A North Carolina cop used a surveillance camera network to stalk her boyfriend's ex-wife 31 times — and the same warrantless system that let her do it is watching every car in America.

More than 110,000 Flock Safety cameras now sit on streets across the country, photographing every passing vehicle, logging license plates, bumper stickers, roof racks, and dashboard items — and collecting Bluetooth and Wi-Fi identifiers from nearby devices — all without a warrant, all fed into a searchable database law enforcement can access. The Mooresville, North Carolina case isn't a bug. It's the feature.

Officer Elizabeth Snowman was arrested Wednesday while on duty after an investigation found she misused the Flock system 31 times to track her boyfriend's ex-wife, according to AL.com. She claimed motor vehicle offenses 29 times and robbery or burglary for the other two. She was charged with computer access violations and posted a $5,000 secured bond. Mooresville Police Chief Ron Campurciani said the department is investigating 10 other instances of improper use, with three looking "problematic." "I don't think we're done yet, quite frankly," Campurciani said. "We could be back here in a couple days, to be quite honest with you."

This is not isolated. A Milwaukee officer used Flock to track his romantic partner's location 124 times and the partner's former partner 55 times. He pleaded guilty and resigned. A Charlotte-Mecklenburg officer was charged with obtaining information about an undercover agent and sharing it with a drug dealer. Georgia has seen similar cases.

Meanwhile, the establishment press is running cover. The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss, posted on X that Flock cameras "aren't interested in you—unless you're a kidnapper, a thief, or up to no good." The Daily Caller reported that the accompanying video by Free Press reporter Maya Sulkin omitted key facts about the technology, which were later flagged in an X Community Note. The framing is clear: the same outlets that breathlessly wring hands over January 6 are telling you not to worry about a private company building a dragnet tracking grid across American towns.

The constitutional stakes are plain. "Automatic license plate readers allow the government to assemble a detailed record of people's movements, with minimal effort and without any requirement of prior suspicion. This search-first, justify-later model amounts to dragnet surveillance, and it poses a serious threat to Americans' Fourth Amendment rights," Andreia Trifoi, staff attorney at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, told the Daily Caller. The ACLU's Chad Marlow warned the cameras "create a dangerous chilling effect on the exercise of people's constitutional rights."

Follow the money. The U.S. video surveillance industry is projected to grow to over $27 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence, driven by AI and "advanced analytics." Flock Safety is building the infrastructure. Cops are abusing it. And the press is telling you it's for your own good.

Campurciani acknowledged the damage: "It all goes up in smoke when you have cops like this violating the system." But the system isn't violating itself. The system is working exactly as designed — warrantless, unaccountable, and expanding. The question isn't whether a bad apple misused it. The question is why any American is being tracked without a warrant in the first place.