Former Pentagon AI Chief Warns: Are License Plate Cameras Pushing America Toward a China-Style Surveillance State?

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A Warning From Inside the Pentagon

Mark Beall spent years shaping how the U.S. military approaches artificial intelligence. He served as the Pentagon's first-ever AI Policy Director at the Department of Defense's Joint AI Center, and later testified before Congress on AI and national security. Today, as president of the AI Policy Network, he is turning his attention to a domestic concern: automated license plate readers.

Appearing on Fox News' "Saturday in America," Beall said the country must guard against building the very system it claims to oppose. Without proper legal limits, he argued, AI-powered tracking tools could morph into "a China-like surveillance state."

Beall was careful to note that the technology itself is not the enemy. Cameras that scan license plates can help police solve real crimes. But he insisted that innovation without guardrails — clear rules, judicial oversight, and accountability — inevitably drifts toward abuse.

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What Flock Cameras Actually Do

The company at the center of the debate, Flock Safety, makes automated license plate readers (ALPRs) — cameras mounted on poles that photograph every passing vehicle and log its plate number, location, and time. Police departments use the data to investigate crimes, locate stolen cars, and find missing persons.

The scale is significant. Flock says its systems now operate in thousands of communities across nearly every state, and independent trackers estimate well over 100,000 of these cameras are active on American roads. Many communities share their camera data with each other and with outside law enforcement agencies through Flock's network — a feature that has become the flashpoint of the current controversy.

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A Backlash Spreading Across the Political Spectrum

What makes this debate unusual is that it does not split neatly along party lines. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders has called for banning the technology outright. Republican Congressman Tim Burchett has pushed to cut federal funding for local Flock installations. Both cite the same underlying fear: a system that can track any car, anywhere, without a warrant.

That fear has already translated into concrete consequences. Several police departments have fired or charged officers accused of misusing camera access to track ex-partners or people they knew personally — cases that have become a rallying point for critics. In some towns, residents have gone further, cutting down camera poles or covering lenses with signs and cardboard.

The frustration also reached the courts. Residents in California and elsewhere have filed lawsuits alleging that Flock shared license plate data with out-of-state and federal agencies without proper authorization, in some cases allegedly enabling immigration enforcement access — allegations Flock disputes.

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Florida Draws a Hard Line

The most dramatic response so far has come from Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis ordered the Florida Department of Transportation to strip all automated license plate readers from state highway rights-of-way within 30 days, calling the technology's rapid, unchecked spread "out of control."

DeSantis framed the issue in blunt terms: chasing down criminals is legitimate police work, he said, but tracking the daily movements of ordinary, law-abiding residents is not. He also raised a separate concern — that private companies operating these camera networks could profit from selling the location data they collect, with little outside oversight of how it is stored or used.

Flock Safety has responded to the mounting criticism with new company policies, including shortening default data retention to seven days and making misuse-detection audits mandatory for every police department that uses its system. CEO Garrett Langley has publicly argued that safety and privacy are not opposites, and that the real fix lies in stronger accountability for how law enforcement uses the technology — not blanket bans.

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Why the China Comparison Resonates

Beall's choice of words — a "China-like surveillance state" — is not just a rhetorical flourish. The Chinese Communist Party has built what independent researchers describe as the most extensive citizen-monitoring system in the world: hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras, nationwide facial-recognition networks, and a "social credit" system that can restrict a person's ability to fly, ride trains, or enroll their children in certain schools based on state-assigned behavior scores.

Reporting on the system has also documented its use against religious and political minorities, including surveillance cameras installed inside churches, mosques, and temples, and intensified monitoring of groups the CCP treats as ideological threats. Analysts note that Beijing has increasingly sought to export these tools to other governments, raising alarm among human rights researchers about the global spread of AI-driven authoritarian control.

The comparison is a reminder of what critics say is ultimately at stake in the Flock debate: not whether police should have useful tools, but whether the architecture of mass, permanent, searchable location-tracking — once built for one purpose — can ever be reliably contained.

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What Comes Next

More than 100 local governments have already canceled or declined to renew their Flock contracts over the past two years, according to legal advocates tracking the issue, and that number appears likely to grow as more lawsuits and misuse cases surface. Florida's move may also spur other Republican-led states to act; Texas Governor Greg Abbott has already ordered a halt to state funding for Flock installations.

For now, DeSantis and others have called for state legislatures — not just executive orders — to write permanent rules into law, since a governor's directive can be reversed by a successor. Beall's message points to the same conclusion at the federal level: the technology itself is not the threat, but a nation that fails to write clear, enforceable limits into law risks building the very system it claims to reject.

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SOURCES

1. Fox News – "Former Pentagon AI chief warns Flock cameras could create 'China-like surveillance state' in the US" – https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-pentagon-ai-chief-warns-flock-cameras-could-create-china-like-surveillance-state-us
2. ABC News – "Flock cameras trigger nationwide backlash over privacy concerns, police abuse" – https://abcnews.com/US/flock-cameras-trigger-nationwide-backlash-privacy-concerns-police/story?id=136084771
3. ABC News – "Florida to remove license plate readers, such as Flock cameras, from state highways" – https://abcnews.com/US/florida-remove-flock-cameras-state-highway-roads/story?id=136118376
4. Radio Free Asia – "China's homegrown tech boosts global surveillance, social controls: report" – https://www.rfa.org/english/china/2025/02/20/china-ai-neuro-quantum-surveillance-security-threat/
5. Federation of American Scientists – Mark Beall, Jr. biography – https://fas.org/expert/mark-beall-jr/

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