In 1995, I worked on the 65th floor of the World Trade Center. A childhood neighbor of mine worked a few floors up. He never came home on Sept. 11, 2001. What that day built in this country wasn’t just two wars abroad. It built a permanent domestic architecture of preventive surveillance and 25 years later, that architecture is why an AI-powered camera on your street corner can log your daily movements into an interconnected, nationwide database that law-enforcement can search without a warrant. Flock maintains that participating agencies control their own data and sharing settings. In practice, that data can be searched through an extensive interagency network — including, in many cases, a nationwide lookup feature that state and federal agencies can query.
The Patriot Act, passed 45 days after the attacks, tore down the legal wall that had kept intelligence and law-enforcement personnel from sharing information. Its Section 215 gave the FBI the authority to collect Americans’ business records simply because they were “relevant” to a terrorism investigation. That same year, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 created a new federal department and, with it, the Homeland Security Grant Program, which still funnels money to state and local police for “terrorism prevention.” That grant program, run through DHS-supported intelligence “fusion centers,” is today one of the primary funding channels state and local agencies use to buy automated license-plate readers. Section 215, notably, did not survive. It expired in March 2020 when Congress failed to renew it, along with two related Patriot Act authorities — the only time before this year Congress let a major post-9/11 surveillance power simply expire (a brief earlier lapse occurred in 2015 before reauthorization).
The centerpiece of Congress’ response to 9/11 is Section 702 of FISA, created by the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which lets the government collect foreigners’ communications abroad without a warrant. Because Americans talk to foreigners, their messages get swept into the same database, and the FBI can search it using American identifiers, a practice known as the backdoor search.
Abuse of Warrantless Surveillance
Here’s what should trouble anyone who thinks judicial review means abuse can’t happen: it has happened, repeatedly, in a system built for exactly that oversight. In 2019, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found 17 significant errors and omissions across four FISA applications targeting Trump campaign associate Carter Page, including one in which FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith altered a document to hide that Page had been a source for another U.S. agency; Clinesmith later pleaded guilty to a federal crime.
And in 2023, declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions revealed the FBI had run more than 278,000 Section 702 queries between 2020 and 2021 that violated the FBI’s own legal standard, including searches on more than 100 Black Lives Matter protesters, 19,000 donors to a single congressional campaign, and 23,000 people connected to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The FISC itself called the pattern “persistent and widespread.”
When Congress reauthorized Section 702 in April 2024, an amendment requiring a warrant before the FBI could search Americans’ data failed in a 212-to-212 vote; progressive Democrats and hardline conservative Republicans supplied most of the yes votes, while centrist Republicans and most of the Democratic leadership opposed it, and a last-second switch from yes to no by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is what actually killed it. The main reauthorization bill then passed.
Every one of these programs had a court reviewing it, a statute governing it, and a reauthorization debate scheduled for it. None of that stopped the abuse. Judicial and congressional oversight caught this only after the fact. They did not prevent it.
The Result is Flock Cameras
That’s the appetite that migrated, through those same DHS grant channels, out of federal counterterrorism and into routine municipal policing, this time with no FISC, no minimization procedures, and no sunset clause at all. The vehicle is the automated license plate reader, and Flock Safety is its largest vendor, with contracts covering more than 6,000 law-enforcement agencies in nearly every state. Flock’s AI-powered cameras log every passing vehicle onto a searchable, nationwide database that police departments query directly, no warrant, no court order, no oversight body standing between the camera and the search.
In Norfolk, Virginia, a lawsuit revealed that 176 cameras had logged one driver’s location 526 times in four months. In California, a class action alleges Flock let out-of-state and federal agencies, including ICE, search plate data through what internal audit logs described as a “side door,” in apparent violation of the state’s sanctuary and license-plate privacy laws. More than 30 cities have canceled their Flock contracts since last year, and the ACLU has filed a Fourth Circuit brief arguing the technology upends the privacy expectations the Fourth Amendment protects.
Give the double-edged sword its due on both edges. An independent academic study published in August 2026, using national FBI crime data across 216 agencies, found vehicle theft fell about 11 percent and arrests for motor vehicle theft rose nearly 16 percent in the year after fixed cameras went live, concentrated in the communities hit hardest. The same study found no statistically detectable improvement in whether stolen vehicles were actually recovered, a more modest finding than the industry’s own marketing claims. The technology helps close cases. It does not follow that it helps in every way its vendor advertises, or that the tradeoff is free. Enough Americans have concluded otherwise that some have taken to physically destroying the cameras, an ugly response but a real gauge of how little public buy-in this system has earned. It was built by default, through thousands of municipal contracts, with none of the sunset clauses, minimization procedures, or court oversight the Patriot Act had to survive.
Defending the Fourth Amendment
The doctrinal question here is whether the Fourth Amendment still applies once your information passes through someone else’s hands, the so-called third-party doctrine. Justice Antonin Scalia narrowed that doctrine’s reach months before 9/11 in Kyllo v. United States, ruling that police use of a thermal-imaging device to detect heat inside a home was a search requiring a warrant, because technology not in ordinary public use that reveals details of a home change the constitutional calculus. In 2018, the court extended that logic to cellphones in Carpenter v. United States, holding that police need a warrant for multi-day cell-site location records. Jonathan Turley called it a rare, meaningful check on the government’s ability to turn ordinary technology into a tracking device. Neither ruling has yet been extended to license plates.
The Constitution does not enforce itself. It only means what a citizenry insists it means when government programs outgrow their oversight.
I think about that every September, on the anniversary of losing a neighbor and former colleagues on that dreadful day. The debt we owe them isn’t just remembering the day. It’s understanding, specifically, what our government and the vendors working for it can do to the rest of us in their name and pushing back when the answer is more than the Constitution allows.
