By Theodore Blackwell, GUEST COLUMNIST
[Editor’s Note: The League of Women Voters is forming a task force to examine questions about privacy, public-safety, and other surveillance technology issues. They’ll be holding an open meeting at Capital Alehouse, 917 Caroline Street, on Thursday, September 17 at 6:30 p.m. for a conversation about the local deployment and use of Flock cameras.]
panoptic
adjective
relating to the ability to consider or control every part of a subject
The word “panoptic” comes from the Panopticon, a prison design proposed by Jeremy Bentham. The prison would be built in a circle around a central tower. From inside their cells, the prisoners would not be able to tell whether someone in the tower was watching them. Because they could not know, they were expected to assume that they might be watched at any time.
I have been routinely reminded about the concept as Flock cameras have appeared along the roads throughout our community. The cameras are visible, but almost everything that happens behind them is not. As we pass one, we do not know whether it captured our car, whether another camera captured us later, whether those records will ever be searched, or who might eventually be able to see them. Most of the time, probably no one is actively looking for us. But we have no way to be sure when someone is.
For some, the cameras provide comfort. They feel watched over and reassured that police may have another way to find a stolen vehicle, locate a missing person, or identify someone connected to a serious crime. Others experience the same system differently. To them, the cameras are a chronic notice that their ordinary movements are being recorded for possible use in a criminal investigation, even though they are not suspected of committing a crime.
Both feelings are real, but the second raises a question we have not yet adequately answered: Should every citizen be placed under that kind of notice for the mere possibility that recording all of us may help catch some of us?
I do not ask that question because I oppose law enforcement or believe surveillance never has a legitimate purpose. Surveillance can be extremely important in protecting a community and making justice accessible. At a recent discussion hosted by the League of Women Voters of the Fredericksburg Area, Police Chief Betsy Mason described a case in which information from Missouri helped Fredericksburg officers recover a young trafficking victim. It is not difficult to understand why police value a tool that can produce that result.
But the fact that a system can be used for a good purpose does not tell us where its boundaries should be. It does not tell us how much information should be collected about people who are not suspected of anything, how widely that information should be available, or how much control over it should be placed in the hands of a private company.
Imagine a police department with hundreds of thousands of photographs of vehicles traveling through a city. The department might technically possess a photograph showing that a particular car was near a particular place, but finding that photograph among all the others could be so time-consuming that the information had little practical value.
Systems such as Flock have changed that. The photographs are logged in a database and made searchable. An authorized user can enter a license plate, a partial plate, or a description of a vehicle and search for matching records in moments. The important difference is not simply that a photograph exists. It is how easily one person can search many photographs and begin piecing together where a vehicle has been.
This is also why Flock is different from a traditional local camera whose recordings remain on a server in the back room of a police station. Flock is a nationwide system operated by a private company. The company says its network now includes more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states. Its usefulness is built around the ability to organize information from many cameras and, when access is permitted, share it across jurisdictions.
Virginia law limits how Virginia agencies may share the information collected here, particularly with federal and out-of-state agencies. Those limits are important, but they do not turn Flock into a local system. The cameras, software, accounts, databases, and security protections are still parts of a much larger structure. Fredericksburg may own the information collected by its cameras, but our ability to control and protect that information still depends on technology that Fredericksburg did not build and does not independently operate.
At our recent discussion, Chief Mason assured us that she and her officers use the system in accordance with Virginia law, and that she would not tolerate its misuse. I appreciate her position, but I do not have to question her sincerity to question the system.
Chief Mason can set expectations for the officers under her command. She cannot make the same promise for every authorized user at another Virginia department. She cannot personally review every search made through every shared connection. She cannot guarantee that every account will always be configured correctly, that every claimed reason for a search will be truthful, that every improper search will be recognized during an audit, or that the company operating the platform will never experience a mistake, security failure, or breach.
There are too many hands in the pot for any one person’s assurance to cover the whole system. Local officers use it. Other departments may be given access. Supervisors are expected to review searches. Administrators manage accounts and sharing settings. Flock operates and updates the platform. Other companies provide parts of the infrastructure on which the information is stored and processed. These people and organizations do not all have the same access, but each forms part of a chain that must work properly for the protections we have been promised to mean anything.
Virginia law can require a reason for each search. Department policy can prohibit personal use. The system can keep a record of who searched for what. But someone must still determine whether the reason entered was honest, examine the record closely enough to notice a problem, and take action when a search was improper. The existence of an audit trail only tells us that misconduct might be discovered. It does not assure us that the trail is being followed.
The concern is not hypothetical. Officers elsewhere have been accused of using Flock to track romantic partners and other people for personal reasons. Virginia’s own State Crime Commission also found, in a survey conducted after the state’s new ALPR law took effect, that some agencies reported access arrangements that the law did not allow. None of that proves misuse by Fredericksburg police. It does show why rules and assurances should not end the discussion.
The original Panopticon had one tower. With Flock, there is no single tower and no single person inside it. There are cameras along the road, records gathered in databases, users in different departments, agreements about sharing, company employees maintaining the technology, and laws and policies that the public must largely trust others to enforce. We can see the cameras, but we cannot see most of what happens after we pass them.
Our government and law-enforcement agencies have a duty to protect us. That means giving police effective tools when those tools are necessary. It also means making sure those tools do what we have been told they do, that their reach does not quietly expand, and that people who have done nothing wrong are not treated as possible criminals simply because it has become easy to record and search their movements.
We are not prisoners in our community. We are citizens participating in a relationship with our government that depends on mutual trust. That trust cannot consist only of the public being asked to accept that the people inside the tower are behaving responsibly. It must also allow the public to understand what can be seen from the tower, who is allowed inside, and who is checking their work.
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Theodore G. Blackwell is president of the League of Women Voters of the Fredericksburg Area. He is a 2026 graduate of the University of Mary Washington, where he studied political science with a focus on public policy, government administration, and intergovernmental relations. Originally from Western North Carolina, Blackwell has lived in Spotsylvania County since 2025.
Thank you sir. I share your concerns.