At the risk of oversimplifying, there are basically two sides to the argument about Flock cameras. One side says you should have no expectation of privacy on public roads, and these cameras help solve crimes, making people safer. The other side says we never signed up to live in a surveillance state in which a tech company works with the government to track you whenever you leave the house.

Our Thomas Gallatin leans toward the first argument. He argued earlier this week that fears are generally overblown, that effective safeguards can be implemented, that the technology isn't going away, and that the law and order brought by Flock cameras is a worthy goal.

I tend to fall in the second category. While I appreciate solving crimes, there are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the artificial intelligence that powers Flock cameras. I've also read 1984, and I chafe at the idea of mass surveillance, however well-intentioned the people currently in charge may be. And even that's dubious. The rampant tyranny during COVID is Exhibit A.

“Of all tyrannies,” said C.S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

Of course, I don't support vandalism to take out these cameras. Neither do I support the crime that might rise without them, so I at least sympathize with that part of the argument.

So, what's a red-blooded American to do? Why, federalize the issue, of course.

I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek. One of the worst aspects of modern America is that everything has become a federal issue. I'm an old-school federalist, so I don't believe that many issues deserve Congress's attention. Maybe whether my town has Flock cameras at every intersection is one of them.

Then again, there's this quaint old thing called the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches...” My driving down the road does not warrant a search and database record.

In any case, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley's office says he has “launched an investigation into Flock Safety’s AI-powered web of thousands of cameras across the nation.” In a letter to Flock, Hawley wrote:

As Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, I am investigating Flock Safety’s collection, retention, and dissemination of the data generated by its artificial intelligence surveillance cameras.
In a few short years, Flock has assembled an unprecedented national surveillance network. Your company boasts more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. The overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong. Instead of serving discrete local investigations, as contemplated by our constitutional processes and safeguards, these camera networks harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search.

Read that again: more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month.

The senator noted a few instances of police or others misusing the technology for stalking purposes. There are scores of such cases across the country, and they're increasingly getting media attention. Does that outweigh the crimes like car thefts and even murders in which Flock cameras were instrumental in providing evidence? He also noted cases in which someone was wrongfully accused and even jailed because the technology is flawed. Does the technology's accuracy most of the time (and that may deserve an asterisk) outweigh the infringed liberties of innocent people?

Well, those questions are the crux of the debate, aren't they?

Hawley says as much, concluding:

To be sure, I want law enforcement to have tools to catch offenders and keep the public safe. But Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church. The Supreme Court has recognized that a comprehensive, retrospective record of a person’s movements is different in kind from ordinary observation in public. Congress never authorized the network your industry has built. Your company’s internal policies are, in practice, the only safeguards for hundreds of millions of Americans. People across the country are now discovering that fact and demanding answers from their elected officials.

In a Daily Wire op-ed, Hawley goes further. “In 1761,” he wrote, “a Boston lawyer named James Otis went to court to fight against something called writs of assistance, which gave customs officers virtually unlimited authority to search anywhere for smuggled goods. After the colonial court did not stop the writs, John Adams said American independence was born 'then and there.' Otis never argued against law enforcement or the need for searches. He objected to open-ended authority without any limiting rules.”

Whatever those rules end up being, the senator is right when he says, “Americans do not surrender all their privacy rights every time they leave the house.”

For its part, Flock Safety says it is “listening to customers, communities, and civil liberties groups,” and the company called Hawley's probe an “opportunity” to make its case.

No reasonable American wants a car thief, kidnapper, or murderer to get away with it just because some vandal cut down a Flock camera. However, I don't think Americans are being unreasonable when we object to being surveilled and the information being compiled in a database just because we drove from home to work this morning.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/1000485-hawley-probes-flock-cameras