Action of the Week, September 14, 2025

Tell Your Local Officials to Oppose License Plate Reader Surveillance

On the August 7, 2025 edition of Money & Markets, Catherine and John Titus discussed the pushback against Flock Safety surveillance technology in New York’s Scarsdale Village, a town that has the distinction of being the wealthiest suburb in the U.S. Citizens there were outraged to find out about a “surreptitious” decision by the village’s board of trustees to sign up with Flock.

Flock Safety (and perhaps other behind-the-scenes entities) have enticed a growing number of local governments into inviting the company’s invasive surveillance system—a network of interconnected live view cameras and license plate readers—into their communities. Catherine pointed out on the Aug. 7 show that Flock is a private company and has as its lead investor Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. (Thiel is, of course, also the co-founder of Palantir.)

Flock has made no effort to hide its ambition to expand to every city in the U.S. Its camera network, says the ACLU, “provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool, and allows big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments to access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns.”

Fortunately, citizens and some local governments are growing wise to the threat posed by the surveillance technology and are pushing back, with the latest rejection taking place in Sedona, Arizona. Thanks to scrappy independent reporting by Red Rock News, Sedona’s City Council and local constituents learned that their city had signed a contract with Flock “without council direction.” After deciding in August to indefinitely pause the program, on September 9, the City Council went further—unanimously voting to cancel the contract and remove the automated license plate readers that had already been installed.

Sedona’s mayor, whose prior career was in law enforcement, was initially in favor of the system but reversed his position, stating, “I now have very serious concerns. We’ve seen how data from these cameras can be accessed by federal agencies in ways I wasn’t aware of and ways that our community is strongly opposed to.” One of the Council members also emphasized the deeper policy implications:

“[T]hat policy issue at hand is the shift from traditional policing tools, where we focus on the bad guys, to starting to gather and store data on innocent people who were never suspected of anything.”

Catherine’s advice: “You need to be checking that your community doesn’t have [a contract with Flock Safety], and you need to make sure they can’t get one without it getting stopped.”