A for-profit company called Flock Safety has built an always-on surveillance network that photographs, scans, and logs the location of every car that passes its tens of thousands of cameras — and police across the country search that database without warrants, sharing it between agencies for a full month of your movements. You cannot opt out. Nobody in Washington is asking who owns all that data, or why a private corporation holds it in the first place.

This matters because the Fourth Amendment was written for exactly this kind of thing. The founders didn't draft a privacy clause for fun — they drafted it because the British used general warrants to search wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Flock has digitized that abuse and sold it back to American police departments by the thousands.

Live 5 News, citing InvestigateTV reporter Brendan Keefe, laid out the scope: Flock Safety markets its cameras and searchable databases to police nationwide. The system has helped catch murderers and kidnappers. But every car passing a camera is photographed and logged — even those not suspected of any crime. Officers have been caught stalking their exes using the system. Hacktivists found some Flock cameras streaming to the open web with zero security. Innocent people have been falsely accused of crimes because their car happened to pass through the wrong area at the wrong time.

The New York Post, meanwhile, framed the story around a contract dispute: the LAPD is suspending its deal with Flock over who controls the footage. Department CIO Dean Gialamas told the Post the sticking point is data ownership — "having very clear terms about who owns the data, what happens with the data once they collect it."

Gialamas said: "Our priority is about protecting the constitutional rights and civil liberties of those we serve."

That's a fine sentence. It would mean more if the LAPD hadn't been using Flock cameras for years before suddenly discovering constitutional rights during a contract negotiation. The Post buried the broader surveillance concern and framed the halt as a bureaucratic disagreement over "video rights" — a phrase that sounds like a licensing dispute, not a constitutional crisis.

About 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. use Flock, according to the Post. Left-wing groups have accused the company of sharing data with ICE to track illegal immigrants. Flock claims it does not share customer data with any federal entity without permission. Cities in Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan have severed ties. Georgia and Oklahoma still use it. A group called Stop LAPD Spying sued the department over its refusal to release records on Flock's AI-powered network.

The Post noted that anti-police activists criticize the technology because federal immigration authorities have used its data. That framing makes this a left-wing cause — which conveniently lets the institutional press ignore the fact that warrantless tracking of every American's movements is a constitutional problem, not a partisan one.

Live 5's reporting was more direct about what Flock actually does: mass surveillance of the public, with no opt-out, shared between agencies, searchable without a warrant. But even InvestigateTV led with the crime-fighting frame before getting to the Fourth Amendment.

The real question isn't whether Flock helps solve crimes. Dogs help solve crimes. The question is whether a private company should be allowed to build a nationwide tracking database of law-abiding Americans' movements and sell access to it — no warrant, no oversight, no accountability. The LAPD's sudden concern about data ownership is better late than never. But 5,000 other agencies are still plugged in, and nobody in Congress has lifted a finger to ask who gave a private corporation the right to watch every American drive to work, church, or the doctor.

The cameras are watching. The question is who's watching them — and why the people paying the bill still don't own the data.