1. United States
2. Md.
3. Letter

Maryland should prohibit the use of Flock Safety cameras by law enforcement as they enable broad, persistent surveillance of residents without sufficient safeguards for privacy and civil liberties. Flock cameras can record and retain information about vehicles traveling through public spaces, allowing law enforcement to reconstruct where a vehicle has been and potentially infer a person’s movements over time. This creates a system of mass location surveillance that can affect people who have never been suspected of committing a crime. The ability to collect this information at scale should not be normalized simply because the cameras are installed in public places. Maryland residents should be able to travel throughout their communities without having their movements systematically catalogued and stored in a law-enforcement database. Existing safeguards are also insufficient to address the risks of misuse, unauthorized access, data sharing, and mission creep. Technology that makes it possible to track vehicles across jurisdictions deserves a higher standard of oversight than ordinary security cameras. Maryland can protect legitimate public-safety interests without creating a permanent infrastructure for tracking residents. I urge the state to prohibit law-enforcement use of Flock cameras and similar automated vehicle-surveillance systems, while establishing clear privacy protections for any future technologies capable of collecting comparable location data.