"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Benjamin Franklin wrote those words in 1755, defending the Pennsylvania Assembly's authority against a governor who wanted more power in the name of protecting the frontier. Two hundred and seventy years later, his warning belongs in Tyler County.
Residents have begun reporting automated license plate reader cameras, the kind made by a company called Flock Safety, at points around Woodville. These are not red-light cameras or speed traps. They are solar-powered units mounted on poles that photograph the rear of every vehicle that passes, day and night, and feed that image into a searchable, nationwide database. The system logs the make, model, and color of your vehicle, along with the date, time, and exact location it was seen. It does this whether or not you are suspected of anything at all.
I want to be careful here. This is not an argument that license plate readers can never do any good, or that the people who install them mean any harm. Departments across the country credit them with recovering stolen vehicles and finding missing persons, and I do not doubt those successes are real. This is an argument about the Fourth Amendment, which protects Texans from unreasonable searches, and about what happens when a technology quietly outgrows the constitutional limits we built for a reason.
The Fourth Amendment has never just protected against officers rifling through your glove box. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that when the government can assemble a detailed record of a person's movements over time, that record-keeping is itself a search, even if each individual data point was collected in public. A single photograph of your truck at a stop sign is nothing. Four years of photographs, time-stamped and searchable in seconds, is a map of your entire life: where you worship, who you visit, what doctor you see, where your kids go to school. That is exactly the kind of aggregated record the Court was worried about, and it is exactly what this network is built to create.
We do not have to imagine how that power gets misused, because it already has been, in documented cases.
In May of 2025, a sheriff's deputy in Johnson County, Texas, used the Flock network to search for a woman law enforcement believed had undergone an abortion. One of the searches the deputy ran queried more than 83,000 cameras across dozens of states, according to records later obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sweeping in states where the procedure is entirely legal. The stated reason logged in the system was blunt: the deputy was searching for a woman because she'd had an abortion. Whatever a person believes about that issue, everyone should be alarmed that one deputy, with no warrant, could mobilize a surveillance net spanning half the country to track a private citizen who was not charged with any crime tied to those cameras.
The same year, a Navy veteran named Lee Schmidt sued the city of Norfolk, Virginia, with help from the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, after discovering that the city's camera network had logged his truck 526 times in about four months, roughly four times a day, every single day. Schmidt was not a suspect in anything. He was simply a man who drove his own truck around his own city, and the government watched him do it, automatically, permanently, and without his knowledge. That case is now on appeal.
These are not stories about liberal cities or conservative counties. A sitting Republican congressman from Texas has introduced federal legislation requiring a warrant before agencies can pull this kind of data, precisely because the concern crosses every political line. Protecting Texans from warrantless government tracking is not a partisan cause. It is the plain text of our Bill of Rights.
So here is what I am asking of my neighbors in Woodville and across Tyler County, whatever your view on this technology ends up being: find out the facts for yourself. Ask the Woodville City Council and the Tyler County Commissioners Court, in an open meeting, whether any license plate reader contract, grant, or agreement exists with our city or county's name on it. Ask the Sheriff's Office whether it can search, or be searched by, any camera network beyond our county line, and under what rules. These bodies are required by Texas law to answer you in an open meeting, and you are entitled under the Texas Public Information Act to the paper trail. You do not need a lawyer or a permission slip to ask a simple question of the people we elected: who is watching, who can look, and who is holding them accountable?
Benjamin Franklin's line is quoted so often it risks becoming background noise. It shouldn't be. Liberty is rarely lost all at once. It is lost one camera, one contract, and one unasked question at a time. Tyler County still has the chance to ask the question first.
Sal Baldovinos is a Woodville resident and business owner.
