Privacy, encryption vs. Surveillance state
- Thread starter pmbug
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It's too bad that the police can't police themselves enough to restrict the use of these cameras to the legitimate uses that 99.9% of all people would agree that they would be ok to use them for.
.....as long as they are also accurate, too.
What if they were only used in cases of serious felonies (murder, arson, robbery kidnapping etc) with real victims.
Edited to add: who wouldn't want to have a camera to see which way a kidnapper went?
As in either needing a warrant to access data or an active investigation. Like using them to see which way a bank robber went to get away.
.....and have serious penalties for misuse. Including automatic jail time.
As it is, they want to use them for petty crimes and do so without even having verification if the camera reads a plate correctly before stopping people with guns drawn.
It's like the cops got these things and then turned their own brains off, and just follow whatever the computer says.
F'in' idiots.
.....as long as they are also accurate, too.
What if they were only used in cases of serious felonies (murder, arson, robbery kidnapping etc) with real victims.
Edited to add: who wouldn't want to have a camera to see which way a kidnapper went?
As in either needing a warrant to access data or an active investigation. Like using them to see which way a bank robber went to get away.
.....and have serious penalties for misuse. Including automatic jail time.
As it is, they want to use them for petty crimes and do so without even having verification if the camera reads a plate correctly before stopping people with guns drawn.
It's like the cops got these things and then turned their own brains off, and just follow whatever the computer says.
F'in' idiots.
Those people should just be banned from even being able to use this stuff.
If we have it at all, it should be police only.
.....and then with serious restrictions on their use.
As in let the hoa's have them, but they can only be accessed by police in response to actual, and serious crimes.
Police never can.
Not in all of history.
It's human nature.
This is why DECENTRALIZATION of police power is so effective, and essential to prevent police-state tyranny.
Unfortunately this Flockup, just consolidates a lot of power, and then, as abuses come out, the Left's answer is always MOAR CONSOLIDATION.
That's why we can't have have nice things.
.....or in this case, a useful tool to help catch kidnappers and murderers.
Instead, they use it to make false accusations of porch piracy.
If Flock had to pay $10 million dollars to each person wrongly accused of a crime based on information provided by Flock, they'd fix the problem so that it never happened again.
FLOCK company is committing what amounts to a FELONY and obstruction of justice
Flock suddenly updated their system to strip the "searching officer's name, the license plate queried, and open-text search reasons" from the Network Audit Logs.
Flock is destroying the only evidentiary trail that proves cops are committing federal stalking crimes (18 U.S.C. § 2261A).
Flock's leadership knows their product is being used to commit felonies. When they altered the logs to hide the identities of the officers making the searches, they transitioned from a neutral technology provider to an active co-conspirator in concealing those felonies.
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Not ONLY this here is the 2nd FELONY
Flock doesn’t have access to local court records or police dispatch systems. Their software cant verify if a case number is real. The system simply accepts whatever text the officer types into the box.
December 2025, Flock's own "Proactive Search Term Tool" failed because cops realized they could just type "investigation" or even "hehehe" as a search reason to bypass the security filters.
So what did Flock do?
They announced “Evidence Mode" works like this: when a police officer runs a search and ties it to a criminal case number, the license plate data from that search is "preserved instead of aging out after 7 days."
And Flock KNOWS it doesn’t have access to local court records or police dispatch systems. Their software cant really verify if a case number is real.
Yet, they intentionally designed a new feature that relies entirely on unverified user input to override the 7-day deletion rule and permanently retain data.They are using the known criminal behavior of police officers as the legal pretext to permanently seize the location data of innocent drivers who happen to be in the same search batch.
Why would a company build a security feature that they know will be defeated by fake inputs? Because the 7-day retention rule was destroying the value of their company.
Their valuation is tied to the size and depth of their nationwide location database. If data deletes after 7 days, their database is useless for long-term pattern analysis. They needed a legal mechanism to retain data permanently without taking the political heat for changing their default policy to "infinite retention."
Thats not the worst of it … When an officer runs a nationwide search for a license plate, that query touches 120,000 cameras across 6,000 cities. Flock's June 2025 blog post states that every search and search reason is "preserved permanently in the audit trail of every agency whose camera was included in the search."
