Fluck Flock Flack – Recorded tracking and monitoring of everyone, everywhere, all the time is what Flock does or can do – that by definition chills and thus subverts freedom; it also directly counters US Supreme Court

Recorded tracking and monitoring of everyone, everywhere, all the time is what Flock does or can do – that by definition chills and thus subverts freedom, it also directly counters US Supreme Court (Carpenter vs US, SCOTUS 2018: ‘Persons maintain legit expectation of privacy in the record of physical movements…’) — Flock etc has already been indirectly interpreted by SCOTUS as unconstitutional.

Institute for Justice is suing Flock Safety’s automatic license plate reader camera network per Flock’s violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution: (1) Flock cameras let police track people’s car movements across a city/region. (2) This creates a warrantless “dragnet” surveillance system. (3) IJ argues that continuously collecting and searching location data about ordinary drivers is an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. (4) They compare it to the Supreme Court’s concern in Carpenter v. United States about long-term location tracking without a warrant. So: the lawsuit is about warrantless mass vehicle-location tracking using Flock ALPR cameras. Such has already been decided by SCOTUS as unconstitutional, so it is just a matter of time before Flock Safety ALPR cameras will also be ruled unconstitutional: SCOTUS has ruled that mass warrantless surveillance is unconstitutional.

The Civil Rights Lawyer and counsel for Institute for Justice RE Flock and its anti-Freedom and thus anti-American essence.

San Jose, California — an egregious anti-American / anti-Freedom Big-Brother-Zone has over 500 FLOCK cameras that captured over 340 million images in 2024, virtually none of which had anything to do with any criminal investigation. 4:00 in

Brands

FLOCK, AXON, Vigilant Solutions

“I have nothing to hide”

Civil Right Lawyer: What do you say to people who say, “I’m not doing anything wrong. I don’t care if we have Flock cameras around because I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not committing any crimes, and I want the police to catch criminals.’ what is the best way to get through to somebody like that?

Institute for Justice:

The way criminal codes are written is so incredibly broad that it’s trivially easy for police to start with the person and then figure out a criminal offense. Youu never know how police are going to ultimately use these systems. And, even if they stop you for one thing, they may be able to pin another thing on you…

More broadly, we just never know how the government will be using the sorts of data that it collects. One reason the framers [of the US Constitution] adopted the Fourth Amendment is because they saw in their own time how over enforcemen of customs laws really chilled people’s ability to to feel secure in their homes. … People should [not] be comfortable [with the fact] that police [pre-] collect whatever information they want [naively expecting that such] will never have negative consequences.

[Persons insisting that they] ‘have nothing to hide’ [should] let the police into [their] home whenever [police] want: Sign a document [allowing], “I consent to police entering my home for any reason at any time.” We all have private matters that aren’t illegal that certainly we don’t just want thrown open to the police.

In our society, the balance that our framers struck is that we don’t just let police do whatever they propose would let them ‘catch criminals’ or let them ‘prevent crime’ [“pre-crime”, per MINORITY REPORT movie], because the consequence of doing that would be loss of freedom. We would lose our ability to be secure in our persons, houses, papers and effects – exactly the security that the the Fourth Amendment guarantees.

The model of policing and the one embodied in the Fourth Amendment is that police need suspicion before they intrude on your privacy in this country. In repressive regimes and totalitarian countries, people are always under suspicion. People are always being monitored in case they do anything “wrong”, and that’s just not the model that we follow in this country. [We abide the] model that’s embodied in the Fourth Amendment, and automated license plate readers [FLOCK Cameras] really just subvert that.

The leading vendor Flock Safety says that its national LPR network collects 20 billion plus data points per month. Virtually none of those have anything to do with a criminal investigation. Those are all just capturing the movements of ordinary law-abiding people as they’re going about their days. But they’re effectively being treated as criminals. They’re being [monitored and in-effect surveilled] all the time, and that information is being saved ‘just in case’ later the police decide that the person did [or may have done] something “wrong” [that the police] want to investigate. None of that access is mediated by a warrant.

This mass-surveillance beyond the kind of collection of data has real consequences for people because none of these systems, none of these technologies are 100% accurate. They all depend on human inputs as well. And so when you’re scanning 20 billion plus license plates per month [with] even a 1% 2% 3% error rate or more, that’s a lot of errors. That’s potentially a lot of people who are being pulled over based on a camera misreading their license plate, based on an officer with a fat finger incorrectly entering the license plate, and potentially held at gunpoint, maybe handcuffed, subjected to the indignity of a stop, and maybe even a longer detention. Those are real consequences of having a mass-surveillance system that’s investigating people all the time everywhere.

Americans have always been pretty skeptical of government surveillance. … Certainly in the post 911 era, there were tons of government surveillance programs that people were understandably very concerned about, but in in those cases the surveillance was often invisible. People didn’t know if it affected them or who it affected. It was something that was kind of happening in the background that didn’t have a tangible effect on their lives.

With automated license plate readers, people see them. They drive around and they see them on their routes and they can reconstruct in their heads how someone might go into the databases and figure out where they’re driving, where they’re going, who they’re meeting with. So people have a really visceral reaction because the surveillance is is visible in their lives. They actually feel it. And I think that’s what’s really accounted for this huge national movement against mass-surveillance through automated license plate readers.