Public resistance is growing, too, with residents in some communities damaging the cameras, as happened recently in Havelock, North Carolina.

HaveIBeenFlocked.com and DeFlock.org are two sites s helping citizens scrutinize the spread of automated license-plate readers. The first is making police audit logs searchable and the second is mapping camera locations across the country, while providing plenty of commentary on the threats these cameras pose to rights and individual privacy.

Critics argue that the Fourth Amendment should protect Americans from having their daily movements tracked and stored by the government without a warrant. Some critics have gone so far as to compare these camera networks to the surveillance state of the former East German Stasi.

Clearly, there is evidence the technology can help police but the consequences can be dire or even deadly when they get it wrong.

The video below reveals why those questions matter.

Also, Connor Boyack recently raised the broader concern in his essay, “Flock’s CEO Said the Quiet Part Out Loud.” Boyack acknowledges that these systems can help solve crimes. His warning is that the understandable desire for safety cannot become a blank check for building a nationwide surveillance network. He calls for warrant requirements, short data-retention periods, and public audits of how these systems are used.

A recent Wall Street Journal piece by Jon Hartley makes the case that Alexis de Tocqueville deserves a statue in Washington, D.C. It’s a compelling argument, especially for anyone who cares about federalism and all the habits that make self government possible.

Perhaps the monument and tributes to Tocqueville are already all around us. The name of our publication, American Habits, is itself a nod to his great insight that self-government depends not only on constitutional design, but on the habits, associations, faith, families, and communities that shape a free people.

Plus, Tocqueville was most impressed with the America outside of Washington. Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” endures because it continually returns to the central question of whether a free people can govern themselves.

More from Hartley in the WSJ:

Tocqueville looked at our “habits of the heart,” society’s ingrained cultural norms, moral beliefs, religion, and civic values. He saw the merits of a Constitution that protects individual rights from the tyranny of the majority. He also saw that the engines of American exceptionalism were its vibrant local ecosystems. He was mesmerized by America’s unique genius for association, meaning the tendency of ordinary citizens to band together to build schools and churches and to solve community problems without waiting for a king or a federal bureaucrat.

Those organic community bonds have fractured in our modern era. Since the early 20th century, the administrative state has expanded, attempting to manage local issues from the environment to education. This accumulation of centralized power mirrors the “soft despotism” Tocqueville feared, which reduces an energetic, industrious people into dependents managed by a bureaucratic class that is unaccountable even to the executive. The Supreme Court and the Trump administration have made progress in rolling this back.

Ever the renaissance man, he wrote it in a few days in an upstairs room on Market Street in Philadelphia and was said to periodically play his violin during breaks in his writing.

The document has a rat-tat-tat cadence that expresses urgency and authority. For really the first time, the divine right of kings explicitly takes a backseat to the natural rights of mankind, stating “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Already known as a talented and prolific writer in Virginia and beyond, Jefferson was raising up permanent truths about self-government and the nature of mankind out of the colonial rebellion against the English Crown.

“It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions,” declared Calvin Coolidge.

Jefferson is often considered one of the most controversial American founders. Nearly everybody can find faults with him. His personal attachment to slavery throughout his life is almost always the chief complaint. How can he write this or say that and own slaves?

A Jefferson statue was even removed from New York’s City Hall in 2021. I’m certain that’s not the only recent example of Jefferson erasure measures. Christians take issue with his obvious deist beliefs. Some conservatives have long been suspicious of Jefferson, particularly his enthusiasm for France during the nation’s violent, unordered, and secular revolution. Alexander Hamilton put the criticism sharply, accusing Jefferson and his faction of having “a womanish attachment to France.”

But Jefferson is very human and American in his contradictions. I find myself drawn to Jefferson, especially as a writer. His beautiful articulation of the rights of man that transcend the state can’t be appreciated enough. Coolidge was right to say that we can’t advance beyond the principles of the document during his notable 150th address on the anniversary of the Declaration. To try to do so only becomes a fall backward against progress.

Heading into America250 and beyond, I believe the task for citizens and lawmakers alike is to live up to those principles and to the high purposes of our own founding. The guideposts are still there, calling us not to move beyond them, but to live up to them.

I’ll have an American Habits issue out later this summer on urban issues. Socialism on the rise is one of the big topics in urban governance.

For now, I put together a video on socialism in cities, but I’m sure we’ll have plenty of opportunities to keep talking about it here.

I read a lot of military history and it helps me to study and think about leadership styles. Halsey’s style definitely leaned towards heavy delegation. He expected his subordinates to seize the initiative as he would. If men came to him with what he viewed as small problems or an issue within their capabilities, he usually worked to relieve them of command authority. He no longer trusted their ability to be decisive in the heat and pressure of combat.

