As many of you know, I write political thrillers, and in 2023 I published Rogue Justice, a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of the FISA Court, a real secret federal court that can surveil Americans without a public hearing, where only a handful of politicians actually have oversight. I write fiction based on fact, and I like to worry about the future, which is why I was so disturbed earlier this month when the Savannah Police Department fired six people, not for a bad shooting or excessive force, but for something disturbingly pedestrian: they typed names into a search bar, using the city’s license plate camera system to look up family members and personal acquaintances. The problem is Savannah is not an outlier, and this is not an episode of Law & Order: SVU. Roughly 50 officers around the country have now been fired, charged, or placed under investigation for doing the exact same thing.
What’s worse is what this system does when it’s working exactly as designed. In Johnson County, Texas, a sheriff’s deputy ran a search across nearly 84,000 cameras, supposedly performing a welfare check on a missing woman. But the audit log recorded what he actually typed: “had an abortion, search for female.” Records obtained by 404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation show the file was a death investigation into a non-viable fetus. A week later, the woman walked into that sheriff’s office to report that her partner had choked her and held a gun to her head. But instead of protecting a battered woman, officers interviewed her about the abortion and read her text messages. These officers of the law had no warrant. They hadn’t gotten permission from a single judge. Instead, they weaponized 84,000 cameras to investigate one woman’s medical decision. And the only reason any of us know is that somebody pulled the audit log.
The company behind most of this is Flock Safety, founded right here in Atlanta, with more than 120,000 cameras deployed across 49 states and over 20 billion plate scans a month. I spent 11 years in the Georgia General Assembly, and during my tenure I personally voted for traffic cameras in school zones. I believe surveillance technology can serve a legitimate public purpose. But what’s been built here is not a camera, it’s a searchable national record of where ordinary people go, assembled by a private company, queried by thousands of police departments, and governed almost entirely by contracts. That’s internal policy, not rule of law.
And it’s not just plates. In June, NPR reported on a leaked DHS plan to hand ICE’s facial recognition app, Mobile Fortify, to roughly 1,300 local police departments deputized under ICE’s Task Force Model, checking faces against more than 250 million images and keeping every photo for 15 years, regardless of status or outcome. First they get your plate, then they get your face.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that pulling someone’s location history from Google requires a warrant, a real limit, but it doesn’t touch license plate readers, tower dumps, or data simply bought from a broker. Courts move one technology at a time. Mass surveillance moves everywhere at once. Even Flock’s newly announced reforms, shorter retention, required case codes, and audit tools, are voluntary, which means a company can undo them just as quietly during the next contract renewal. A safeguard you can’t enforce isn’t protection, it’s customer service.
Look, I’m a Democrat, but Flock, Palantir, and others are eroding our freedoms, and that’s a nonpartisan issue. That’s why I’m laying out five demands: require a judicial warrant based on probable cause for location searches, cap data retention at days instead of years and publish audit logs, prohibit searches tied to immigration enforcement, reproductive healthcare, or protest activity, ban sharing with outside agencies absent a warrant, and attach real penalties for misuse. None of this is radical. It’s what should have been written before we put cameras on American telephone poles. When lawmakers go back into session, somebody is going to write the rules for this. The companies already have lobbyists in the room, your neighbors do not. So we have to be voting in state legislative races all across the country in November, and then we’ve got to show up in those chambers in January, because the midterms are about more than congressional control. They are a referendum on whether we, the people, still have any actual say over privacy and our lives.
Joining our conversation about these laws, their limits, and what we’re facing in the fight for freedom is Katie Phang, lawyer, political commentator, former MSNBC anchor, and host of the Sidebar podcast.
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