Surveillance technology, such as that provided by Flock Safety, can serve legitimate public ends. But the laws governing this rapidly evolving technology leave dangerous avenues for abuse. Citizens need meaningful safeguards and checks on both public and private power, particularly when the two converge in law enforcement. Legislatures should preserve the benefits of these tools while deterring abuse, providing relief when deterrence fails, and keeping government and its corporate partners accountable.

Those safeguards should begin with a distinction between identifying a wanted vehicle in real time and reconstructing a person's movements over days or weeks. Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) can do both, but the latter represents a substantially different power. Real-time comparisons against specific lists of stolen or wanted vehicles should remain available. Searches of extended travel histories should require a warrant.

The law must also define what officers may search for and why. Statutes should clearly govern the scope and permissible uses of surveillance technologies, including ALPR searches. Safeguards should not rely solely on vendor capabilities or individual agency policies. Each search should have a documented, authorized purpose tied to legitimate law-enforcement purpose or an open investigation. Legislators should weigh narrowly drawn emergency exceptions against the risk of abuse.

Even an authorized search can produce a faulty result. ALPR matches can result from misread plates, stale records, and database errors. An automated hit should be treated as an investigative lead, never as sufficient justification on its own to stop, search, or arrest. Independent confirmation would not substantially burden normal policing practices.

The longer agencies retain these records, the greater the power they accumulate. Both surveillance power and the potential for abuse grow with each additional data point about an individual's or vehicle's movements. Records that do not match a list of wanted vehicles or serve another authorized law-enforcement purpose should therefore be automatically deleted after a short period. Legislatures should set that limit. New Hampshire has taken a strong stance, requiring non-hit records to be deleted and made unrecoverable within three minutes.

Legislative limits should also govern what these systems can identify. Systems approved to identify vehicles should not become tools for identifying people through a software update or product expansion. If legislators wish to permit facial recognition, passenger identification, gait recognition, or other biometric identification in public, they should do so through separate legislation. Such additions to ALPR systems should remain presumptively prohibited without public debate and express legislative authorization.

The same principle should govern the reach of these networks. Thousands of local ALPR deployments can become a de facto national movement database without legislative authorization if every participating organization can simply opt to share its data. Criminals may move across jurisdictions, so information sharing should remain possible. But authorization should cover individual results of interest, rather than wholesale sharing of entire databases.

Enforcing these limits requires a reliable record of how the systems are used. Every ALPR system action should leave a permanent, cryptographically secured, tamper-evident log identifying who performed it, what they did, when and why they did it, and where the information went. The system should be designed so that users cannot plausibly deny their recorded actions. While citizen-tracking data should have the shortest reasonable lifetime, evidence of government use should remain indelible.

Those records must also face independent scrutiny. Public trust depends on transparency, integrity, and independent verification. Agencies using ALPR or other surveillance systems, and the vendors that provide them, should be subject to routine audits by an independent state auditor. Public reports should disclose how agencies use the technology, any violations or access by outside agencies, compliance with retention requirements, and disciplinary findings. Auditors should release as much information as possible without compromising active investigations.

Oversight must carry consequences. A government employee who knowingly misuses a surveillance system, including an ALPR system, should face a felony conviction with a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, permanent disqualification from law enforcement or any other position of public trust, and forfeiture of public pension benefits to the fullest extent the law permits. The severity of these penalties should deter anyone tempted to willfully misuse a surveillance system. Negligence and accidental noncompliance should carry penalties proportionate to the conduct, while remaining distinct from knowing abuse.

Punishing the offender, however, does not by itself provide relief to the person harmed. Unlawful tracking can cause serious privacy injuries without producing an easily calculable financial loss. Ordinary damages may therefore prove inadequate as an enforcement mechanism. Anyone who has been unlawfully tracked should have a private right of action to pursue statutory damages, even without a provable financial loss. Affected citizens should also be able to pursue punitive damages for knowing violations, recover attorney's fees, and obtain injunctive relief to prevent continuing abuse.

These remedies should not disappear in the fine print of a government contract. Neither government agencies nor surveillance providers should be able to negotiate away protections enacted for citizens. Contracts should not limit, waive, indemnify against, or otherwise defeat liabilities or remedies created by law. Ordinary contractual allocation of commercial risk should remain untouched, but the parties exercising surveillance power should not be able to transfer or neutralize their liability for abusing it.

Accountability should also extend to the people directing these companies. Executives and board members who knowingly authorize or conceal unlawful surveillance practices or product defects that could enable those practices should not remain insulated from personal liability. Surveillance intrudes on citizens who cannot insulate themselves from it. Corporate structures should offer no shield from personal responsibility to executives and board members culpable for that intrusion.

For the companies themselves, serious or repeated violations should bring escalating consequences. Substantial penalties and the loss of public contracts should ultimately give way to exclusion from the market when conduct is egregious or lesser measures fail. Any vendor that repeatedly proves unable or unwilling to exercise its extraordinary surveillance power lawfully should cease to be trusted with it.

I write from Texas, where the Occupations Code already authorizes the denial, suspension, revocation, or nonrenewal of private security licenses for violations of Chapter 1702 or rules adopted under it. In July, 2024, the Texas Department of Public Safety reported that its investigation had determined Flock Safety was operating in Texas without a license. According to the department, a cease-and-desist order halted Flock's operations until licensing was completed and Flock became compliant.

Licensing authority should become a means of enforcing the protections described here. Compliance should be a condition of maintaining a surveillance company’s license, and serious and repeated violations should result in suspension, revocation, or exclusion from regulated private surveillance activity in the state. Losing a license should close both the private market and access to public contracts. State law should forbid any Texas governmental entity or political subdivision from contracting for, receiving, accessing, querying, maintaining, hosting, or otherwise using ALPR or other surveillance services from a provider without an active Texas license. The Texas Code should be amended to reflect this requirement.

Texas provides a concrete example, but these protections should apply across the country. Every state should require a license to operate a surveillance business or provide surveillance technology, and make continued licensure depend on compliance with meaningful safeguards.

None of these prescriptions requires rejecting useful surveillance technology. Legislatures ought to define limits, establish consequences for abuse, and preserve remedies when those measures may fail. We should retain the public benefits these technologies can provide while ensuring that neither the government nor its private partners exercise surveillance power without meaningful restraint.