Decentralized mission command in the military is nothing new. Some of America’s strategic thinking here is partially influenced by the Germans. The term is Auftragstaktik: commanders define the objective and intent, but subordinates closest to the action are expected to exercise quick judgment and initiative. Of course, there is a little irony here because the United States was able to seize the initiative during the D-Day landings because of decisions by and through the initiative of junior officers and NCOs against the then top-heavy command of Germany, which by 1944 was awaiting instruction on how to respond from Hitler himself.

Probably one of the more notable examples cited is then Lt. Dick Winters of Easy Company. Part of the airborne landings, he did not drop into order and clarity. Like many airborne troops, he landed into chaos, with scattered units and broken chains of command. Yet near Brécourt Manor, Winters led a small group of paratroopers against a German artillery battery threatening the Utah Beach landings. He had no formal orders or anybody telling him what to do. He understood his mission and he had a few men, and took the initiative to seize the battery.

That type of empowered initiative works well with Americans because of our republican form of government and independent spirit. Our system of federalism and dispersion of power compliments it. As Herbert Hoover said after the great Mississippi Flood of 1927, “The safety of the United States is its multitudinous mass leadership.” Hoover said he didn’t need to call out the entire army because Main Street was already active and well equipped to handle the mission of disaster relief.

I feel like that is a phrase worth remembering as we approach America250.

The American experiment has never depended only on presidents, generals or national institutions. It has depended on citizens willing to take responsibility where they are, which certainly includes civil society, local government, and the commercial sector. That is why I sometimes roll my eyes, even though I can be guilty of it too, when we incessantly prattle on about who the president happens to be.

America’s next 250 years will require the same qualities if we are going to prosper and endure: not a nation waiting to be managed from the top, but a republic full of Americans willing to lead where they are.

I was just a kid when President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Because I had seen Bush in person multiple times on military bases growing up, I paid closer attention than most kids probably would have to the news surrounding Thomas’s nomination.

The Anita Hill allegations exposed me, probably earlier than I should have been, to some of the uglier details of adult politics. I recognized some of the senators on the Judiciary Committee. Joe Biden was familiar to me because of his disastrous 1988 presidential campaign, but for reasons I still can’t fully explain, Alabama Sen. Howell Heflin is the figure who has always stayed with me from those hearings. Maybe it was the heavy deep Southern accent and I had no real knowledge of him previously.

There was obviously real doubt that Thomas would be confirmed. I remember thinking it looked like a lost cause because of the negative media coverage surrounding his nomination. He helped save his nomination by his steely and perhaps cantankerous testimony. The final vote was 52-48.

Years later, as an undergraduate at Ole Miss, I took a Southern Studies class where we discussed racial violence, particularly the history of lynching in the Deep South. When the professor asked us to offer a modern example connected to the subject, I brought up Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings and his use of the phrase “high-tech lynching.” I could tell she did not care for the answer and quickly pivoted. Maybe it was because of her politics, or maybe because Thomas complicated the usual categories through which those discussions were framed. I intentionally brought him up for a reason though and her dismissive reaction stayed with me. At the very least her reaction seemed to suggest Thomas is of no importance.

He’s now the second longest serving U.S. Supreme Court justice in history and probably one of our best civic educators today. I read and reviewed Thomas’s autobiography “My Grandfather’s Son.” Autobiographies are usually awful books but his is quite good. It uplifts so many of those important and enduring values that are desperately needed now.

I’ve learned a great deal from Thomas over the years. In a recent piece, I wrote about why his speech at the University of Texas at Austin was so compelling: instead of merely applauding civic pride for America250, he reinforced that modern progressivism carries with it a dangerous anthropology.

He continues to remind Americans of the importance of the founding, and of the responsibilities that must accompany our rights.

Much of his life and work points back to a truth he expressed powerfully in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges:

Our Constitution—like the Declaration of Independence before it—was predicated on a simple truth: One’s liberty, not to mention one’s dignity, was something to be shielded from—not provided by—the State.

When I was in seminary and taking a class on Thomas Aquinas, I wrote a paper on Thomas’s natural law influences, which I was a little surprised my professor ended up loving. Writing it helped me to see at an even deeper level how closely connected law needs to be to moral truths.

I admire Thomas because I feel aligned with him from a worldview perspective. But the stories I’ve heard about him also reinforce the sense that he is a friend and champion of the common man. He does not seem especially worried about, or influenced by, elite opinion. Nobody is close to perfect, of course. But what I admire most is that Thomas appears so clearly anchored in conviction rather than popular acceptance. In the end, if America is going to recover its true meaning and purpose, we need examples of that kind of courage. Clarence Thomas has spent his life reminding us that such conviction is still possible.