Imagine that a Democratic administration in Washington announced a national network of cameras to log car trips all across America. The system would photograph your plate, your make and model, your bumper stickers and the dent in your tailgate, and file it all in a searchable database run by a private company that investors value in the billions. Thousands of agencies could query it without a warrant. Imagine the reaction in Cooke County. There would be resolutions and town halls, convoys and furious speeches about federal tyranny, and every one of them would be justified.
That network exists, and it is bolted to poles along I-35 and US 82 right now. It was not imposed on us by Washington. Our own county government signed us up for it, twice, on a consent agenda. Our newsroom's investigation today lays out the paper trail: the two contract items that passed without recorded debate, the $83,550 in payments, the $12,993 drawn from the sheriff's drug-forfeiture fund, the absence of any published policy, camera count, or retention rule, and the absence of any public statement from an official we could locate. We will not re-argue the documents here. We want to talk about what they mean. This is mass surveillance. Our courthouse bought it without asking us. And conservatives, of all people, should be the ones saying no.
Two details from that record deserve to be said slowly. A taxpayer who reads the sheriff's adopted budget from the first page to the last will not find a line that says cameras. In the check registers, he will find rent. Three of the four Flock checks, $66,781 of them, were charged to a rent account that appears nowhere in that budget, and Texas law says a county may spend its money only in strict compliance with the budget it adopted. Second, residents keep being reassured that these cameras do not run facial recognition. That is true of Flock's product, and it is beside the point, because the sheriff's office bought facial recognition separately, an $11,190 subscription from another company in October 2024, logged on the routine subscriptions line. No published policy. No presentation or vote in the records we reviewed.
Start with the oldest question in government: who watches the watchmen? This month, in Milwaukee, that question got a painfully literal answer. CNN reported that an officer there used Flock to look up a romantic partner's location 124 times, logging each search as "investigation." He pleaded guilty and resigned. Then one of the internal affairs detectives who investigated him was himself charged, accused of having earlier used Flock to track two people while logging his searches as "training" and "test." The watcher assigned to watch the watcher had been doing it too. In the same month, five officers in Albany, Georgia, were arrested over Flock misuse and all five were fired, and Greer, South Carolina, fired two more. The Institute for Justice's running count of such stalking cases reached at least 28 by late July, and the group calls that almost certainly an undercount. An audit log an abuser fills in himself, with words like "training," is not a guardrail. It is a diary.
Now apply the test we opened with. A sheriff's deputy in Johnson County, another North Texas county, searched 83,345 cameras across the country for a woman who had ended a pregnancy, typing "had an abortion, search for female" into the log, according to 404 Media. Senator Ron Wyden's office found that ICE's investigative arm, the Secret Service, and Navy investigators all had access to the network through pilot programs, and he warned the company that abuses of its product are "not only likely but inevitable." Flock's own chief executive had denied the company had federal contracts before admitting the pilots existed, conceding, in a statement NPR reported, that "some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information." If a blue-state tech baron had built a warrantless tracking network, made inaccurate public statements about who could search it, and gotten caught, every conservative in Texas would know his name. The only reason we tolerate this one is that it arrived wearing a badge we trust.
Some conservatives have noticed, and they are not the squishes. Representative Mitch Little, a Republican from Lewisville, posted in July, in remarks Texas Scorecard quoted: "These are sold as license plate readers, but the capabilities are far greater than that... no one voted for this, and there is no legislation that enabled it." Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania was blunter, in remarks Newsweek reported: "The mass surveillance of the American People must end... STOP THE FLOCK." Thomas Massie, Tim Burchett, and Texas's own Keith Self have filed bills requiring warrants for federal access to networks like this, and Massie has announced a further bill to withhold federal money, by the same report. And in June the Supreme Court held in the Chatrie case that even a short window of cellphone location data is protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Someone will answer that the courts have already blessed this. Read the rulings before you rest on them. In March the Fifth Circuit, whose decisions govern Texas, held in United States v. Porter that plate reader data was not a Fourth Amendment search, and its whole reasoning was that a system of about 10 cameras in one Mississippi town catches only periodic glimpses, far short of tracking a life. The most thorough opinion in the country, the January ruling that upheld Norfolk's 176 cameras, is even more instructive. The judge there wrote that such surveillance "could become too intrusive" and that his answer, "at least in Norfolk, Virginia," was "not today." He warned that as these networks grow, "the constitutional balancing could conceivably tip the other way." And he leaned on something Norfolk had and we do not: a state law capping retention at 21 days, forbidding sharing outside Virginia, limiting what officers may search for, and requiring audits. Guardrails, he wrote, are best "erected by state legislatures or local governing bodies, as is the case in Virginia." Texas passed no such law. Cooke County has published no such policy. The Norfolk ruling our officials will wave at us was built on the very protections nobody here has bothered to give us. And "a judge has not stopped us yet" is a poor motto for people who name their children after the Founders. We do not need a court to tell us what we already believe: a government that must ask a judge before it reads your mail should ask a judge before it reconstructs your movements.
