You may not be completely familiar with the issues here. Flock’s a mass surveillance-as-a-service company. The cameras are only the most visible part of the company. As you can see here, Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code | WIRED they’re pushing into Minority Report territory as fast as they can. I take what used to be a pleasant drive home from work on some side roads and these eyes of Sauron are pointed directly at my face the whole way.
The Supreme Court has made different decisions that make it difficult to guess whether they’d find that Flock’s mass surveillance, equivalent to stalking by a private corporation, violates the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights or not (since they’re hiding, for now, behind police to pretend at legitimacy), but they have found in the past that degrees of expectation of privacy do exist even in public.
At the same time, states like New Hampshire and Maine, with relatively sane laws governing ALPRs, don’t have very many Flock cameras. They’re almost illegal in those states.
A step further, there’s nothing in principle that prevents the good ol’ US of A from criminalizing data brokers. We should do that. If we had any laws, these people would be criminals.
So the cops are just straight-up lying. That’s cool.