Josh Shapiro challenger supports ban on Flock cameras in Pennsylvania: ‘Invasion of privacy’

Stacy Garrity calling Flock cameras an "intrusive invasion of privacy" isn't some fringe libertarian talking point anymore. It's becoming the mainstream position, and it should be. These are license plate readers bolted to poles across neighborhoods, quietly building a searchable database of everywhere you drive, every day, whether you've done anything wrong or not. Nobody voted for that. Most people didn't even know it was happening until local reporters started digging.

What's notable here is that this cuts across the usual lines. This isn't a partisan gripe about surveillance state overreach dreamed up in a think tank. It's happening in city council meetings and county commissions in red counties and blue ones alike, because regular people are realizing their comings and goings are being logged in a private company's database with murky rules about who gets access and for how long. Police departments love the tool because it works. But "it works" has never been sufficient justification for unchecked government tracking of citizens who aren't suspected of anything.

Garrity making this a campaign issue against Josh Shapiro is smart politics, but it's also just correct policy instinct. Shapiro hasn't exactly rushed to put guardrails on this technology, and that silence is telling. Pennsylvania voters deserve a governor who treats their movements as their own business, not raw material for a tracking network nobody consented to.

There's a version of this technology that could be defensible: narrow use, judicial oversight, real retention limits, actual accountability when it's abused. That's not what most of these deployments look like. Until it is, banning the cameras outright isn't paranoia. It's just paying attention.