Another local politician is sounding the alarm about those automated license plate readers, the ones from Flock Safety. Knox County, Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs wants a nationwide stop to their rollout. He says these things are tracking too much, collecting too many digital breadcrumbs on regular folks just driving to work or picking up groceries. It is a pile of new surveillance that lacks any kind of real oversight. They are setting up a system with no proper rules, no constitutional guardrails, as he put it.
Jacobs points to dozens of cases where these cameras got used in ways nobody intended, outside of anything resembling due process. Think about every car you pass, every trip you make to the store or a friend's house. That data creates a permanent record, a digital paper trail for anyone who decides they want to see it. It is raw information, a pile of digital breadcrumbs waiting to be exploited, sitting in a server farm somewhere. Without a clear set of federal laws, he argues we are just letting these digital eyes record everything without accountability. It is a rough deal for the people caught in the grind, just trying to get through their shift.