"But they keep us safe." Do they, though? Here's what the research actually says.

Here's something most people don't realize: for a technology that's spread to thousands of towns, there is shockingly little solid proof that it actually reduces crime. Researchers who study this for a living say so plainly. The cameras spread far faster than anyone bothered to test whether they work.

And when researchers do test it, the results don't match the sales pitch. Let's go through what the actual studies found.

Now, the fair counterpoint, because we're not going to do to you what Flock does. Flock says its cameras assisted around a million investigations last year and helped locate missing people, and a few single-agency studies show modest improvements in solving certain crimes after the fact. We're not claiming these cameras have never once helped solve a case. Of course a giant surveillance dragnet occasionally catches something.

But "it occasionally helps solve a crime after it happens" is a very different claim from "it makes your town safer," and it's nowhere near enough to justify recording every driver, all the time, with no warrant. The honest bottom line, in the words of the researchers themselves, is that the evidence is thin, and the best studies show these cameras help investigate crimes without actually preventing them.

Sources: Automated License Plate Readers, Vehicle Theft, and Clearance (CrimRxiv working paper, 2026); An Evaluation of a Major ALPR Expansion, Atlantic City (2025); Measuring the Cost-Effectiveness of ALPR (Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, 2025); A Multi-Site Evaluation of ALPRs (Policing Institute); and Forbes' investigation of San Marino.

If you want to understand why this is dangerous, look at what technologist Benn Jordan found at the end of 2025. Working with the news outlet 404 Media and another security researcher, he discovered that at least 60 of Flock's Condor cameras—the high-resolution units that pan, tilt, and zoom to actively track subjects—were live-streaming to the open internet with no password and no encryption. Anyone with a web browser could watch. 404 Media confirmed it by driving to one of the cameras in Bakersfield, California, standing in front of it, and watching themselves on the public feed in real time.

What was on those feeds wasn't just license plates. The cameras were actively zooming in on people—capturing strangers Christmas shopping, unloading groceries, walking along public trails, and even filming unattended children at a playground. Jordan called it "Netflix for stalkers." Sit with that for a second: the hardware itself is built to follow and zoom in on individuals going about their normal, innocent lives.

While Flock patched this specific vulnerability after it was exposed, that completely misses the fundamental issue. Software patches cannot fix the underlying constitutional danger. First, any centralized network of connected cameras is vulnerable to future leaks, credential breaches, rogue employees, and bad actors. But second—and most importantly—even if no outside hacker ever accesses the feed, the government still has this power.

Building a pervasive, pan-tilt-zoom surveillance dragnet that monitors, tracks, and archives the daily movements of innocent Americans violates the core spirit of the Fourth Amendment. The hardware is designed to watch people. The data is collected without suspicion or a warrant. The existence of the dragnet itself is the threat—whether accessed by an outside observer or by the state.

Sources: 404 Media, "Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves"; 404 Media follow-up on how he found them; and Benn Jordan's own video below.

Here's the part that really matters, and it's the question to put to anyone who defends these cameras. The evidence that they reduce crime is weak. But suppose it wasn't. Suppose these cameras really did help. Would that alone make it okay?

It wouldn't, and our whole system is built on that answer. Lots of things would help police catch criminals. Letting officers search any house without a warrant would help. Putting a tracker on every citizen's car would help. Cameras in every living room would help. We don't do those things, and not because they'd be ineffective, but because we decided as a country that some level of government power over free people is not worth the trade, no matter how useful it might be.

That's what the Fourth Amendment is. It's a decision the Founders made that the government does not get to search and track you without cause and a warrant, even when doing so would be convenient for catching criminals. "It might help" was never supposed to be enough. If "it might help" were enough, there'd be no limit on government power at all. The whole point of having rights is that they hold even when giving them up would be useful.

So when someone says "but they help catch criminals," the honest response is: first, the evidence says they mostly don't, and second, even if they did, that was never the standard. We don't trade away our constitutional protections for convenience. That's not how a free country is supposed to work.

You'll hear it constantly: "Only people with something to hide would be worried." It sounds reasonable. It isn't, and here's why.

The "nothing to hide" line quietly flips the whole thing around. It assumes the government has a right to watch you, and that you have to justify wanting privacy. That's backwards. In a free country, the government has to justify watching you, not the other way around. You don't have to prove you deserve privacy. They have to prove they have cause to take it away. That's the entire idea behind needing a warrant.

You have nothing to hide when you close your bathroom blinds, or seal an envelope, or have a private conversation. Privacy isn't about hiding wrongdoing. It's a basic condition of being a free person instead of a monitored one. The moment "I have nothing to hide" becomes the standard, you've conceded that your freedom depends on the government's goodwill, that they can watch everyone as long as most people aren't doing anything wrong. That is exactly the kind of unchecked power the Constitution was written to prevent.

Every elected official, police chief, and public servant swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. When they sign contracts to build mass surveillance dragnet networks, they fail that oath in one of two ways:

Either they don't actually understand what they signed—meaning they rubber-stamped a massive expenditure of taxpayer money and invited invasive surveillance into our community without doing their basic due diligence—or they understand the technology and authorized warrantless tracking of innocent citizens anyway. That is fundamentally anti-American. In either case, signing away the privacy of the people you represent is an indefensible betrayal of public trust, freedom, and what it means to be American.