Over the past several weeks, there have been multiple reports of police officers using Flock cameras to track ex-romantic partners, and of innocent people being caught up in a digital dragnet. If this sounds like a “Gone Girl”-inspired thriller or something ripped from the plot of “1984,” you’d be right. Except it’s real life, not a novel or a movie.

Propelled by a wave of outrage over these recent reports, the ACLU’s tracking suggests that more than 35 Massachusetts cities and towns — and more than 200 communities across the country — have cut ties with Flock Safety, a company that sells automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and mass surveillance hardware and software to law enforcement agencies.

But Flock is just one of many ALPR vendors. And more broadly, invasive AI-powered surveillance technologies are fundamentally changing the nature of modern policing, with serious implications for our privacy and civil liberties.

Flock and other companies are building an omnipresent digital dragnet without democratic consent, enabling law enforcement to track people across the country with the click of a mouse. This is often happening with  little transparency or accountability, and in most cases, without any independent oversight from a judge — like requiring a warrant.

Traffic flows past an Axon brand automatic license plate reader (ALPR) camera in the median of 16th Street near the border of Maryland and the District of Columbia on August 19, 2026 in Silver Spring, Maryland. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The AI-powered tools used in Massachusetts and elsewhere include ALPRs, biometric tracking technology like facial recognition, social media monitoring tools and video analytics software that enable police to track one person or object across thousands of linked surveillance cameras. Information from all of these systems and other sources can feed into real-time crime centers that aggregate, centralize and categorize surveillance data from many different sources.

Despite the widespread proliferation of these tools, most of them are entirely unregulated. Local police departments often decide how and when to use them, against whom and in what kinds of situations. Their use is almost entirely secret — unknown by residents and even elected officials.  And there is little, if any, public debate before these technologies are deployed, let alone checks and balances to protect against misuse and abuse.

As police gain access to an unprecedented amount of information, so too do the private, for-profit companies that market and sell these technologies. Through their surveillance tools, they collect all sorts of sensitive information about each of us, from travel patterns to biometrics, even when we are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Typically, these companies — and not the police departments they contract with — control that data. They store, categorize, and analyze vast amounts of personal information, and even decide whether it is shared with other agencies, including federal authorities like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Boston Police Department, which briefly piloted Flock ALPRs before realizing the company was improperly sharing the department’s data with external agencies, is now giving Axon’s and Motorola Solutions’ ALPRs a try, according to records obtained by the Boston Globe. But this raises many of the same concerns as Flock’s network of vehicle tracking cameras.

The Chicopee Police Department, which serves a mid-sized community of 55,000 in Mass., has adopted a wide range of products from Axon’s AI-powered technology suite. It includes ALPRs, other surveillance cameras, software that uses AI to generate police reports, and, most concerningly, Axon FUSUS, a real-time crime center — a law enforcement dashboard and database — that combines data from all of these sources (and potentially others) and makes them searchable to any police officer with access.

The centralization of surveillance data on a platform like FUSUS leaves the door wide open for potential abuse. With the help of FUSUS, an officer could surveil a person, not just as they drive around town, but after they get out of the car, and follow them through a network of surveillance cameras, tracing their movements with even greater precision.

Motorola Solutions’ Digital Recognition Network, meanwhile, sells vehicle location data collected by privately-owned trucks outfitted with ALPR cameras. The company boasts that it collects 500 million records on Americans each month. Motorola’s Vigilant — which contracts with law enforcement agencies to deploy ALPRs — offers police departments access to a nationwide database, making it remarkably similar to Flock and its nationwide ALPR data sharing network.

Flock and other companies are building an omnipresent digital dragnet without democratic consent, enabling law enforcement to track people across the country with the click of a mouse.

AI-powered surveillance technologies are also susceptible to bias and machine error. The ACLU has documented over a dozen cases of people wrongfully arrested because police relied on faulty facial recognition algorithms that flagged the wrong person. One woman spent six months in jail for bank fraud in Maryland, even though she could prove she had been at her home, in Oklahoma, when the crime took place. AI had pegged her as the suspect, and police would not release her.

Abuse of the tools and technological errors are worrying enough. The big picture is much more alarming.

AI-enabled cameras, sensors and other technologies can be placed at nearly every corner to constantly monitor all of us, 24/7. This comes at an enormous cost to our privacy and constitutional rights – if law enforcement is monitoring what every person is doing and where they’re going, it threatens to hollow out people’s reasonable expectation of privacy that underpins our constitutional rights. It could also make us question whether it’s safe to speak out or protest in the face of authoritarian-inspired crackdowns, like the Trump administration’s war on immigrants and critics of the administration’s policies.

Despite what Flock and other surveillance tech vendors would have you believe, more surveillance does not necessarily equal safer communities. In the vast majority of cases, police use surveillance technology to try to track down people after harm has been done — not before.

The best argument proponents can make is that surveillance technologies can help find the perpetrator after a crime is committed. But even this claim is not necessarily borne out by the evidence. For example, recent FBI data shows that after law enforcement agencies in Atlanta blanketed the city with over 5,000 ALPR cameras, case “clearance” rates for offenses like homicides actually declined, meaning police solved a smaller share of serious crimes, despite adding thousands of cameras.

Furthermore, surveillance poses safety risks to people who have a reason to fear police officers may target them for personal or political reasons, as we have seen in cases with Flock in Massachusetts and across the country.

The good news is, we have the power to organize in our communities and push back against unreasonable, secretive, dragnet surveillance. We can do so at town meetings, and in conversations with city council members and representatives in the state legislature. You need only pick up the phone.

The growing rebellion against Flock is a sign that more and more Americans, on both sides of the aisle, are rejecting this digital dystopia.