Politically Unstable: Flock cameras flip the Fourth Amendment on its head

Video

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

OPINION:

Safety versus mass surveillance. 7,000 police agencies. 120,000 cameras. 20 billion license plates scanned every month — no warrant needed.

Judge Andrew Napolitano joins Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to ask whether Flock cameras have quietly rewritten the Fourth Amendment.

[SADLER] I just became aware of these cameras. I did a little research, so I want to put some stats to introduce our audience to what these Flock cameras are. Currently, they’re being deployed by 7,000 primarily law enforcement agencies, your local cops, for example. They can track license plates 75 feet away. They can put together algorithms if they don’t have a clear shot of the license plate to gather license plate numbers. They retain this information in a mass data storage system for about 30 days, which is accessible to any police officer on the force, depending on where you live in the United States of America.

So far, 120,000 cameras have been installed nationwide, capturing about 20 billion license plate numbers a month. Law enforcement agencies and advocates say they swear by these cameras, calling them a crime-fighting star. I just can’t help but think about what if this information falls into the wrong hands?

[NAPOLITANO] Well, it already has fallen into the wrong hands.

About 30 police officers have already been arrested for accessing the data for personal or nefarious purposes. But the problem, in my view, and you know this from what you’ve heard me say and from my column, is bigger than that. These Flock cameras were never authorized by any city councils or state legislatures. They were just quietly acquired by police departments.

And this is not just another crime-fighting tool. This radically alters the relationship, I suggest to you, between the individual and the state. Because by capturing everything, by capturing the movements of people who are accused of no crime, accused of no wrongdoing, done nothing to invite public scrutiny, they have turned the Fourth Amendment on its head.

The Fourth Amendment requires a search warrant in order to engage in surveillance. You present evidence to a judge, like I was in New Jersey. If the judge accepts the evidence as credible and as constituting probable cause of a crime, the judge signs the search warrant and then the surveillance begins. This is the opposite. This is surveil first. Mass surveillance. You just pointed out billions of acts of surveillance. Surveil first and hope for evidence afterwards.

That is 180 degrees from what the Fourth Amendment requires. This will radically change the relationship between government and individuals by making us totally subject to the whims of those in law enforcement without any intercession by the judicial branch.

[SADLER] Judge, there have been suits that have made its way through courts. And the court has ruled in favor of law enforcement, saying basically that if you are in a car using public roads, you have no right to privacy. What do you say to that argument?

[NAPOLITANO] Those findings, and there are many of them, and they go back a long way. Even when I was in law school a long time ago, we were all taught early on in the criminal procedure course: in public, you have no right to privacy. That was before technology destroyed privacy beyond anybody’s imagining at the time those decisions came down.

Because technology is extraordinary, Kelly. The first time the car is captured, the information is stored. The second time the car is captured, the camera doesn’t even have to go to the license plate. It already knows from the mobile device in the pocketbook or the front seat of the driver who it is and what’s there. And depending upon the nature of your mobile device, it can actually gather information from the mobile device, which you think is private and secret. None of that was available to the courts, to the prosecutors, or to the defense lawyers challenging the privacy in public at the time these cases were addressed.

The most recent case by the Supreme Court goes the other way. It goes in the direction of privacy.

This is a case called Chatrie. It was just decided two months ago. In Chatrie, Mr. Chatrie was accused and eventually pleaded guilty to robbing a bank. In order to find him, the local police asked the local service providers for the identifying information of every cell phone that was near the bank at the time it was robbed. And they did this without a search warrant. Then they did it again. Then they got a retroactive search warrant. Then they gathered the information about who was there and they failed to get a search warrant to access the information.

So you have a couple steps here. One is the surveillance, and the other is the use of the data surveilled. You have a search warrant the first time, no search warrant the second time of the surveillance, and no search warrant to access the data to get Mr. Chatrie’s name.

He pleads guilty to bank robbery and reserves the right to appeal. Supreme Court reversed his conviction and said they needed a search warrant to access the data. So the current Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, but at times, thanks be to God — you know why I’m smiling, because you know my thoughts — a libertarian bent when it comes to the Bill of Rights, said you can’t do this. Go get a search warrant. Go present evidence first and see if a judge agrees with you.

So I think those cases you referred to will soon pass away as historic relics.