Trump’s Flock surveillance cameras in national parks spark outrage over privacy concerns
The National Park Service installed automated license plate reader cameras made by Flock Safety at Yosemite National Park and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The current and former rangers pushed back against the rollout.
The rangers argued the cameras turned protected wilderness into a monitored zone and exposed visitors to tracking without their knowledge.
“Flock protects property, not people or parks. People should be free to recreate in ways that are respectful to the ecosystem — but the surveillance is a disrespectful invasion of privacy,” a current NPS ranger stated to 404 MEDIA.
Rangers say the cameras betray the mission of public land
Another ranger noted that every American should be able to visit a national park without having their location traced by the federal government, adding that wild places sat at the core of American freedom and that nobody should feel afraid to visit them.
A former ranger added that if the public understood public lands were being surveilled, people would push back against it.
Another ranger raised a more specific worry, saying they feared the day a visitor’s trip would be interrupted by a stop at g**point because a license plate reader misread a plate.
They pointed to an incident from the previous year in which Yosemite officials changed rules about hanging flags on the face of El Capitan and then backdated the change to make it appear violators had broken an existing law.
Yosemite and the Park Service defend the purpose of the cameras
The National Park Service told the outlet in a statement that Yosemite used a traffic monitoring system to measure vehicle counts, travel times and wait times at entrance stations. The agency said the cameras were not connected to law enforcement or DMV databases.
Yosemite officials separately said the equipment did not capture license plate numbers and was tied to a larger traffic and parking initiative the park called an Integrated Visitor Information System.
Rangers told reporters the park also planned to fold artificial intelligence into that system so visitors could check conditions before setting out.
Trump says he is still deciding
Donald Trump addressed Flock cameras publicly for the first time when a DAILY CALLER correspondent asked him about the technology as he responded, “It’s being studied right now. You have pros and cons, right? It’s being studied right now.”
“We’ll have an answer as to our views on it over the next couple of weeks,” he added.
A separate report from the WASHINGTON EXAMINER noted that Flock’s cameras had already drawn interest from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been able to access footage through arrangements with local police departments.
Flock responds with new limits
Facing sustained criticism, Flock Safety chief executive Garrett Langley announced changes to the company’s data practices, cutting the default retention period for captured data from 30 days to seven and giving individual police departments the option to set their own retention rules.
Langley later told FOX NEWS host Kayleigh McEnany in an interview that he wanted to find a national compromise between public safety and privacy protections, as videos of vandalized camera poles and signs blocking camera lenses continued to circulate from cities including St. Petersburg, Florida.