Private Monopolies and Mass Surveillance: My Plan to Tear Down Flock Cameras in Missouri 🛑📸

 

If you drive through Springfield or anywhere in Southwest Missouri today, you are being watched. Without a warrant, without your consent, and without individual probable cause, your daily movements are being logged into a permanent database.

 

I’m talking about Flock Safety cameras—the automated license plate readers that have quietly taken over our street corners. Right now, the Springfield Police Department operates 41 of these active devices, and the network is expanding.

 

As your Libertarian candidate for Missouri State Senate District 30, I want to be entirely clear: When I get to Jefferson City, I have a plan to ensure every single one of these cameras is taken down across the State of Missouri.

 

To understand how we got here, you have to look at the trick the administrative state is playing on the public. Flock Safety is not a government agency. It is an $8 billion, private, venture-backed tech corporation. Local city councils use your taxpayer dollars to sign private subscription contracts with this corporate monopoly to manage a nationwide, interconnected cloud database.

 

Why do they contract a private company instead of building the grid themselves? To evade the Constitution.

 

Under the Fourth Amendment, a police department cannot legally build a giant, centralized national tracking database to follow every law-abiding citizen without a warrant. To bypass this judicial boundary, the government relies on a loophole known as the “Third-Party Doctrine.” They argue that because a private company is capturing your data on a public road, you have no expectation of privacy.

 

This is exactly like a state-run propaganda newspaper outsourcing its printing to a private press just to bypass free-press protections. It is a corporate-state alliance designed explicitly to escape legislative oversight and judicial accountability.

 

It reminds me of the exact same playbook used to build the multi-billion-dollar ignition interlock industry decades ago. Private tech vendors bypassed the consumer, lobbied politicians to embed their devices into statutory law, and turned a commercial failure into a government-mandated corporate monopoly. But there is a massive difference: an interlock device is a targeted penalty for a convicted individual. Flock cameras are mass surveillance targeting 100% of innocent, law-abiding citizens under the assumption that you might commit a crime in the future. That is not free enterprise. That is environmental trespassing on our public space.

 

Here is my solution:

 

We don’t need to pass a hundred tiny regulations. We need to cut the single thread keeping these surveillance grids legal. In the State Senate, I will introduce legislation that completely closes the Third-Party Doctrine loophole for political subdistricts.

 

My bill will establish a strict Anti-Outsourcing Clause stating a simple, unbreakable rule: No government entity in Missouri may enter into a contract with a private vendor to collect, store, or process data that would be unconstitutional for the government to collect itself.

 

The moment this bill passes, the legal shield vanishes. Every single municipal contract with Flock Safety and similar mass-surveillance vendors across Missouri will be rendered null, void, and contrary to public policy. By law, the cameras will have to be dismantled and taken down within 30 days.

 

The proper role of government is highly restricted: to protect individual life, liberty, and property. Mass surveillance grids run by private monopolies do the exact opposite. Let’s restore true constitutional boundaries, eliminate warrantless tracking, and protect the privacy of every Missourian.