Hannah Foust’s entry into a growing debate over police surveillance began with a photo in a group chat. A friend had spotted an oblong camera mounted high on a street lamp one May evening over a residential intersection in Carrollton. Not everyone in the chat knew what it was, but within weeks, members of the group were organizing against it.
They learned that similar AI-assisted Flock cameras were appearing along roads across the country, logging billions of vehicle locations each month. Each capture could include a plate, color, make and distinguishing features — down to bike racks and dents — feeding a vast searchable network police use to identify suspects and locate missing people and vehicles.
To them, it felt like an invasion of privacy that didn’t make sense: an almost unfathomable record of ordinary drivers’ movements. They wondered how a tool with such reach had quietly spread so widely.
“It’s more than what’s needed,” Foust, a 41-year-old project manager, said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “It’s like using a jackhammer to hang a picture frame.”
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