Someone will also say you are already on camera everywhere, that the phone in your pocket knows more about you than any deputy could, so what is one more lens on a pole. The premise is true and the conclusion does not follow. Being seen once, by a neighbor or a store's camera, is not the same as a government-searchable system that logs your plate, your location, and the minute you passed, and keeps it so an officer can pull your stored trips at once. The Supreme Court has recognized that this kind of prolonged, technology-assisted tracking can implicate the Fourth Amendment even when every moment it captures happened in plain public view. Whether a plate-reader network crosses that line depends on how many cameras there are, how long the data is kept, who it is shared with, and how it is searched, not on whether any single photograph was legal to take. And the phone is the opposite of the point: you bought it, and you can turn it off. No one here opened a Flock account or agreed to have their comings and goings entered in a police database. That the county rented the system from a private company changes nothing that matters. When the government mounts the cameras and searches the results to build its cases, outsourcing the hardware does not outsource the Constitution.
The company's answer to all of this is more product. Flock now advertises offense-type menus, keyword filters, an "audit assistance tool," and its chief executive's assurance about "the 99.99% of officers" who mean well. A Santa Cruz council member gave that the reply it deserves, NPR reported: an officer running an improper search can simply pick a more palatable option from the menu. Flagstaff, Arizona, tried the guardrail route in earnest, pulling its data out of the national lookup and cutting retention in half, and then canceled anyway, because the town no longer believed the company. And when volunteers started mapping the cameras so citizens could at least see where they stand, Flock's chief executive called the project "terroristic", a label he has since apologized for, and wrote to customers that opponents want to "defund the police." A police chief in Staunton, Virginia, answered him better than we could: residents asking whether they are being surveilled is "democracy in action." His city canceled too. And in April, a council in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, approved a Flock contract after a company executive assured members the system did not build a heat map of a driver's movements. The police chief said the next morning that it did. The council killed the contract inside a day, and the company later conceded the heat map covers up to a month. Trust, once you have to check it every time, is not trust. So did Cambridge, Eugene, and Santa Cruz. If liberal college towns have found the nerve to take these cameras down, it would be a strange thing if the county with Gadsden flags on its tailgates turned out to be the one that shrugged.
There is an honest case for the cameras, and we will state it fairly. Flock says its technology helps solve a tenth of reported crime in America, though 404 Media found that study was written by the company's own employees. Flock says its cameras helped recover six abducted children in Colorado in five months, and police used them to help track the Brown University shooting suspect. Stolen vehicles get found. Those are real goods, and nobody here is against catching criminals. But the independent evidence stays narrow and mixed: more recoveries, with limited and inconsistent signs of prevention. A tool with real but narrow uses calls for narrow, accountable deployment: warrants where tracking becomes a search, written limits, sunset dates, and a public vote. Not a permanent dragnet, rented by the year, from a company that answers its critics with press releases and name-calling.
So where do we go from here? To the courthouse, first, with specific demands. Publish the contract. Publish the camera count, the retention period, the sharing list, and a written use policy. Name the cameras on their own line in the coming budget instead of filing them under rent, and tell us what the county owes when the state grant money stops. Stand up a transparency portal at least as forthcoming as the ones Lewisville and Denton already run, both of which, as our investigation notes, list our sheriff's office as a partner while our own county publishes nothing. Bring the program back as a regular agenda item, argued in the open, with public comment; the court gives every speaker three minutes, and sign-up closes an hour before the meeting. A petition demanding removal, under the banner "Our Roads Are Not Checkpoints," is already circulating. And if the answers do not satisfy, there is a clean exit that more than 70 communities, by a DeFlock tally the Washington Times reported, have already taken, and Texas reporting puts Austin, San Marcos, and Lockhart among them: cancel. The cameras are rented, at a going rate of roughly $3,000 apiece per year. Cancel, and they come down.
Freedom of movement was the point of this country, and the open road is where Texans have always gone to feel it. Somewhere on I-35 tonight, a camera will log a rancher's truck, a nurse's commute, a family coming home from the lake, and hold them for a search that needs no warrant. Every one of those roads leads to the courthouse. It is time the courthouse remembered that it answers to the people driving past.
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