Cameras recording tour activity in malls, and on public roads has been the case since the 90s. Flock became a lightning rod of attention due to ICE, but they don't actually represent any change from the status quo.
At the end of the day, a camera in public can only record images of people in public. That does not and never did require a warrant.
With Flock that can be reduced to a mere search query across many locales (maybe not even their locale!) with effectively no effort spent.
When the cost changes so dramatically it effectively changes the balance of power and that is something we should, at the very least, deeply consider.
The whole point about ALPRs is that the license plate reading is automatic. Even during the 90s, all a police officer had to do was query a database.
• There were few of them
• The databases were managed by the jurisdiction
To my exact point, by increasing the number of readers and SaaS-ifying the process to enable jurisdictions to opt-in to information sharing, you have meaningfully changed what the technology is capable of and how it can be used.
> Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact.
Scale and level of effort involved matter. How many cameras were reporting to the Motorola database in 2000? 2010? Flock today?
How easy was it to type in “white Chevrolet Tahoe at [intersection]” until you see the one you want, get its license plate and run through the rest of the database?
Who was able to do that? How easy was it?
The sum of many small changes can create a meaningfully different result that we need to evaluate different than the thing that came before.
Only in the sense that the frog has been boiled gradually. The mere presence of cameras in public spaces is not the inconsistency that you seem to think it is. A nationwide centralized aggregator is not even remotely the same thing as a privately owned corner store having a purely private video feed of the front door.
You are the person arguing that because you're allowed to pick up a pebble it follows that you are permitted to scoop up a handful in a bag thus by extension it's okay to grab a small bucket full thus it must logically follow that filling up the trunk of your car is acceptable therefore no one has any grounds to object to the dump truck and excavator that you've engaged to illegally mine gravel along the side of the road.
It's more like trucks are have been mining gravel from this pit for decades, and the courts have repeatedly affirmed that it's legal to one gravel.
I am not singling out flock here. I am merely observing that a given behavior having been deemed legal or constitutionally protected in one context does not necessarily translate over to another. Your previous line of argument justifying that the practices of flock et al are legal depends on such specious reasoning.
Then how is "the nature and scope" of Flock different? You didn't actually bother to explain what you meant here. In your earlier comment you emphasized that flock's aggregation is nationwide, which is why I was under the impression that is what you were referring to.