Alameda County expands the surveillance state with renewal of Flock Safety cameras 82%
By Zach A. Brooks0%
7/17/2026, 11:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Appeal to Authority, and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 27.6% saturation with 224 hits. Analysis detected 2,092 faulty-reasoning hits from 811 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 74.4% and a BS Rank of 82% (3,189 of 17,190 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 81.50% of the article peer group.
In the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Carpenter v.
United States, which set limits on the government’s ability to access a person’s cell phone location data, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that modern technology has become an invaluable tool for law enforcement.
But he cautioned that those same tools create a risk of “government encroachment of the sort the Framers, after consulting the lessons of history, drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent.”
The rapid expansion of a nationwide automated license plate reader network illustrates precisely the danger Roberts foresaw in the 2018 ruling.
Last month, Alameda County’s Board of Supervisors approved a new $2.4 million contract extension with Flock Safety for the Georgia-based security company’s surveillance technology, which is deployed in 49 states.
Many other Bay Area cities and counties, including San Francisco and San Jose, already use Flock cameras.
Alameda County Supervisors Nikki Fortunato and Elisa Márquez opposed the renewal, arguing that Flock’s system lacked adequate safeguards against misuse.
Supervisors David Haubert and Nate Miley supported the contract, with Miley saying he would not be doing his job if he denied the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office access to the technology.
Haubert said he didn’t believe Flock was being misused.
The decision further entrenches a surveillance architecture that inverts one of the Fourth Amendment’s core assumptions.
Rather than requiring law enforcement to develop individualized suspicion before intruding on a person’s privacy, automated license plate reader networks collect and retain everyone’s movements, allowing officers to search those records for later suspicion, associations or investigative leads.
What was once targeted surveillance has become persistent, suspicionless monitoring.
Police departments across the country have repeatedly demonstrated that mass surveillance systems, once created, inevitably expand beyond their stated purposes and become vulnerable to abuse.
According to numerous media reports, Flock Safety’s nationwide network of license plate reader cameras, which automatically photographs and catalogs the movements of millions of vehicles, has been used to track current and former romantic partners and even strangers whom officers wished to pursue romantically.
Law enforcement agencies have also used the technology for purposes far removed from its stated mission of preventing violent crime.
In Kansas, police reportedly used license plate data to identify a citizen who had written an opinion article that was critical of the department.
In Texas, law enforcement used Flock’s network to track a person seeking abortion care in another state.
In another widely publicized incident, a mother and her children were held at gunpoint after a license plate reader system incorrectly identified their vehicle as stolen.
In San Francisco, police allowed out-of-state agencies to conduct more than 1.6 million searches of the city’s Flock database, including at least 19 searches related to immigration enforcement.
This transformation would have deeply concerned the Founding Fathers.
As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence, it is worth remembering the abuses that helped spark the American Revolution.
Among the colonists’ greatest grievances were the infamous writs of assistance, which authorized British officials to search homes, businesses and personal effects without individualized suspicion or meaningful limits.
The colonial backlash against those sweeping search powers helped give rise to the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by requiring warrants to “particularly” describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
The framers of the Constitution feared that the new government might one day exercise the same arbitrary authority as the monarchy they had overthrown, so they designed a constitutional system that required individualized justification before government intrusion.
For most of American history, that principle shaped policing.
Officers observed suspicious conduct, conducted an investigation and only then sought judicial authorization for more intrusive surveillance.
Technologies like Flock reverse that sequence.
Instead of developing suspicion before conducting surveillance, the government can now surveil everyone continuously and search vast databases of historical location information for suspicion after the fact.
Systems designed for comprehensive collection, long-term retention and instantaneous search test the constitutional limits that the Supreme Court sought to preserve in Carpenter v.
United States.
When the government maintains permanent, searchable records of where everyone travels, the Fourth Amendment’s promise of particularity begins to lose practical meaning.
Alameda County’s decision moves local policing closer to a model of continuous observation and further away from one grounded in individualized suspicion.
As a country, we must decide whether we remain faithful to the constitutional principles that emerged from the American Revolution.
The Founders rejected a government empowered to observe, search and map private life without meaningful constraints.
The further we entrench a system of constant monitoring with limited judicial oversight, the more illusory the Fourth Amendment’s protections become.
Zach A.
Brooks is a civil rights attorney in San Diego.
He is the co-author of “Collateral Damage: Sacrificing Liberty for Safety in Our Criminal Legal System.”
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