Flock Safety: Tracking Crime or Tracking Citizens? | Flock CLO, a Sheriff & 5 Privacy Activists LIVE

Our Take

Credit to Hide and Speak (via Verified Privacy VPN) for assembling a panel that actually includes Flock Safety's Chief Legal Officer alongside the activists who got the tech banned in parts of Oregon and community advocates from Atlanta. Most coverage of license plate readers stays in an echo chamber — either law enforcement talking points or privacy advocates preaching to the choir. Getting both in the same livestream, live and unscripted, is the kind of format this debate needs more of.

The framing question — "tracking crime or tracking citizens" — is the right one, because the answer is almost always both at once. Every Flock camera that flags a stolen car also logs the location, time, and direction of travel for every other plate that passes, whether or not that driver has ever been suspected of anything. That dragnet is the whole story. A sheriff touting case closures and a company's top lawyer defending federal data-sharing practices will always have a tidy anecdote; the structural question is whether a nationwide, networked system of plate tracking should exist by default, with almost no public vote and almost no warrant requirement.

We'd rather people hear this fight play out between people who actually have skin in it than take our word for it. If you want to see how close this infrastructure already is to your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has the tools to start.