TARGETED VS MASS SURVEILLANCE WITH NAOMI BROCKWELL
The short version: Naomi Brockwell's framing of targeted versus mass surveillance on Jen's Two Cents cuts right to why Flock's blanket ALPR dragnets are indefensible.
Our Take
Credit to Jen's Two Cents for bringing Naomi Brockwell on to lay out a distinction that gets lost in almost every police department press release about license plate readers: there's a world of difference between law enforcement targeting a specific suspect with a warrant and law enforcement logging every single car that drives through a neighborhood, forever, just in case. That's the entire Flock Safety business model, and it's why we keep harping on it. Cops don't need probable cause to point a camera at your plate — they just need a city council that signed a contract.
The "it's just public roads" defense that Flock and its police partners love to trot out ignores the point Brockwell is making: aggregation changes everything. One photo of your car at one intersection tells a cop nothing. Thousands of cameras logging your car at every intersection, cross-referenced and stored for months, tells a complete stranger with database access where you sleep, worship, get medical care, and who you see. That's not targeted policing, that's a tracking system that happens to also catch the occasional stolen car.
If this conversation got you thinking about how close that dragnet is to your own driveway, check our camera map to see what's already watching your town, and head to our take-action page if you want to push back at your next city council meeting.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Jen's Two Cents. | Jen & Friends Podcast, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.