For decades, the war on drugs relied on traffic stops, confidential informants, aggressive searches and the selective enforcement of laws that disproportionately harmed poor and minority communities.
Today, that machinery is being modernized.
Flock Safety cameras and other automated license plate readers are creating a vast surveillance network capable of recording where millions of Americans travel, when they travel and which vehicles appear alongside them. Police no longer need to personally follow someone across town or across state lines. They can reconstruct that person’s movements from a computer.
For cannabis reform supporters, this should not be viewed as a separate privacy debate. Flock cameras are quickly becoming a new front in the war on drugs.
A recent Wisconsin case provides a disturbing example.
According to court records reviewed by 404 Media, Wisconsin police used Flock cameras to track a man’s vehicle as he traveled into Michigan, where adult-use marijuana is legal, and returned to Wisconsin. Police cited previous Flock records showing that the vehicle frequently traveled to Michigan, describing the state as a “known source state for marijuana” because cannabis is legal there.
The man was initially wanted for alleged bail jumping connected to domestic violence charges. But police also used his interstate travel history as part of the justification for stopping him and searching his vehicle for marijuana. The bail-jumping charge was ultimately dismissed, and he was convicted only of marijuana possession.
Consider what that means.
Traveling to a state where marijuana is legal became a source of suspicion. A person’s lawful movements were collected over time, analyzed by police and used to help construct a drug investigation.
This is precisely the type of mission creep civil-liberties advocates have warned about.
Flock describes its automated license plate readers as cameras that record license plates, vehicle characteristics, locations and timestamps, converting those observations into searchable data. The company says the information belongs to its customers and that its technology helps police identify vehicles and develop investigative leads.
But describing these records as isolated “point-in-time” observations ignores what happens when thousands of cameras are connected.
A single camera may capture one vehicle at one intersection. A network can reveal that the same vehicle regularly visits a dispensary, attends a political meeting, parks outside a medical clinic, crosses into a legal marijuana state or spends the night at a particular address.
The American Civil Liberties Union has documented how police departments can share their locally collected information with specific agencies, agencies throughout their state or the nationwide Flock network. Departments that enable nationwide sharing can also gain access to information collected elsewhere, turning cameras purchased by individual towns into pieces of a much larger surveillance system.
That model should deeply concern anyone who fought to end marijuana prohibition.
State legalization was supposed to establish that adults should not be treated as criminals simply because they purchase or consume cannabis. Yet Flock allows police in prohibition states to examine travel into legal states and potentially treat that travel as an investigative clue.
Legalization becomes geographically conditional. The moment someone crosses a state border, conduct that was lawful on one side can become the basis for suspicion on the other.
This will not affect everyone equally.
People with money can purchase marijuana discreetly, hire attorneys and absorb the costs of a criminal case. Working-class consumers, medical marijuana patients, racial minorities and people living near state borders will face the greatest risks. These are many of the same communities that suffered most under traditional marijuana enforcement.
The technology may be new, but the pattern is painfully familiar: collect broad powers in the name of serious crime, then gradually use them against lower-level conduct.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has reported Flock searches connected to school-residency checks, employment background investigations, noise complaints, protest activity and an abortion investigation. Its analysis concluded that the absence of meaningful warrant requirements encouraged police to use the system well beyond the serious crimes typically invoked to justify its installation.
Marijuana enforcement can now be added to that list.
Supporters will argue that license plate readers help recover stolen vehicles, find missing people and identify suspects in violent crimes. Those uses may sound compelling when considered in isolation.
But surveillance systems are not judged only by the most sympathetic case offered during a city council presentation. They must be judged by the full authority they create, the officials who may eventually control them and the ordinary people whose movements are recorded despite no suspicion that they committed any crime.
The constitutional questions are also far from trivial.
The Supreme Court has recognized that location information can reveal an intimate picture of a person’s life and that collecting large amounts of such information may constitute a Fourth Amendment search, even when individual movements occur in public. In Carpenter v. United States, the court rejected the idea that extensive digital location histories receive no constitutional protection simply because individual data points are held by a third party.
Courts have not definitively resolved how that principle applies to every automated license plate reader network. Lawsuits challenging Flock systems are attempting to answer that question, including a case involving Norfolk, Virginia’s dense network of cameras and its warrantless collection of drivers’ movements.
But cannabis advocates should not wait for years of litigation before taking a position.
We already know what happens when law enforcement receives a powerful tool with weak oversight. The scope expands. The original limitations erode. Data collected for one purpose is used for another. Policies change, administrations change and information gathered today remains available to officials with priorities the public never approved.
Cannabis reform organizations should therefore oppose new Flock contracts, demand that existing contracts be terminated and support legislation requiring warrants before police may search historical license plate information.
At an absolute minimum, communities should prohibit nationwide data sharing, block searches conducted on behalf of outside agencies, require detailed explanations for every query, make audit logs public and impose extremely short retention periods.
But the better presumption is rejection.
A system that indiscriminately records everyone’s movements in the hope that some of those records may later prove useful turns the basic principle of American law enforcement on its head. Instead of investigating people because there is evidence they committed a crime, it collects evidence on everyone so police can decide later whom to investigate.
The marijuana reform movement has spent decades challenging the assumption that police should be able to stop, search and arrest people based on vague indicators associated with cannabis.
We cannot abandon that principle simply because the officer following someone is now an automated camera.
Flock cameras are not merely traffic technology. They are infrastructure for a more efficient, less visible and potentially more expansive war on drugs.
Cannabis reform supporters should oppose them with the same urgency they brought to opposing prohibition itself.
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