So The Atlantic has decided that a private company putting cameras on every light pole in America to track where you drive, when you drive, and how often you visit your church is actually a good thing. Bless their hearts.
The piece, by Charles Fain Lehman, argues that Flock Safety’s automatic license-plate readers, now spread across more than 5,000 jurisdictions with an estimated 100,000-plus cameras, can make the criminal-justice system “fairer and less punitive, if we let them.” If we let them. As if the only thing standing between us and utopia is our stubborn refusal to hand over our daily movements to a database managed by a company that won’t even disclose how many cameras it operates.
Here is what I can see with my own eyes. The ACLU, no friend of mine on most days, has documented case after case of these cameras being abused. Kansas police used Flock data to pursue a man whose crime was writing a critical op-ed about their department. A Colorado officer wrongfully accused a woman of theft based on a Flock hit and then refused to look at evidence proving she was innocent. A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because the system wrongly flagged their car as stolen.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm, counted 30 cases of officers using Flock cameras to stalk romantic interests. Thirty. These are the people The Atlantic wants us to trust with a permanent record of every road we have ever driven down.
And then there is ICE, which has been pulling Flock data through local police departments to track people without warrants. The same federal agency the left normally treats as the bogeyman is now their preferred crime-fighting partner. You would think that would give The Atlantic a moment of pause.