Tea Party Patriots welcome back Jeramy Kitchen, President of Texas Policy Research. Jeremy spoke at our September 2025 meeting. He is a Texas Tech graduate and a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst. Jeramy is a husband, father and a concerned taxpayer. He will be speaking on technology and the 4th amendment inlight of the government use of cell data, remote kill switch mandated for vehicles and the spread of Flock camera surveillance.
Cameras are named Flock Safety Cameras launched in 2017 out of Atlanta, and were pitched as small police departments wanted surveillance cameras but could not afford sophisticated infrastructure. Flock provides cameras cheap (sometimes free upfront) in exchange for a subscription contract and data rights. It still has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 6,000+ communities across 49 states. Flock cameras scan over 20 billion license plates per month. It is the largest private vehicle location database in American history. It is NOT about the cameras but the DATA. Every Flock camera logs every license plate that passes it. Timestamp, GPS coordinates, direction of travel, and vehicle description which goes into Flock’s proprietary system, called Safety Network, which has a checkbox called “Enable National :ookup.” So the agency’s camera data can be shared with every other agency in Flock’s National Lookup.
Flock’s official position is that cities control their own data sharing settings. They do not have to share with federal agencies;however, the default settings favor maximum sharing, and the oversight mechanisms to verify what was actually happening were nonexistent at the city level. WHO’SACTUALLY IN THE NETWORK? FRONT DOOR: some federal agencies have formal agreements with Flock or with specific local departments that authorize direct access. BACK DOOR: in Washington state, at least eight local law enforcement enabled direct data sharing with the U.S. Border Patrol during 2025, in some cases without the knowledge of the cities that owned the cameras. Washington state legislature passed SB 6002, the Driver Privacy Act, in 2026 specifically to close this pathway: requiring warrants for most ALPR(Automatic Number Plate Recognition) data sharing with federal agencies. SIDE DOOR: unauthorized or unauthorizedbut- tolerated access through default data sharing settings that agencies did not actively monitor. SCHOOL CAMERAS: Flock has contracts with hundreds of K-12 school districts. An investigation by The 74 (a nonprofit news website) found that in a single month, more than 3,100 police agencies ran over 733,000 searches on cameras belonging to just one Texas school district: the Alvin Independent School District, which paid for eight cameras. The specific communities that canceled in 2026 include: Mountain View, CA; Evanston, IL; Dayton, OH; Santa Cruz, CA; Santa Clara County. CA; Hillsborough, NC; Woodburn, OR; Los Altos Hills, CA; and Edmonds, WA. Legislation has been passed in Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Washington and Illinois. This all leads to the constitutional question: does pervasive ALPR tracking constitute a FOURTH AMENDMENT SEARCH?
