You have not been accused of a crime.
You are not under investigation.
No judge signed a warrant.
The government is tracking you anyway.
We are asking every candidate and officeholder in America to take a side.
I pledge to ban government use of Flock cameras, automated license plate readers and equivalent systems that indiscriminately track the movements of innocent Americans.
I will use every lawful power of my office to remove these cameras, terminate government contracts, stop taxpayer funding and prevent government agencies from replacing them with another system that does the same thing under a different name.
Officeholders and candidates sign the pledge. Everyone else signs the demand that their representatives take it.
Your name appears on the public signer list once our team confirms your office. Nothing publishes automatically.
Every signature is verified by phone or official channel before publication.
Tell your representatives to sign it. We will send them your name and keep you posted on what they do.
We never sell your information.
The commitment does not change with the office. What changes is the authority available to carry it out.
The government is supposed to investigate people suspected of crimes. Flock reverses that. It records everyone.
Where you drove. When you passed. What your vehicle looks like. Where it appeared before. Where it appears next.
The government does not need to follow you today if a machine has already been following you for months. That is not a side effect of the system. That is the point of it.
The Fourth Amendment was written to stop government from searching first and finding a justification later. Colonists had watched British officers walk through their doors carrying general warrants that named no suspect and described no crime. The writs of assistance did not accuse anyone of anything. They simply authorized the government to look.
Collect first. Store it. Search later.
That is what mass automated surveillance makes possible, and the record of abuse is already written. An audit by the Illinois Secretary of State found plate data collected in Illinois had been searched by out-of-state officials monitoring abortion and immigration. Officers have been caught running the system on people they knew personally. Federal agencies have reached into local camera networks that local taxpayers paid for and local officials never agreed to share.
You should not have to trust thousands of government employees not to abuse a database that should never have existed in the first place.
We are not naive about crime, and we are not hostile to the officers who fight it. Police have always been able to follow a suspect, photograph a vehicle and build a case. What is new is not surveillance of the guilty. It is permanent, automated, suspicionless surveillance of the innocent, held on a private company's servers and searchable by people who will never have to explain themselves to a judge.
Nobody voted for this. The infrastructure was sold as a way to recover stolen cars and it became a nationwide tracking system that no legislature designed and no citizen consented to.
We are not interested in making mass surveillance more polite.
We don't want better rules for Flock cameras.
We don't want another study.
We don't want shorter retention periods.
We want them gone.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.Benjamin Franklin · Pennsylvania Assembly · 1755
He wrote it about a legislature being asked to trade away its own authority for protection. The argument has not changed. Only the equipment has.
Officeholders who have committed in writing. Every name confirmed directly.