A Milwaukee police officer used a private company's camera network to search his romantic partner's location 124 times – and nobody stopped him because no warrant was required.
That same network now has 120,000 cameras in over 5,000 police jurisdictions across America.
And Senator Rand Paul just explained why nothing is stopping the officer in your town from doing exactly what Milwaukee's did.
The Camera Network Watching Every Car in America
The company is called Flock Safety.
It processes upward of 20 billion vehicle images every month – not just your license plate, but your car's make, model, color, bumper stickers, and roof racks.
Every time you pass one of those cameras, a permanent record is created with no cop present, no warrant, and no suspicion of anything.
Senator Rand Paul put it plainly on X Thursday morning.
"Flock has 120,000 cameras tracking cars across America, no warrant required. Over 5,000 police agencies have signed on. This isn't crime fighting. This is mass surveillance of every American, and a violation of our 4th Amendment rights," he wrote.
Paul didn't arrive at this fight last week.
https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/2090453806127690150?s=20
He filed the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act in 2013 to stop the NSA from reading Americans' phone records without a warrant.
In 2014, he filed a class-action lawsuit against Barack Obama and the NSA directly.
The year after that he held the Senate floor for ten and a half hours demanding the government stop bulk-collecting American phone records.
"The bulk collection of all Americans' phone records all of the time is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment," Paul said during that filibuster.
Swap "phone records" for "everywhere you drove this week" and it describes Flock Safety perfectly.
What Officers Are Actually Doing With This Data
Milwaukee was not an isolated case.
Court and audit records show at least 50 officers nationwide have been accused or charged with using Flock cameras to track women they knew personally.
The Institute for Justice documented 30 separate cases of officers using the system to stalk romantic interests.
This week alone – Thursday, August 21 – Massachusetts authorities placed two Lynn officers on leave and moved to fire and criminally charge a third after audits flagged misuse of the Flock network across all three cases.
One Marshfield woman entered her plate number into a database called HaveIBeenFlocked and discovered an officer had tracked her movements for seven days across 88 different camera networks.
She had done nothing wrong and had no idea she was being watched.
That's how the system works: officers can log in and query 20 billion vehicle images with no judge, no probable cause, and no notification to the person being tracked – unless someone runs an audit and happens to catch it.
Why Congress Has Done Nothing
Here's what's happening in Washington, DC right now.
Republican Congressman Keith Self introduced the PRIVACY Act in July requiring federal agencies to obtain a warrant before querying ALPR data.
Republican Thomas Massie is working on legislation to strip federal funding from camera systems used to track American citizens.
Republican Tim Burchett introduced a bill to ban federal agencies from purchasing Flock cameras outright.
As of this week, not a single bill in Congress would ban Flock-style cameras.
Not one.
Meanwhile, Flock spent $920,000 lobbying Congress in 2025 and $430,000 more in just the first half of 2026 – $1.35 million purchasing the right outcome while Republicans introduce competing bills that go nowhere and Democrats say nothing at all.
What the Founders Understood That Congress Has Forgotten
The Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment because British colonial officials used "general warrants" – sweeping authority to search anyone, anywhere, for any reason, with no named suspect and no specific place.
That's what Flock Safety is.
https://twitter.com/mattvanswol/status/2075610195892257053?s=20
A general warrant running 24 hours a day, stored in a private database, searchable without probable cause by any officer across 5,000 jurisdictions.
The government doesn't need to break into your house when it knows every road you took to get there.
It doesn't need to read your messages when it knows you drove to a political meeting, a gun shop, a lawyer's office, or a doctor’s office three times last month.
The most significant court challenge – Schmidt v. City of Norfolk – was dismissed by a federal judge in January 2026, who ruled the cameras constitutional.
That case is now before the Fourth Circuit on appeal, with no Supreme Court ruling on the horizon.
Flock Safety is not a crime-fighting tool with a privacy problem on the side.
It's a surveillance infrastructure that occasionally catches criminals – and Congress is busy counting the lobbying checks while the cameras multiply.
Sources:
- Rand Paul, post on X, August 20, 2026.
- Daily Caller News Foundation, "There's Not a Single Bill in Congress to Outlaw Flock-Type Spying," Daily Caller, August 19, 2026.
- Washington Times, "Congress Talks Tough on Flock Cameras, but No Bill Would Ban Them Outright," August 20, 2026.
- Institute for Justice, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk case documents, 2024–2026.
- Tech Times, "Police Used Flock's License Plate Network to Stalk Women in at Least 50 Cases," August 4, 2026.
- Boston Globe, "Flock License Plate Cameras Under Fire as Mass. Police Misconduct Cases Mount," August 21, 2026.
