Dozens of American towns are voting to rip out AI-powered surveillance cameras that track every vehicle on their streets — and the rebellion is cutting straight across partisan lines.

Flock Safety's automatic license plate recognition cameras have quietly spread across the country, creating a dragnet that records the movements of every driver, whether they're accused of a crime or not. Now communities are pushing back. Lago Vista, Texas, explicitly condemned the cameras and voted to remove them, according to the Daily Caller. The ACLU has launched a national campaign called "Get The Flock Out" to help other towns do the same.

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told the Daily Caller News Foundation he hasn't seen anything like it in nearly 25 years fighting mass surveillance. "We're talking leftists, MAGA, traditional conservatives, Main Street, [and] people in the middle," Stanley said. "It seems to be a pretty broad consensus that Americans don't like [Flock cameras]."

That consensus exists for a reason. Stanley warned that mass surveillance systems built for one purpose inevitably expand: "[W]hen you create a mass surveillance system for you know specific purposes, maybe purposes that everybody agrees with... Inevitably, [the technology] gets used for other purposes. It inevitably gets used for other purposes. It inevitably gets abused." He cited ICE's access to local Flock data as one concrete example of that abuse.

The ACLU's campaign pulls no punches. "These creepy cameras make it possible to track everyone's movements — even if you haven't been accused of a crime," the group states on its website, offering a toolkit for Americans who want to cancel Flock contracts in their own towns.

Law enforcement insists the technology is worth the tradeoff. Lieutenant Wes Kelley of the Apache Junction, Arizona Police Department told the DCNF that ALPR cameras helped his officers track down a suspect who abducted a 13-year-old girl and locate missing elderly citizens. "We are leveraging the technology that's out there with how to proactively police and make sure we are keeping our community safe with this technology," Kelley said.

Kelley emphasized that every officer using the system must complete training and that the department conducts weekly audits to prevent misuse. He also framed opposition as marginal: "We actually have a very supportive community overall. Of course, you're always going to have a small few that disagree with technology updates."

Maybe. Or maybe the "small few" are a lot bigger than police departments want to admit. When the ACLU and MAGA agree that a surveillance tool has gone too far, that's not a fringe position — that's the country speaking. The question isn't whether Flock cameras can help solve individual crimes. It's whether Americans should have to surrender their freedom of movement to a private company's dragnet to get there.

The founders didn't write the Fourth Amendment so police could outsource blanket surveillance to a vendor and call it community safety.