Whether a belated semiquincentennial birthday gift to America from the ghosts of the Founding Fathers or simply a bout of good fortune for those longing for the degree of privacy against the government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted, the last several weeks have been pretty rough on Big Brother, especially Flock Safety.
For those unfamiliar with Flock, this is the company that partnered with police, homeowners’ associations, and various businesses to blanket much of the country with automatic license plate readers and thus roll out a mass vehicle surveillance network before most people understood what was going on.
Marketed and sold as investigative tools for solving serious crimes, ALPRs from Flock and other vendors have been criticized in recent months for increasingly being used for frivolous or even legally questionable purposes, such as investigating loud parties and keeping tabs on romantic partners (aka stalking).
Furthermore, there have been growing concerns regarding the ability of automatic license plate readers to read license plates accurately and the consequences incurred by individuals whose vehicles are wrongly flagged as involved in a crime.
An audit by the Los Angeles Police Department, for example, reported that during a two-month period in 2025, roughly one-third of the vehicles flagged as stolen by the city’s ALPRs were, in fact, not stolen (a kind of important distinction). Subsequently, the LAPD allowed its contract with Flock to expire earlier this month.
Making matters worse for the poor panopticon vendor, Flock also ended up pulling the plug on the “distress detection” program, piloted as an additional feature of the audio-processing devices it markets and sells to law enforcement for detecting gunshots, crashes, and fireworks. Although Flock’s blog post about the matter didn’t cite the specific reason, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has voiced concerns that “distress detection” could violate some state eavesdropping laws and that computer errors could result in armed police being deployed to any loud neighborhood interaction.
Yet, the biggest blow to Flock these last few weeks is that concerns about the role their products play in our emerging surveillance state went from something primarily discussed by libertarians and digital privacy advocates to a mainstream issue.
Within less than 24 hours, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying of the DarkHorse Podcast, Tucker Carlson, and Hayley Caronia of the Bongino Report channel’s lunch-hour show all provided mostly scathing coverage of Flock (the exception being Caronia, who seemed more accepting of mass surveillance as an unavoidable part of modern life).
Moreover, all this comes just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Chatrie v. United States, which not only put limits on the government’s ability to access Google location history data, but, according to organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Institute for Justice, could meaningfully impact the government’s ability to purchase location information from data brokers, obtain cell tower dump warrants, and use surveillance tech such as facial recognition and ALPRs.
OPINION: YOU NEVER APPROVED THIS CAMERA. SO WHY IS IT WATCHING YOU?
Yet, despite these important wins, celebration would be premature. Only a week after the LAPD’s Flock contracts expired, for example, I noticed newly erected quartets of ALPRs at a series of intersections along a road running through the downtown area of a quasi-rural Illinois suburb with under 20,000 residents. Similarly, around the same time, news broke in North Carolina that, after years of bipartisan opposition, law enforcement gained approval to set up ALPRs on state highways with little oversight, proving that winning a few battles does not mean the war’s outcome has been decided.
Hopefully, though, the aforementioned victories, perhaps with a little help from some founding ghosts, can provide some much-needed momentum in the war against Big Brother’s permeating surveillance.
Daniel Nuccio is an independent journalist and a spring 2026 College Fix fellow. He is a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute. He earned his doctorate in biology in 2025.