Flock Cameras Can Link Your License Plate to Your Cell Phone — Andy Biggs Won't Say Ban It
The short version: A caller presses Andy Biggs on banning Flock cameras statewide, and his hedge-everything answer says more about political will than policy detail.
Our Take
Credit to 550 KFYI for pinning down a sitting member of Congress on tape and making him answer for the surveillance apparatus spreading through his own state. "What else is in it?" is the classic non-answer politicians give when they don't want to be on record defending a technology that tracks ordinary people's movements without a warrant. It's not a yes, it's not a no, it's a dodge dressed up as nuance.
The bigger issue raised here — that Flock's system can potentially correlate a plate read with other data streams, including device identifiers nearby — is exactly why we've been saying these networks are bigger than "finding stolen cars." Once a camera network can tie a vehicle to a location, a time, and a person's phone, you're not looking at a traffic tool anymore. You're looking at a pattern-of-life database, and nobody voted to build one.
Politicians who won't commit to a ban aren't protecting public safety, they're protecting the status quo of vendors and police departments that have gotten comfortable with no-warrant access to your daily movements. If you want to see how many of these cameras are already watching your commute, check our camera map, and if you want to push your own representatives to actually answer the ban question instead of deflecting, start with our take-action page.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of 550 KFYI, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.