Today, in the morning update, anti-Flock outrage has become bipartisan, but for entirely different reasons. People on the right want privacy and protections from the capricious surveillance state, while people on the left…don’t want the Feds, or local police, seeing or finding their criminals, foreign or domestic.
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EP 262 links:
- https://dailycaller.com/2026/09/12/states-republicans-democrats-flock-cameras-alpr-pennsylvania-california/
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Edited Transcript:
Welcome to your Wednesday, September 15th, 2026 morning update.
Flock cameras, automatic or automated license plate readers in particular, and a handful of cases of abuse have the political right reminding everyone of something we’d been telling them for a very long time.
A mass surveillance net is exactly what the progressive left wants and needs, and no matter who puts it in place, somebody’s going to abuse it. Well, apparently this has gotten a lot of attention.
Quote: Several state and federal officials are calling to restrict automated license plate readers, artificial intelligence-powered cameras that scan the plates of passing cars. Pushback to this technology, specifically Flock safety cameras, has brought together Republicans and Democrats who say these tools amount to warrantless mass surveillance, while law enforcement warns that restricting them would hinder their ability to solve crimes.
Republicans, libertarians, everyone from the center right has long had concerns about cameras and the surveillance state. We make jokes about the UK and about China. Or about how we have an army of people with smartphones in their pockets. Effectively wielding Big Brother’s cameras for them.
And that we have willingly embraced a mass surveillance state because we can watch cat videos or, I don’t know, there are all sorts of apps on those things, right? Just waiting to be tapped by anybody with the skills, with or without a warrant.
So we kind of chose that. But you have to have guardrails, otherwise you end up with social credit systems. Digital banking and currency have lots of tripwires, all of which we should avoid. And of course the open embrace of the tracking device. [Related: MACDONALD: Massholes Embrace the De-Flocking Movement]
But it wasn’t the political right that got the recent mass hysteria ball rolling on the matter of Flock cameras and license plate readers.
While the hysteria appears to be bipartisan, efforts to stop, remove, prevent, stall, delay, and disconnect. That’s all from the radical left.
The very people whose political agenda not only demands but needs mass surveillance are so outraged that ICE can use it with local law enforcement to locate or identify their beloved criminal aliens and other criminals? Well, that just has to stop. [Related: Morning Update: “What the Flock!”]
How dare you use our mass surveillance system to remove our warm body census placeholders? It’s an outrage.
And it turns out you can use these things to catch actual criminals and not just catch them, but show the world who they are and what they’ve done.
And this is incredibly inconvenient.
Black dudes cutting white girls’ throats on public transit or starting them on fire. The left is livid. How dare you let people see that this wasn’t a white perpetrator? Or that you might be able to figure out that one of our liberal DAs or judges set this guy free for the 15,000th time, and he just escalated and killed this poor white girl who also happened to be a legal immigrant. It’s a bad look. The answer: remove the cameras.
Quote: The growing opposition from local city councils to Congress and state legislatures is the direct result of communities across the country standing up against mass surveillance, said somebody whose name I can’t pronounce, Associate Director of State Affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Again, no, it’s not. Republicans and conservatives have been bitching about surveillance and cameras for years. It wasn’t until Democrats realized that they allowed law enforcement to enforce the law.
That they got all uppity about it. If we can see the crooks and criminal aliens they’ve set loose in our neighborhoods, well, we might sweep them up and enforce the law.
And let’s be clear, it’s fine with me.
If Democrats want to pretend this is about privacy and I get more privacy as a result, thumbs up to that.
But it has nothing to do with privacy. Progressives abhor privacy, unless you’re talking about, say, a citizen journalist identifying trillions of dollars worth of fraud under the very noses of blue state governors and their massive statewide regulatory agencies also wasting taxpayer dollars.
And hey, we’ve still got spy devices in our pockets: cameras, microphones. Pro tip. Those little anti-static bag Faraday cages. Those are really inexpensive.
That’s it for today. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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