Texas law enforcement used license plate surveillance cameras to track women seeking abortions. What started as crime-fighting tools have become a surveillance network targeting reproductive healthcare choices. Flock Safety’s license plate readers helped create a digital trail that investigators used to follow women across state lines. This isn’t a future threat - it’s happening now.
How License Plate Cameras Became Abortion Surveillance Tools
A woman in Texas drives to another state for an abortion. She passes automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras that scan her plate and record her location. Texas law enforcement later searches this data, claiming they’re looking for a “missing person.” But new documents reveal the truth: they were investigating someone connected to an abortion case.
Texas has 83,000 of these cameras. A single search can check all of them, creating a detailed map of where someone traveled and when. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found documents showing Texas deputies searched Flock Safety’s database for abortion-related investigations, not actual missing persons as they claimed.
Johnson County Sheriff Adam King and Flock Safety both said the search was for a missing person. The new evidence shows they weren’t telling the truth.
Flock Safety’s Weak Defense
Flock Safety tried to distance itself from the controversy. Their CEO wrote in a blog post that an internal review “found not a single credible case of law enforcement using the system to locate vulnerable women seeking healthcare.” They claim local police made their own decisions to work with federal authorities.
But once your community’s data goes into Flock’s nationwide network, local control disappears. The company’s CEO has said before that Flock won’t stop law enforcement from using their data for immigration enforcement if it’s legal in that state. This shows communities have little control over how their data gets used.
The lack of oversight has already caused problems. Cities like Evanston and Oak Park ended their Flock contracts due to privacy concerns and potential misuse.
Your Car Tracks You Whether You Like It or Not
ALPR cameras scan every license plate that passes by. They record the plate number, time, and location. This data gets stored and becomes searchable. Your car becomes an unwilling witness to everywhere you go.
When abortion access is under attack, this network turns every trip into potential evidence against you. Your vehicle becomes an informant for the state without your consent.
This goes beyond abortion rights. If police can misuse ALPR data for health investigations, what’s next? Political protests? Union meetings? Religious services? Knowing your movements are tracked makes people less likely to exercise their rights.
This case shows how surveillance technology keeps expanding without proper limits. It’s not just about what the technology can do - it’s about what we’ll allow it to do.
Fighting Back Against Surveillance Overreach
As states take different approaches to abortion access, surveillance technology becomes a bigger threat. While some states like Illinois are trying to limit license plate reader misuse, Flock’s nationwide network means local protections don’t work well.
This creates a clear conflict between safety technology and civil liberties. The fight for reproductive choice is now connected to the fight for digital privacy. Without strong legal protections, every drive could add to a surveillance system that tracks our lives and potentially criminalizes our personal decisions.
In the digital age, our right to choose increasingly depends on our right to move around freely and privately.