Category: Cops

On any given Saturday in Alabama, a man can leave his driveway, gas up, run by the gun shop for ammo, shoot all morning at the range, and be home for lunch. He hasn’t broken any law or bothered a soul. And in more of our towns than you’d guess, a camera on a pole photographed his truck at every stop and filed it in a searchable database owned by a private company in Atlanta.

The company is Flock Safety, and it runs the largest mass surveillance network in American history, with more than 100,000 cameras by its own count. But don’t be confused; these aren’t run-of-the-mill red light cameras. Every Flock camera photographs every vehicle that passes by, around the clock, whether anyone suspects a crime or not.

And the record contains far more than your tag number. Each image becomes a searchable record containing the plate, time, location, direction of travel, make, color, body type, and other identifying features. Flock calls this part of their system the “Vehicle Fingerprint,” and their own materials advertise the ability to conduct searches using unique vehicle details, including bumper stickers and decals. That matters in Alabama. A Gadsden flag, Glock sticker, BamaCarry decal, or other Second Amendment message on the back of a truck is not just something another driver sees at a red light. It’s now a searchable data point tied to that vehicle, the owner, and your movement.

These cameras came into Alabama the way kudzu did: quietly, then… boom, everywhere.

Birmingham’s city council approved a $9.7 million contract last July for more cameras citywide. Huntsville has run more than a hundred since 2019 and shares into a national pool; Madison, Decatur, Moody, Springville, and retail parking lots have them too. The Alabama Gazette reported that Alabama Power was marketing Flock systems to cities, bundled with utility poles and streetlights, some of which I have noticed just outside my neighborhood.

But here is the craziest part: most of it arrived by consent agenda and contract renewal. The Legislature never voted on a statewide surveillance network. Yet ALEA’s administrative rules let plate reader data sit for five years, the longest of any state, per a 2026 legislative survey, and require every read to feed a statewide registry once ALEA stands it up.

That should stop every gun owner in their tracks. Alabama law, through Act 2024-232, prohibits the government from keeping a list or registry of privately owned firearms or their owners. Gun owners fought hard to secure that protection. Yet today, Flock has effectively created a searchable, five-year archive showing which vehicles with Second Amendment decals park at gun stores on Fridays, attend gun shows, or regularly visit shooting ranges. It may be built from “license plate photos” instead of firearm records, but for all practical purposes, it’s a hard registry of gun owners.

Nobody in any police department has to sit down and build that list, because Flock’s built-in artificial intelligence builds it for them. The software reads every photo, determines what your truck is, tags every sticker and decal, and logs the time and place, 20 billion scans a month, according to the company’s own marketing. Its analytics even flag vehicles that keep showing up together as likely associates. By the time an officer pulls up a chair, the sorting is already done. All anybody with a login has to do is check.

As of today, there are a lot of logins. Roughly 5,000 law enforcement agencies use Flock, and most share their feeds into a national pool. A single lookup can sweep nearly every camera in America at once. No warrant. No judge. Just a few words in a reason box and the Enter key.

This isn’t hypothetical, and we’re not guessing about how this gets used. For example, just last year, a Texas deputy went on the hunt for a woman who had an abortion. One search, roughly 83,000 cameras, 6,809 networks, some as far away as Washington State. The sheriff called it a missing person case until a sworn affidavit surfaced. Whatever you make of that issue, look at the trail: one officer, one computer, enforcing his own state’s law inside somebody else’s. Now hand that computer to an Illinois task force with a magazine ban or a so-called “assault weapons” ban to enforce, and the same play runs against an Alabamian who drove north with a truck bed full of legally owned property.

If you think the feds would never point this at gun owners, they tried it before with far weaker tools. The Wall Street Journal reported that Barack Obama’s Justice Department drew up plans in 2010 to run plate readers at Southern California gun shows – all using far less superior technology than what we have now. An ACLU records request from the same era turned up a DEA email describing joint work with ATF on the same idea. The DEA said nothing ever came of it. Sixteen years later, the network those agents could only sketch is real, nationwide, and off-the-shelf. And it reads now far more than just a one-time ping at a local intersection.

The misuse has already come home. In the last few weeks, Moody’s police department fired a sergeant for using Flock to track a woman he was interested in, and a Springville officer resigned over using it to follow a family member. Both cases landed at ALEA in the same news cycle. The safeguards everybody promised were in place the whole time.

Courts are starting to catch up. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that pulling someone’s historical cell phone location records is a search requiring a warrant. This June, in Chatrie v. United States, it said the same about location history held in a tech company’s database, even over a limited period. A lawsuit over Norfolk, Virginia’s cameras, now before the Fourth Circuit, will test whether that logic reaches plate readers. No court has struck these networks down yet, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the political winds have shifted, and Alabama should seize the opportunity while the wind is at our backs.

Whenever this issue comes up, somebody inevitably says, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Tell that to the Arkansas couple who were ordered out of their car at gunpoint this February, with their six-week-old baby in the back seat, because a license plate reader misread a single digit. The Institute for Justice has documented numerous mistaken traffic stops caused by fixed plate readers since 2018, and in nearly two-thirds of those cases, officers drew or pointed their firearms at the mistaken culprits. Now imagine a law-abiding Alabama concealed carrier caught in the same AI-generated felony stop. That’s how innocent people get killed.

The older constitutional answer holds, too. General warrants would have solved plenty of crimes, and the founders banned them anyway. Rights were never meant to run on the honor system of 5,000 agencies’ worth of password holders.

This worry isn’t fringe, and it isn’t only ours. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have raised the same alarm from the left; dozens of communities, red and blue, have canceled Flock contracts, and Congressman Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, filed a bill in July to keep federal agencies off these networks. When a radical leftist organization like the ACLU and a hard-nosed conservative like Tim Burchett make the same argument, it deserves all of the public’s attention.

Here is the ask. Show up at your city council and county commission meetings and ask, on the record, how many cameras your town runs, who can search the data, and how long it’s kept. Then call and email your state legislators and tell them the fix is not a tweak or a task force; it is a ban: a state law taking a hacksaw to these cameras, preempting them in every city and county. And until Montgomery acts, press your own county and town to drop the contract and take the cameras down now.

BamaCarry and the National Association for Gun Rights intend to fight this tooth and nail, from council chambers to the State House floor, and we will keep track of who stood where. We’d love to have you fighting alongside us.

Alabama has already decided that the government doesn’t get a list of its gun owners. It’s time Montgomery made it stick.

Taylor D. Rhodes is Executive Vice President of BamaCarry and Executive Director of the National Association for Gun Rights. A Southern Miss and Liberty University graduate, he has spent nearly a decade in the fight for gun rights. He and his family live in Hoover, Ala., and are members of Hunter Street Baptist Church.