One evening back in March, I stood up in front of the Auburn City Council and asked a simple question: who decided this?
Cameras had been installed around our city that can read and log the license plate of every car that drives past. Auburn Police Department, through a 2023 federal grant, received funding to install their own.
Auburn residents were never told the cameras were being installed. We were certainly never asked whether we wanted them!
That is where this starts for me. I and my own neighbors were learning… after the fact… that our daily movements were being recorded.
It’s unacceptable.
Thanks to pushback, Auburn City Council isn’t funding these cameras in its next budget, and they are expected to take the current batch down. But without a ban, there’s nothing to say they won’t try to add more in the future.
I am not talking about a problem somewhere far away. Androscoggin County, where Lewiston and Auburn sit side by side as the county’s main service center, has quietly become one of the more camera-dense corners of the country. The crowdsourced mapping project @therealDeFlock counts 18 readers in Androscoggin, ranking it well into the top fifth of the nation’s counties. And that is only the ones people have found and reported.
Lewiston now runs the largest network of these cameras of any agency in Maine with Auburn not far behind.
What these cameras actually do
The cameras going up around Maine are largely sold by @Flock_Safety, though some are made by other companies like Verkada, Motorola, and Genetec. They are automated license plate readers, and they do not just flag a stolen car and move on. Each one photographs every vehicle that passes, capturing the plate, the make, the model, the color, and distinguishing features right down to roof racks and bumper stickers, then pairs all of that with the time and the location and uploads it to a searchable database.
Not even just cars. Pedestrians and bicyclists have been caught up in Flock’s dragnet as well.
A police officer who happens to see me driving down Main Street has always been allowed to do that. But there is a real difference when every trip you take is logged, time-stamped, and dropped into a system that police hundreds of miles away can query. The U.S. Supreme Court has wrestled with exactly that distinction. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the justices recognized that stitching together enough location data can reveal the intimate details of a person’s life, even when each individual sighting happened in public.
Maine saw this coming
Here is something we should be proud of. Maine put rules on this technology earlier than most of the country.
State law limits who may use these readers to law enforcement, the Department of Transportation, and the Turnpike Authority, and it says the data cannot be stored for more than 21 days. Thankfully, that is one of the shortest retention limits of any state in the nation.
But here is the catch. That 21-day clock governs Maine agencies. It does NOT govern the national network these cameras feed into, and it does NOT follow the data once it is shared with agencies in other states.
And that is not a hypothetical.
When Flock first arrived in Maine, York was the only town running it. That is no longer true.
By late May, at least five Maine police departments had installed these systems: Lewiston, Auburn, Falmouth, South Portland, and York. The spread has been fast, and thankfully, the pushback has been significant.
York deactivated its cameras after officials discovered that Flock had shared the town’s data with Homeland Security Investigations and ICE, on a trial basis, without telling the public. The town has elected not to be part of the national network. Saco tabled a plan to add 140 more cameras.
In South Portland, residents packed a City Council workshop on May 19, many of them only learning their movements were being logged when the police asked the budget to buy another camera. Days later, on May 28, the police chief announced the department would stop feeding South Portland’s data into Flock’s national network, which had reached roughly 700 agencies, and limit sharing to Maine only. Some residents say that does not go far enough. When it revisited the question on June 11, city councilors voted 5-2 to immediately terminate the contract with Flock and disable the city’s seven cameras.
Up north, Houlton built a town-wide camera system, made by Verkada, whose facial recognition capability ran afoul of Maine’s law. After public records requests and court filings, those cameras came down.
The ACLU of Maine is now filing records requests in roughly a dozen Maine towns, because Flock has been running an aggressive sales push, with free trials and steep discounts, often with very little public input.
Dealing with objections
I have sat through the council meetings and read the emails, so let me take the pushback head on.
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
The Fourth Amendment was written for the innocent, not just the accused. Privacy was never a shield for the guilty. It is the difference between a free people and subjects of the government.
“You have no privacy on public roads anyway.”
There is a world of difference between a neighbor seeing your car go by and a system that remembers every trip you have ever taken and lets a stranger search it. The Supreme Court grasps that difference even when the technology’s defenders pretend not to.
“These cameras catch real criminals.”
Some do, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Police have used them to recover stolen vehicles and crack serious cases, and that work matters. But there is a difference between running one plate in one investigation and keeping a permanent log of where every law-abiding Mainer drives, then feeding it into a national database. You can want car thieves caught and still believe the government should not track everyone to do it. We strike that balance everywhere else in the law. We let police search a home, with a warrant and a reason. This technology should not get a pass on the rules the rest of us live by.
“Flock says its cameras do not even use facial recognition, and the company says it is the police, not Flock, who decide whether to share the data.”
Both of those things can be true, and it still does not settle me.
You do not need facial recognition to build a map of someone’s life when you already have the plate, the car, the time, the place, and a nationwide network to match it against. Agencies deciding what to share is cold comfort when York discovered its own data leaving the state and nobody had told the public.
Mainers push back when they know
Here is the encouraging part. When Mainers understand what is happening, they speak up, and it cuts across party lines. This session, the Legislature decisively rejected LD 1457, the Turnpike Authority’s automated speed-camera pilot, with opposition from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Years earlier, in 2021, Maine enacted the strongest statewide facial recognition law in the country, which the ACLU of Maine helped bring into law. And just recently, Rep. David Boyer of Poland announced that he will file a bill to bar Maine towns and police departments from using these readers at all, with a narrow exception for toll collection.
That is a Republican, working on the very same problem the ACLU is working on.
This is not a battle of left vs. right. It is a question of whether the government gets to track innocent people, with no warrant, no suspicion, and no knock on the door to ask first. My neighbors in Auburn never got asked. Odds are, neither did yours.
So get informed, then speak up. Ask your town council and your police department a few plain questions. Do we use these cameras? Who can see the data? Is any of it shared outside Maine? You are entitled to the answers, and you may be surprised how few of your neighbors know to ask.
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Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, represents District 90 in the Maine House of Representatives and is the executive director of @Lead_Maine.
For more on this topic, find the episode of Speak Up with Laurel Libby, “An Unlikely Alliance to Protect Mainers’ Privacy” wherever you get your podcasts.