July 8, 2026 - Security State Is Harming Safety

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for July 8, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry. 

In 1755, Benjamin Franklin wrote, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." We need to be thinking much more about those words, now much more than ever, as cameras and questionably accurate AI systems continue to proliferate in our society. 

There are now more than 100,000 automated license plate reader cameras from Flock Security deployed around the U.S. These cameras, some of which are deployed by municipalities and some by private businesses, utilize AI to try to track vehicles and people with the stated intent of stopping crime. But the reality is, they are stealing what little privacy we have left in modern society, and they often make errors that could potentially lead to tragic results. 

This past weekend, my friend Joel Feder was running errands with his wife in Plymouth,  Minnesota, where they live, while driving a Range Rover press vehicle that he was reviewing. Flock cameras had flagged the vehicle, and the system claimed it had stolen license plates. They were, in fact, New Jersey manufacturer plates. A plate had been stolen from another press vehicle in Los Angeles, and the similar number was incorrectly entered, and so the flock system was tracking all of these, including the one Joel was driving. After four days of tracking, the system alerted police that Joel and his wife were in a store, and four police vehicles waited to ambush them when they emerged, a dramatic overreaction for an allegedly stolen plate. Given what we've seen police officers do to innocent people in recent years, this could easily have been a tragic situation. 

Joel and his wife were detained for an hour while the police tried to sort out what happened, but this should never have occurred in the first place. Businesses and politicians need to reconsider the security state that the U.S. is transforming into and start rolling it back. The mock fear that politicians like U.S. senators Bernie Moreno and Elisa Slotkin express over the possibility of Chinese cars spying on Americans is a farce compared to the real spying that American governments, law enforcement, and businesses are already doing. Ben Franklin would be ashamed of what this country has become. 

Thanks for listening.