A Florida sheriff is brushing off legitimate Fourth Amendment concerns over a mass network of 180 AI-powered license plate readers as "ignorance and misinformation" — and comparing citizens who want them gone to "defund the police" radicals — while claiming he owns your movement data and shares it with the FBI.
St. Johns County Sheriff Robert Hardwick sat down with The 904 Now on August 14 to address growing pushback against Flock cameras blanketing his jurisdiction. Maps show some highway exits packed with four cameras in one small area. A community group called Deflock STJohns has organized to provide "clear, accessible information" on the surveillance system. Hardwick's response was to circle the wagons.
"A little bit of it is ignorance and misinformation of what it truly is," Hardwick said, according to Breitbart. He insisted Flock is "American-owned" and operated just outside Washington, D.C. in Virginia — as though proximity to the capital comforts anyone skeptical of federal surveillance.
Then he made the data ownership claim that should stop every American cold: "It's mine. I own it. I choose to do what I want to do with the information." That's a public official asserting that data collected on citizens traveling public roads belongs to him — not to the people whose movements are being logged.
Hardwick admitted the data is shared with surrounding counties and the federal government. "Do we share it with the federal government? Yes. The FBI is the only other entity in the federal government that we share it with. We have very tight parameters, and I think you understand why," he said, invoking terrorism as justification. "It's important that we track these people that are trying to kill us in America, whether it's weapons of mass destruction."
The sheriff also tied privacy advocates to the defund-the-police movement, using crime-ridden Minneapolis as his foil. "If you look at the cities that are removing Flock, those are the same exact cities, in the same exact states that defund the police department, turn our backs on us when one incident occurs," he said. The equation is convenient: oppose mass surveillance, and you're against police entirely.
Hardwick called the concerns "the flavor of the day" and predicted they'd fade. He noted his office has used license plate reader technology since 2017, but conceded the current system is "on steroids now." That's quite an admission. The surveillance footprint has expanded dramatically, and the sheriff's position is that anyone who objects simply doesn't understand.
The Fourth Amendment protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures. A network of 180 AI-powered cameras logging every plate that passes — data shared with federal agencies — is not a minor upgrade. It's a dragnet. When a sheriff claims ownership of your travel data, frames constitutional objections as radicalism, and invokes terrorism to shield the program from scrutiny, the question isn't whether the cameras solve crimes. It's whether Americans still have a right to move through their own country without the state keeping a record of every trip.
