The Fourth Amendment does not say the people have a right to be secure against some government files, or against files kept longer than 30 days, or against files a judge later decides they look “too much like a GPS.” It says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.
Read the nouns. Persons. Houses. Papers. Effects. The right is security from the state. Period. End of question. The warrant clause then tells the government the only lawful way to pierce that security: probable cause, oath, and particularity. A particular person. A particular place. A particular effect.
That text does not authorize the government to create a running file on the innocent and rummage it later. It authorizes the government, with a warrant, to take what already exists from a particular target. The state may receive another party’s records when a judge has named the crime and the person. The state may not stand in the road and become the original author of the citizen’s movements, even when it employs a third party to do it for them.
That is why, if this question is framed correctly and taken to the Supreme Court, we will win.
Government May Not Originate the File
A bank statement exists because you banked. A phone bill exists because you used a phone. A store camera pointed at a register exists because a merchant is guarding his till. Those are ugly facts for privacy, and the old “third-party doctrine” tried to turn them into a blank check: if anyone else has a copy, the government may take it without a warrant.
Even that doctrine is cracking. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court refused to let police vacuum seven days of cell-site location records without a warrant. In June 2026, in Chatrie v. United States, the Court held that a geofence — a dragnet over everyone who happened to be in a place — is a Fourth Amendment search and must meet probable cause and particularity. Justice Gorsuch has separately questioned whether the third-party doctrine should survive at all.
Flock does not even deserve the third-party excuse.
Nobody “shared” a travel diary with Flock the way a customer shares a deposit slip with a bank. The city hired the company. The city chose the poles. The city pointed the lenses at public ways you cannot avoid if you intend to live a normal life. The company then sells the city a searchable history of who passed, when, and in what direction — and, in practice, a network other agencies can query. That is not a merchant’s leftover footage. That is the state manufacturing the record.
If “papers and effects” mean anything in a digital country, they mean the record of where a free person went. A license plate is an effect. The log of that plate across a county is a paper the Founders would have recognized as more dangerous than a seized pamphlet, because it reconstructs the whole of a life. Church. Clinic. School. Political meeting. A former spouse’s street.
The government that originates that paper has already searched. The later “query” is only the opening of a file it had no right to write.
This Is the General Warrant With a Better Marketing Department
The Fourth Amendment was written because the Crown used writs of assistance and general warrants: rummage first, name the suspect later. Officers were sent out to look until they found something. Entick and Wilkes were not angry about a single stolen horse. They were angry that the state claimed a right to harvest a man’s papers in bulk and sort them at leisure.
Flock is that claim with only a pole and a contract.
No officer has to swear out a warrant naming you before the camera takes you. The system is built to take everyone. Retention windows and “audit logs” are not particularity. They are filing rules for a general warrant. A 21-day rolling cache on 176 cameras in one city, or 20 billion scans a month across a national network, is not “seeing a car on a public road.” It is a standing inventory of the people.
Lower courts will keep trying to save the inventory by shrinking the facts. Last week a federal judge in California said four Flock photos in two kidnapping investigations were not “near perfect surveillance,” so no search occurred. United States v. Riley is what you get when judges measure the Constitution in snapshots instead of in architecture. The architecture is the search. The snapshot is the fruit.
The only court we can really trust is our current Supreme Court.
United States v. Jones (2012) already held that the government searches when it attaches a GPS to a vehicle and tracks it. Carpenter already held that compiling a person’s movements through a vendor’s database is still the government’s search. Chatrie already held that a location dragnet needs a real warrant. Flock is GPS without the magnet, Carpenter without the cell tower, Chatrie without pretending Google was the only party in the room. The contractor is the state’s eye.
A Supreme Court that still claims to read text can say the obvious: a government that builds a machine to originate movement papers on the entire public has searched the people. To open those papers against a named suspect, get a warrant. To keep a suspicionless warehouse of the innocent, get out of the warehousing business.
Corporatism Built the Loophole. Text Closes It.
Flock exists because politicians wanted the power of a surveillance grid without the honesty of a badge on every corner. They rented the grid from a vendor, called it “safety,” and told the public that a private company in the middle made the Constitution blink. It is corporatism: coercive public power joined to a private profit model. The city supplies the streets and the immunity. The company supplies the cameras and the invoice. You supply the life being logged.
That structure does not cleanse the search. It advertises it. When the government cannot lawfully stand in your path and compile your days, it may not hire a firm to do the compiling and then pretend the file is “just business records.” A warrant still has to name a person and a crime before the state starts collecting. It cannot name a vendor and a zip code and call the rest “innovation.”
Cities canceling contracts, states limiting retention, and senators opening investigations are window dressing. They ignore the core reality: Big Brother is exactly why the 4th Amendment was underscored by America’s Founding Fathers. The right does not depend on a city council’s mood. It depends on a sentence that already binds every official in the country.
Take the Question Up
The other side will say plates are public, roads are public, and therefore the dossier is public. That is the argument that would have blessed a clerk in every tavern writing down who entered and handing the book to the sheriff. The Founders banned the general warrant anyway. Public space is not a waiver of security in your person and effects. It is the place a free people move without becoming a government data set.
If the Court is asked only whether four photographs feel like Carpenter, some justice will say no and send everyone home. Ask the real question: May the government originate a continuous record of the people’s movements, or may it only, with a warrant, examine a record that already belongs to a particular case?
On that question the text is not ambiguous. Persons, houses, papers, and effects are secure from the state. The state does not get to write the first draft of your life and then ask permission to read it. Flock clearly writes the first draft as window dressing for government to bypass the rights of the people.
Take that to the Supreme Court. We will win.
