Marci Bakely thought someone had hidden a tracking device on her Kia.

The 50-year-old Air Force veteran and mother in Jefferson, Georgia, installed cameras around her home, bought a hidden-camera detector, and took her car to a mechanic three times. Her former boyfriend seemed to know where she went: the grocery store, the doctor, even a date.

The tracker was not on her car.

A Washington Post investigation found that her former boyfriend, Michael Steffman, then police chief of nearby Braselton, allegedly used Flock Safety’s nationwide license plate-reader network to search the plates belonging to Bakely and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times. Steffman was later arrested on charges including stalking and misuse of automated license plate-recognition systems. He died before trial, so the allegations were never adjudicated.

Flock was built to help police find criminals. Bakely’s experience exposes the harder question: What happens when a system powerful enough to find the guilty can also follow the innocent?

Americans understand a camera at a traffic light watching an intersection. Flock represents something different.

Flock reports more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states, producing approximately 20 billion license plate scans every month. The cameras record plates, time, location, and vehicle characteristics. AI turns those observations into searchable intelligence. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) opened a Senate investigation this week into Flock’s collection, retention, and dissemination of Americans’ data.

That capability can save lives. In Columbia, Missouri, a Flock camera helped police locate a stolen vehicle carrying two sleeping children, ages one and three; a state trooper recovered them unharmed. Psalm 82 commands authorities to “Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked” (Psalm 82:4 ESV). Christians need not oppose technology that answers that call.

The argument is about limits.

And the issue is already becoming larger than license plates.

FlockOS advertises one platform connecting video, license plate readers, sensors, 911 data, police systems, and drones. Flock also promotes integrating public and private cameras from schools, HOAs, and businesses into that platform.

The network effect is extraordinary. In August 2025, Flock told Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that about three-quarters of its law enforcement customers had opted into National Lookup, which lets participating agencies search data shared across jurisdictions.

Then add AI.

WIRED recently examined code for Flock’s developing OS Investigate system and found an AI tool capable of analyzing driving patterns, identifying vehicles repeatedly seen together, and surfacing possible witnesses or “associates.” The system can reach police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records. Some prepared searches do not begin with a license plate or even a known suspect. They begin with a location, a time period, and a pattern of behavior. Flock says the product remains in limited testing and may change before broader release.

The privacy danger is data fusion. A plate scan means little alone; combine it with other camera feeds, commercial identity records, and open-source information, and AI can reveal where I travel, whom I associate with, and which institutions I frequent.

A vehicle repeatedly appears at a church, political meeting, pregnancy resource center, medical clinic, or particular business. Each observation alone may reveal little. Joined with identity records, online information, and other cameras, those observations can expose religion, politics, relationships, habits, and associations.

That reaches beyond the Fourth Amendment. If government can identify who was there, First Amendment freedoms of religion, speech, assembly, and association come into play. A free society investigates after suspicion; a surveillance society collects first and decides later whom to scrutinize.

China offers a sobering lesson here, if we describe it accurately.

China does not assign citizens a single numerical social-credit score, despite common portrayals. The Mercator Institute for China Studies explains that the system remains fragmented, relying heavily on regulatory records, blacklists, and databases. But China’s larger surveillance architecture is anything but imaginary. Freedom House documents pervasive facial recognition cameras, smartphone monitoring, real-name requirements, and extensive governmental access to citizens’ personal information, according to its latest China assessment.

The Chinese lesson is not one master score; it is integration. In “The New AI Cold War,” I warned that AI can fuse license plate scans, financial records, school or workplace data, biometrics, and online activity to map movements and associations.

America is not China. Flock is not a social credit system. Our Constitution, independent courts, and elections remain real differences.

That is exactly why the present moment matters. Liberty is best protected before separate systems become an integrated architecture of control.

Orwell’s “1984” imagined Big Brother watching through telescreens. America’s danger would be subtler: useful systems linked incrementally until no one can say when observation became comprehensive surveillance. AI accelerates that convergence by correlating data at a scale no bureaucracy could match.

Christians should understand this especially well. Scripture pictures a future regime in which allegiance is ultimately tied to the ability to buy and sell. Flock cameras are not the Mark of the Beast. Scripture says nothing about license plates or roadside cameras.

Previous generations could wonder how authorities might identify, monitor, and enforce compliance across huge populations. Ours no longer must. AI surveillance, digital identity, networked databases, biometrics, and digital finance make comprehensive monitoring technically conceivable. The issue is not prophetic fulfillment; it is that the machinery of control is no longer science fiction.

That should produce discernment, not panic.

God is omniscient; Caesar is not. Scripture gives government authority to punish wrongdoing, not omniscience over innocent citizens merely because technology makes such knowledge obtainable.

Flock deserves credit for responding. On August 13, it announced a seven-day default for new deployments and said stronger case-code, audit, lockout, and multifactor-authentication safeguards would become mandatory for law enforcement customers by year’s end.

But corporate safeguards cannot substitute for constitutional boundaries.

Congress and state legislatures should regulate data fusion, not merely cameras: warrants for prolonged tracking, strict purpose and sharing limits, independent audits, human review of AI-generated leads, and real penalties for misuse. Local elected bodies should also approve participation in cross-jurisdictional sharing networks.

The question is no longer simply who can see the camera.

It is who can connect the cameras, what other information connects to them, what AI may infer from the resulting picture, and what government someday may decide to do with that knowledge.

A free people should set those limits before surveillance that once seemed unthinkable becomes simply another part of American life.