companies create a layer of separation that law enforcement then exploits. Police get continuous location intelligence without ever having to justify it to a judge. That is an evasion of constitutional limits in everything but name. The Fourth Amendment was designed to restrain the state from general searches—broad, suspicionless monitoring of people who have done nothing wrong. Flock’s system is a general search: a blanket capture of everyone’s movements on the off-chance some future investigation might find value in it. Handing this power to a private vendor doesn’t make it constitutional; it just creates plausible deniability. The public never consented to having private companies build dossiers of their daily routes, timestamps, and associations. Yet municipalities sign contracts, the cameras go up, and suddenly our travel patterns become a commercial product pipeline flowing directly into police systems. That is not “community safety.” That is a privatized surveillance economy feeding government power. If the state wants access to our movements, it should meet the constitutional threshold required to obtain them. Instead, it purchases mass-collected data from a vendor whose entire business depends on stripping away the protections the Fourth Amendment was built to provide. People deserve full visibility into what is being collected about them, how it is being used, and how long it is retained. If the data is truly harmless, individuals should be able to access their own travel records. If the data is too sensitive to release, then its collection without individualized suspicion is a constitutional red flag. This is not a gray area. It is an industry built on circumventing constitutional constraints, normalizing suspicionless monitoring, and eroding civil liberties under the guise of technology.