2026 is turning out to be a pretty strange year politically.
If you’d asked me last year to guess what issues might be concerning the body politic in a midterm year, I might have answered “inflation, jobs growth, social justice madness, housing costs, and the Iran war.” Not on my bingo card: Women cheering on a mother who confessed to killing her three children and the public uniting against Flock cameras, yet here we are.
Texans overwhelmingly oppose Flock cameras and remain wary of data center construction, according to a new poll that also found an essentially tied U.S. Senate race.
Conducted August 24-26 by Overton Insights/Texas Public Policy Foundation, the poll of 1,167 likely voters shows overwhelming concern about license plate reader cameras, especially those offered by Flock Safety.
Opposition to Flock cameras totaled more than 63 percent, with 51 percent strongly opposing the technology. Only 28 percent of Texans expressed support.
There has been increasing public opposition to the technology over the past few months. Many Texans are raising concerns about Fourth Amendment violations and data privacy because Flock cameras allow law enforcement and private entities to track and retain the movements of drivers not suspected of crimes without a warrant.
David Dunmoyer of the Texas Public Policy Foundation has warned that “Texans do not own their own personal information. Texas has never granted its citizens title to their own data.” Texas lawmakers are expected to evaluate potential safeguards during the upcoming legislative session in January.
Louis Rossmann was ahead of the curve for this one.
I initially didn’t feel strongly about Flock cameras one way or another, since public roads are not a place anyone should have “a reasonable expectation of privacy.” However, the fact that Flock and other AI camera companies have employed underhanded methods to get taxpayer approval for funding them (given the mysterious fervor several public officials have shown toward buying and installing them despite voter resistance, I can only assume that bribery is involved) has changed my mind. Plus Flock’s data sharing and retention policies do bring up Fourth Amendment concerns, and do seem like a sneaky attempt to set up a surveillance system over American citizens, using private companies to carry out activities that would be unconstitutional for the federal government to implement directly.
Not to mention the persistent problem of AI generating false positives.
It seems a lot of people are starting to agree. Texas Governor Greg Abbott suspended state funding of Flock.
Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered state agencies to pause funding for Flock cameras.
The pause, reportedly issued last Thursday, comes after a Texas agency allegedly spent an estimated $30 million on grants used for the technology.
“To the extent that cities get any funding for those cameras, most of it comes from the federal government,” said Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris on Friday. “To the extent any funding comes from Texas agencies, those agencies are clarifying that those funds cannot be used for Flock cameras.”
Flock contracts have been cancelled or rejected across the nation amid concerns surrounding Fourth Amendment violations, with several Texas localities joining the movement.
Snip.
Flock’s database is free for law enforcement officers to access anytime without a warrant, raising concerns over the potential violations of citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights.
Numerous Texas towns and cities have canceled their Flock contracts.
Wylie City Council unanimously voted to not renew its contract with Flock Safety cameras this week.
The 7-0 vote places the city of Wylie in a small group of local governments in Texas opting out of a contract with the automated license plate reader (ALPR) company.
Snip.
Following Pflugerville City Council’s unanimous decision to deactivate the city’s Flock cameras this week, Pflugerville ISD followed suit, notifying parents Wednesday morning of the decision to suspend use of the cameras on district property.
“We understand this technology has raised questions and concerns within our community, and we have listened,” said a Pflugerville ISD spokesperson.
Hood County recently decommissioned its three Flock cameras following significant backlash to concerns of mass surveillance and potential Fourth Amendment violations.
DeFlock Wylie praised the council’s decision, calling it “exactly what residents asked for.” The site quoted Wylie Mayor Matthew Porter as saying, “The protections are just not there and are not required in the terms of the existing contract.”
“This started in January 2026 with one resident reading a contract, and grew into a nonpartisan campaign of neighbors,” wrote DeFlock Wylie.
“By the night of the vote, more than 700 residents had signed the petition, people packed the chamber, and the case was made in Flock’s own words. No lawyers. No budget. No outside money. Just Wylie residents who decided their privacy was worth showing up for.”
They join Burnet County
And it’s not just in Texas, as Florida is fed up with Flock as well.
The Florida Department of Transportation on Monday revoked all existing permits for automated license plate readers installed by local law enforcement in state highway rights-of-way and said it will stop approving any new installations, citing an “exponential increase” in deployments, reports of misuse, data privacy concerns and “surveillance schemes.”
The Engineering and Operations Memorandum, signed by Will Watts, P.E., FDOT’s chief operating officer and assistant secretary, directs local agencies to remove the devices within 30 days. If they do not, the department said it will take them down. FDOT reserved the right to immediately remove any unit that poses a safety hazard.
As far as I can tell, Republicans are taking the lead in opposing Flock cameras, but this is the rare issue that Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on.
The cameras (at least the ones taxpayer-funded) should come down.
Tags: AI, Amanda Lindberg, Borepatch, Budget, Burnet County, data centers, David Dunmoyer, Flock AI cameras, Florida, Fourth Amendment, Greg Abbott, Hood County, Louis Rossmann, Pflugerville, Pflugerville City Council, Pflugerville ISD, polls, surveillance, Texas, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texas Scorecard, Will Watts, Wylie
Okay, this goes to a weird case that could be ultra 7D chess by the CCP, or just “the enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, but in this case we agree for some reason” but see white paper by some think tank (link from an article on Fox News) at: https://www.caseforconsumers.org/case-whitepaperthe-compute-war-at-home/
Basically these folks say the CCP-linked Singham set of funding channels are tied to funding both the far left opposition to AI data centers and the campaign against Flock cameras.