This means a single fake case number entered by a stalker cop in Georgia gives Flock the legal cover to permanently preserve the location data of every vehicle that passed those 120,000 cameras during that time frame, across state lines, without a warrant.
So Flock SWEPT UP MILLIONS of INNOCENT Drivers license plates across 50 states with user-generated string of text of FAKE case numbers
Flock's "Evidence Mode" mechanically bypasses the 7-day rule using unverified user inputs, creating a permanent, privately controlled tracking database. Flock designed a system where a local cop's unverified keystroke authorizes a private corporation to permanently seize the location history of an out-of-state citizen.
Flock has no API to local court records.
And Flock knows the case numbers are unverified because they already admitted cops lie in the search reason field yet engineered a backdoor (Evidence Mode) to retain data permanently. Flock is intentionally creating a permanent repository of unwarranted surveillance data, built entirely on fraudulent user inputs.
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This might be the best case to ban all ALPR Cameras after flock cameras just ruined an innocent Florida woman’s life.
Cops used one ALPR hit to pin a triple-fatal hit-and-run on 23-year-old Lindsey Isaacs. Seized her undamaged black Durango, claimed “damage,” then arrested her 6 months later after she sued to get it back.
She sat in jail 13 days facing life in prison.
They ignored the maroon paint transfer, the partial plate that didn’t match, the airbag that never deployed, and witnesses. Just took the first Durango Flock flagged.
7 months of hell. Charges finally dropped when they got the actual driver.
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Flock Safety built a network of 120,000 license plate cameras across 6,000 American communities. Any officer with access can search it to track where a car has been. Flock claims 93% accuracy, but an LAPD audit found a 32% false-positive rate on stolen vehicle alerts, and a Roseville, California police audit found 71% of flagged plates were misread. At 20 billion scans a month, even Flock's own accuracy claim means 1.4 billion misreads. A Washington Post investigation found at least 50 officers used the system to stalk people, mostly ex-partners, and 404 Media uncovered that Flock pitched turning 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and delivery cars into mobile plate scanners. The deal fell through but Flock presented it to the Georgia Attorney General's office as if it was already operational.
My Take
120,000 fixed cameras and 50 abuse cases weren't enough to slow Flock down. The company's next move was to put scanners in every rideshare car in America so the network could follow you block by block instead of catching you at one spot. The deal fell apart but the pitch document is public, and Flock was comfortable enough to present it to a state attorney general as a selling point. The drivers may not have even known their dashcams would feed a police database.
Flock took over $500 million in VC money and the company answers to the investors who funded the growth and the police departments buying the product, not the people being tracked. 50 officers got caught abusing the system and Flock's fix is shorter data retention and login prompts.
Meanwhile people in some towns started ripping the cameras down because nothing else worked. I think those people understand something Flock won't admit, which is that a surveillance network this size with this little oversight was always going to be abused, and bolting on safeguards after the fact won't change that.
Hedgie
Let's see if it lasts.
Hate to be a downer, but I think this, the outrage, is a passing thing.
The Overton Window only slides one way...to the Left.
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Judge rejects plea deal, gives ex-Menasha officer 6 months for tracking ex with Flock
APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) - A former Menasha police officer pleaded no contest Monday to accessing a license pl...
wtaq.com
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Locally (lotta ads)
lowerbuckssource.net
Flock Camera Protections to be Proposed by Bipartisan Group of State Lawmakers - Lower Bucks Source
Flock Camera Protections to be Proposed by Bipartisan Group of State Lawmakers
lowerbuckssource.net
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Some more on this................
Flock cameras and license plate readers are everywhere. Can we trust cops with them?
From wrongful arrests to officers stalking exes, license plate cameras keep exposing police failures.
reason.com
Viking
Yellow Jacket
New Flock-style scanners can now pick up readings from the devices in your car —and researchers say police 'may no longer need to begin with a known person or vehicle'
New Flock-style scanners can now pick up readings from the devices in your car —and researchers say police 'may no longer need to begin with a known person or vehicle'
New SignalTrace tech is designed to help in crime investigations, but there are questions about privacy.