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First and foremost FLOCK has become an all encompassing term for safety cameras when there are multiple types and brands, but more on that later.When this subject is debated the question(s) almost immediately arrive at “What about missing children?” or “What about solving crime?” I have not seen taken the stance anyone that “Flock never helps solve a crime”, it obviously sometimes does. However, a system generating billions of scans on people with no connection to any crime, with a documented one-in-three false positive rate in at least one major audit, and a track record of being repurposed for stalking, surveillance, and questionable investigations, cannot be justified by pointing to its best-case use. If the safeguards only catch abuse after the search, then the privacy harm is already done. That’s precisely why Flock itself announced new safeguards this month. Shortening default retention from 30 to 7 days, requiring case-number justification for searches, activating a previously optional feature that flags “abnormal search behavior” and immediately locks out suspicious users. This after its own audits and investigative reporting exposed the scope of misuse.A company tightening controls in response to documented abuse is not consistent with “this tool is only ever used to catch bad guys.”You’ve probably also heard, “There’s no reasonable expectation of privacy in public.”While this is true for a single glance, false for aggregated, retained, searchable tracking. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected this equivalence. The Court held that the government’s acquisition of just seven days of a suspect’s historical cell-site location records constituted a Fourth Amendment search, even though the data reflected movements over public roads that anyone could theoretically have observed. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that “a detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled” record of someone’s movements reveals their “familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations”. This is an intimacy of information that isn’t diminished just because each individual data point occurred somewhere public. The Court explicitly rejected the argument that Carpenter forfeited his privacy interest by exposing his location to a third party (his cell carrier), which is the same “you exposed it publicly” logic Flock proponents use for license plates.As I mentioned before, Flock is a brand and their “Falcon” Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras are just one type of surveillance component in the package. They also have their “Condor” AI powered Point Tilt Zoom (PTZ) camera designed to recognize and track humans as well as “Alpha” the automated Drone First Responder (DFR), that can launch automatically based on 911 calls or sensor alerts. It is capable of autonomously following vehicles and reading plates from 2,000 feet. These components integrate together in Flock’s mass surveillance ecosystem.Axon, yes the manufacturer of the leading law enforcement body camera has jumped into the market with their own version of an ALPR known as the “Outpost”. They’re also marketing a camera system named “Lightpost” that quickly attaches to existing streetlights and combines ALPR, live-streaming and vehicle attribute recognition. Axon also has their own version of a DFR, “Air”.Possibly the most concerning is defense contractor Leonardo with their surveillance technology known as “SignalTrace”. This ADDS wireless sensors to ALPRs. It captures nearby device identifiers like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and RFID signatures from phones, smartwatches, and laptops to build a trackable "electronic fingerprint" of vehicle occupants rather than just tracking the vehicle's license plate. Think about the electronics you carry, the chips in your cards, ID badges, even a pets microchip. Those unique identifiers become you.Flock is just one of the public safety brands, but it’s not just about public safety. This is about the normalization of the surveillance state through the use of fear and emotion to erode YOUR liberty. If you’ve made it this far, I’ll leave you with this. What accompanied the sharp rise in safety cameras and sensors? The data center boom.