Flock's real change is a private, warrantless national network

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 12:27

   So ALPRs have existed, I believe, since the 1970s, and I think they started getting used in the United States in the late 80s and 90s. And one of the classic ways that they would be used in the 2000s is they would be mounted on a police car. And if a police car wanted to run someone's plate, that way they didn't have to type it in while they're driving and they could run a plate over to dispatch. I personally don't have any problem with that.

2. 12:51

   I think that makes sense. That's a decent use. So, however, you would have issues where you would get plate misreads and then people would get taken out of their car at gunpoint as a result. Flock is a lot different. Flock basically started a private nationwide network where any police department or city that's using Flock's network, they can opt into it and share their data with it. And then police departments across the country can run a license plate with 30 days of retention on everywhere someone's been.

3. 13:22

   anywhere in the country as long as they're sharing data. So you would have someone in Texas being able to search somebody's movement through New York or Atlanta or something like that. And they were doing this, they are doing this without a warrant, whereas any type of ALPR data sharing previous to Flock had to go through the National Crime Information Center, which does require a magistrate judge to look at the overall context of a situation and then issue a warrant.

4. 13:50

   warrant to allow tracking. So that's the innovation here, right? They built the private network, the private database. They convinced a bunch of law enforcement agencies to buy their system and they could opt in. And there's some kind of legal innovation here where by making it a private database, they could just sort of excuse themselves from the warrant process. But the actual hardware of the cameras is not all that impressive, right? There's something about that, that I really just want to hone in on. The idea of the flock camera being the problem is secondary to the flock network being the problem. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one way that I think of it, a lot of the defense of flock cameras, even outside of flock themselves, is that it's all happening in public. So this is all in public view. So it's generally the same as

5. 14:36

   you're allowed to take a picture anywhere in public. So why can't they do this? My argument would be that if you were to have a police officer follow someone or go through public traffic cams, which are all over the country, go through every single public traffic cam and wait for your car to come and then write down when that was there and do that for 30 days, that's generally like a serial killer situation.

6. 14:59

   Like the amount of, you know what I mean? The amount of resources that you have to dump into that, you would have to justify that expense with a very serious crime. But doing that for somebody who, you know, stole stakes from a Kroger is very different. And I think, you know, what worries me about it is that you might end up with police officers being able to get a lead on a case much easier that doesn't necessarily need police for society to become safer in a better place, like a nonviolent crime or, you know, something that's not a huge deal, rather than investigating on more serious crimes.