Flock cameras are invariably deployed by local police departments.

Local officials are the most vulnerable class to being voted out, because local elections are dominated by local issues, not national issues or party politics.

Make the surveillance cameras a local election issue. Raise awareness at local community groups. Be loud. You will see them be taken down quickly.

reminds me of that old movie, where the government basically had a "time machine" of surveillance technology and could stalk you for hours days ago with no oversight.

What is worse the police being able to do so dragnets (not good) but the flip side is they actually solve some crimes you do care about, or random companies hovering up data from all kinda of public records and using it for gwd only knows what?

We can argue if surveillance tools like this are valuable enough to policing to justify the intrusions and what the controls should be. 'Get warrant' I expect actually would destroy almost all the value because the main problem they are trying to solve with this are crime spotting, and suspect identification, not 'find this guy' even if they are super effective at that, type 1 errors aside...

The real issues are public recording and data aggregation generally and in the commercial space particularly. You don't want Amazon showing you a little higher prices than your neighbor because they know how clean you keep your car, do you? That is probably the most innocent application.

As far as law enforcement and government go... The reality all this data is going to get swept and aggregated up AND no matter what laws you make will be abused by government, in all sorts of ways we can't even imagine (though not like this is happening already). The laws we make do not matter because there is no public will to hold government accountable at all. The Epstine files are instructive here, a law was very publicly enacted with very wide public support, it required all the files to be delivered to congress and later published. Specifically it called for ONLY VICTIMS to be redacted. Guess what happened the FBI redacted all sorts of things besides just VICTIM identification before the files ever got to the parent DOJ. It took Khanna and Massie about 2 hours to figure that out looking at what they got. Nobody did a f***ing thing! Again laws don't matter here, because they simply won't be followed.

If we want privacy though we need to bite the bullet and recognize the only things are really going to work are, heavy prohibitions against public recording by EVERYONE individuals, corporates, and yes even so called journalists. Similarly strict controls on aggregation and combination of ANY data-source you did not yourself generate first party. For the sake of being able to do research and understand cause and effect we have to allow some of that but probably need to create a national registry of PII, if have any such records on individuals you don't directly employ, care for as a patient, provide a financial service to, the record formats should have to be disclosed, a long with a statement of users in a consistent searchable format, and expected retention period.

> After all, the surveillance business model is the problem

No, the problem is that the surveillance business model is legal.

So, would they also need a warrant for Ring camera video that a homeowner is willing to provide freely? And will they be stopped by the law from accepting video from a homeowner unless a warrant were signed too? Same thing, different company, right?

Unfortunately, most judges will rubber stamp warrant requests so they're not quite the check/balance they were intended to be.

Someone will figure out how to break into either the Flock camera or the network due to poor security practices or laziness.

Then it will be a free for all of data dumping. Followed by a comedy of failures trying to secure the networks.

Then calls to government to help them but by then the government will pile on because they think they can get fines as income from the company.

Then Chapter 11 followed by 7. Liquidation sales, thefts, etc., and people bragging about putting the cameras to use as a private sec

LOL!

No.

EFF is completely wrong here. It would never stand up in court to tell a private company that they can't willingly give info to the police. You can demand that the police need a warrant to get info from them, but you can't restrict a company or citizen from volunteering the data. What we need is the Flock cams GONE.

> This all leads to the bigger and more important issue: We should not be letting companies decide how much privacy we deserve... It shouldn't be up to Flock or any other ALPR vendor to decide how long police can collect and retain data

No, the bigger and more important issue is that we should not be letting anyone retain that data. If you want to do ALPR there is one and only one correct way to do it: You build a list of license plates you want information about after getting warrants about them, that list is sent to the point of recognition whether it's a camera or a data center, and any data about any plate not that list is not stored . There is no other way to fix the problem besides not collecting the data in the first place, period.

...with extraordinary penalties - I mean like immediate firing AND PROSECUTION - for authorities given access to the data using it for any reason aside from the direct execution of a clearly-defined warrant.

In essence, as a person in authority, you should view being granted access to fishing through these things with anxiety, like being "the guy who has the key to the money room". You have a position of a) substantial access to personal data, and b) a low barrier to abuse (eg it's unfortunately technically

The warrant issue should revolve around one question: what is the likely, foreseeable outcome of having to wait for a judge to sign off on a warrant. It's low risk to get a warrant to pursue a typical car thief. It's unacceptably high risk to make law enforcement wait if the request is based around an Amber Alert or a suspect who is armed and dangerous and just fled the scene of a violent felony.

A warrant would be required for every use.

The control console would be in the courthouse, not the police station.

Every use would be monitored by an officer of the court.

Every use would be logged and entered into the public record.

It's really as simple as this: a private company should not be able to circumvent our 4th amendment rights.

Even if their collection of the data is legal on the face of it, their use and sale of that data to law enforcement should explicitly not be. LE using a private company to end-run the 4th amendment needs to be struct down by SCOTUS in no uncertain terms. Every single search done by LE should have a signed warrant - no exceptions.

Looking more broadly, congress needs to get it's shit together and pass laws restricting this kind of mass surveillance in general.

The 'problem' is there's plenty of uses to justify this "we caught the car thief" but the potential for abuse is FAR too great. The utter invasion of privacy is beyond reason. Better a criminal go free than an innocent man be jailed.

It's not the ALPR. It's the registration lookup that's the problem. ALPR - the core tech - is genuinely useful. Consider this thought experiment: normal people (you, me and our neighbourhood posse) implement our own ALPR network. We run it on poles in frontyards, on old mobiles duct-taped to windows, on personal phones in its cradle as we drive around. We run torrents that sync ALPR data with trusted nodes. Someone vibe-codes an app that correlates ALPR data with public crime report: It flag plates possibly associated with crime, such as the casing of an area before burglaries. Another app detects bad driving (yes, where someone's "bad" could be someone else's "snazz").

So far, all is functioning as it should. Capturing ALPR data privately is just photography in a public area with no privacy violation. The plates are both and provide anonymity to vehicle owners, divers and passenger. The private ALPR network could help report concerns about specific plates to the police with no idea who owns the plates.

What breaks privacy is running a plate/car registration. Now you know the owner, where they live, whether they have insurance. Doing *that* should require lawful exigency or a warrant.