Could just be commies don’t like being automagically surveilled by AI either, but worth a consideration in teh vastness of open source intelligence.
It’s not just about the cameras, it’s about everything else that coming to to be paired with them. When they try to convince everyone they’re not trying to build a panopticon they’re lying, as usual. They can’t institute a Chinese-style social credit system outright so they’re using the corpocracy and doing it in phases as an end run around the constitution. The usefulness of this omnipresent surveillance for actual crime is secondary to its eventual usefulness to nudge compliance from the public – DeSantis is absolutely right drawing a comparison to what things would’ve been like during covid had these been everywhere.
We can’t even get the feds to drop the hammer on voter fraud, I trust their statements about privacy safeguards just as much as I trust their lies about the actual rate of inflation.
The Flock camera dust-up parallels earlier experience with red-light cameras and photo speed radar (or really any routine speed enforcement): they create perverse incentives for revenue-collecting offenses that actually undermine public safety. The former brought on shorter yellow light dwell time. The latter diverts traffic from high-speed high-spec roads to shorter routes over secondary roads. (80 mph on the interstate is safer than 55 on a secondary road, but rational response to speed enforcement is to take the shorter route.)
Even drunk driving enforcement lacks any long-term correlation to traffic safety. Fatalities were trending down before enforcement tightened, and stopped declining even after lowering BAC limits and federalizing drinking age, etc. Very little traffic law enforcement stands up to even a modicum of statistical scrutiny. Even the theory falls apart against a Bayes theorem analysis with anything close to plausible numbers.
Traffic calming measures that slow down urban traffic get pedestrians killed. Seat belts save lives, but seat belt laws don’t accomplish anything. Roll-over wrecks are rare, and usually too violent to be survivable even if the car is required to not cave in, but fat A-pillars block visibility and aggravate the incidence of more common wrecks, for a net worsening of fatality rates. And on and on and on.
We have reached the point where every proposal for traffic law enforcement is presumptively counterproductive.
I have to wonder if the eagerness for politicians to approve this stuff has a simpler explanation.
Crime is increasing.
They can approve more police patrols. Which is expensive, takes a long time to ramp up, and involves things like pension obligations.
Or they can bring in more cameras (there’s already lots – how many crimes are caught on cellphone already?), which are advertised as increasing safety.
The problem is that you can have all the cameras in the world, but if you don’t prosecute and imprison criminals you aren’t fixing the problem.
Gah, no edit.
Politicians, particularly the technocrat type, are biased towards technological methods to fix problems. As opposed to “old” measures, they want “new” ones.
Particularly with associated topical buzzwords. Lately it’s “AI”, a few years ago there was either “blockchain” or “cloud”, earlier there was “three-tier”, before that “client-server”. Etc.
Think of the Kompromat material that could be gathered by these cameras and how it could be used to blackmail elected officials and you discover one reason for their uneasiness with its wide-speead use.
The Godley, Texas prostitution ring, run by elected officials, could hardly have been an easy matter if their clients rode in on bicycles to avoid having their license plates recorded.
Small wonder that the interests of elected officials and the body politic coincide on this issue.
The reason we have license plates is so that they can be read. Duh. Police routinely track the movenents of suspects by piecing together footage from cameras at intersections, in gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, ATMs, toll plazas, etc. This new technology saves a lot of legwork. True, you say, but this new system may be abused. The concern is not about the system itself, but about the possible abuse thereof in violating our rights. If you’re concerned about the police violating your rights, remember that they can do a lot worse than tracking your license plate. Hell, they have guns. They can shoot you. So, let me get this straight. We trust the cops with guns, but not with cameras. And here are a couple of possible benefits to consider: First, it will be way easier for the cops to get your stolen car back to you. Second, the system may clear you if you’re wrongly charged. If you’re mistakenly identified as a suspect in Philadelphia, and the system has tracked you to Pittsburgh, you’re cleared.
My problem with the Flock system is not the cameras themselves. After all there have been CCTV systems for decades and a good portion of the population – including me – have cameras on their houses. My problem with Flock is how they tie them together with computers and AI to create a continuous monitoring system. And you have to trust the police and politicians and who knows who else when they cross their heart and swearsies that they won’t misuse them. At least with CCTV or the camera above my garage door the authorities have to come and make some pretense that a crime has been committed before accessing them. And if I don’t want a camera on my house, or want a flip phone instead of a smart phone, I can make that choice. Not so with Flock. Unless I want to go vigilante and saw them down. That’s the crucial difference to me.
“So, let me get this straight. We trust the cops with guns, but not with cameras.”
The police may only shoot someone under rare circumstances and when they do, each and every incident is subject to review. No such standard exists for license plate monitoring.
We trust cops with guns but we don’t give them carte blanche to employ violence. Police surveillance should be governed by 4th Amendment considerations but I am insufficiently familiar with case law to suggest a remedy here.