Latest / Commentary - TJ Meadows / Flock or the Fourth Amendment? Huntington Chose Poorly

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Flock or the Fourth Amendment? Huntington Chose Poorly · Commentary - TJ Meadows

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  Speaker 1: Huntington City Council voted early Tuesday morning to approve a
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  Speaker 1: five year, roughly two point one million dollar contract with
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  Speaker 1: Flock Safety for a package of public safety technology that
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  Speaker 1: includes license plate readers, live cameras, drones, and audio detection.
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  Speaker 1: Flock cameras are raising questions across America, from city halls
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  Speaker 1: to federal courtrooms. The fundamental issue is simple Flock or
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  Speaker 1: the Fourth Amendment. When those two come into conflict, the
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  Speaker 1: Constitution must win. The Fourth Amendment guarantees quote the right
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  Speaker 1: of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
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  Speaker 1: and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. It's one of
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  Speaker 1: the bedrocks of American liberty. Now. To be clear, no
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  Speaker 1: one has a constitutional right to hide a license plate
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  Speaker 1: while driving on a public road. Police officers can see it,
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  Speaker 1: other drivers can see it. Anyone's stands ending on a
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  Speaker 1: sidewalk can photograph it. The question isn't whether a single
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  Speaker 1: observation is constitutional. The question is what happens when government
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  Speaker 1: collects millions of those observations, stores them in a searchable database,
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  Speaker 1: and gains the ability to reconstruct where people have traveled,
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  Speaker 1: when they traveled, and potentially whom they visited. The Supreme
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  Speaker 1: Court recently reinforced that technology changes the constitutional analysis. In
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  Speaker 1: Chatry versus United States, the Court held that obtaining stored
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  Speaker 1: cell phone location history was a Fourth Amendment search. It
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  Speaker 1: did not decide the legality of flock cameras, but it
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  Speaker 1: recognized that government's ability to collect, retain, and analyze large
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  Speaker 1: amounts of personal location information matters. That very issue is
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  Speaker 1: now before the Fourth Circuit in a challenge to Norfolk,
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  Speaker 1: Virginia's block camera system. None of this is to deny
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  Speaker 1: these systems can help solve crimes, recover stolen vehicles, or
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  Speaker 1: find missing people. They can, and those are worthy goals.
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  Speaker 1: But good intentions do not suspend constitutional limits. The Fourth
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  Speaker 1: Amendment exists to restrain government power even when government believes
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  Speaker 1: its actions are reasonable and necessary. In fact, that's precisely
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  Speaker 1: when constitutional guardrails matter most. The City of Huntington should
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  Speaker 1: revisit this decision before the system is deployed. The legal
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  Speaker 1: questions remain unsettled, the constitutional concerns are real, and when
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  Speaker 1: government must choose between expanding surveillance and preserving individual liberty,
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  Speaker 1: the Fourth Amendment should never be treated as an inconvenience
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  Speaker 1: standing in the way