Scale is the argument. Flock operates something on the order of 120,000 cameras and works with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies. These aren’t red light cameras triggered by a violation. Every car gets photographed, logged, time-stamped, and assigned what the company calls a vehicle fingerprint. Make, color, body style, bumper stickers. Police can then ask where your car has been. No warrant, no suspicion, no judge.

Courts have been slow to catch up, though they’re moving. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held that pulling months of cell-site location data constituted a search requiring a warrant because the whole of a person’s public movements carries a reasonable expectation of privacy. Norfolk residents Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington made the same argument against that city’s 175-camera grid and lost on summary judgment in January. Their appeal now sits before the Fourth Circuit. Then came Chatrie v. United States on June 29, decided 6-3 with Justice Kagan writing, holding that obtaining a suspect’s location records is a Fourth Amendment search and rejecting the government’s fallback that a narrow slice of an enormous database somehow doesn’t count. That reasoning is precisely what Norfolk relied on to win below.

Abuse isn’t hypothetical. A Milwaukee officer used Flock to locate his romantic partner 124 times and her ex 55 more, according to the criminal complaint that ended his career. He pleaded guilty. Mountain View, California, later discovered that federal and state agencies had been querying its cameras through a nationwide search setting Flock switched on without the police department’s knowledge.

Gun owners have particular reasons to pay attention. In Ithaca, New York, the readers went up under a state gun violence program, and residents woke up unable to leave their neighborhoods without being photographed. A camera at the entrance to a shooting range performs a function no legislature ever authorized. It builds a list of people exercising an enumerated right, sortable and searchable, held by a private vendor and available to any agency with credentials. Congress has never passed a firearms registry. This is how you get one anyway.

I’ve spent 30 years in private wealth management, where the government’s ability to reach client records through an administrative subpoena, without judicial approval required, is a routine cost of doing business. The pattern is identical. Collection happens first, the constitutional question gets asked years later, and by then, the infrastructure is paid for and nobody wants to unplug it.

FLOCK OFF: BIG BROTHER’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD MONTH

Localities are unplugging it anyway. Knox County commissioners abruptly canceled a meeting on a proposed 200-camera rollout. Cities across several states have canceled contracts outright after public hearings went badly for the sheriff. That’s federalism working as designed, and it moves faster than litigation.

Congress should finish the job. A warrant requirement isn’t a burden on legitimate policing. It’s the price of a free country, and it was cheap when James Madison wrote it down.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.