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What the Flock?: License Plates, Privacy, and the Fourth Amendment
Paperback
General LawGeneral SociologySocial Movements
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Publisher: Larry D\Johnson
Pages: 220
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
There is a camera on the corner of your street.
It has already photographed your car, logged its make and color, and sent that information to a database that more than 5,000 police departments, and, in documented cases, federal immigration agents, out-of-state sheriffs, and individual officers tracking their ex-partners, can search in seconds.
Flock Safety built this network in less than a decade, growing from a homeowners'-association security startup into an $8 billion company. Its cameras have helped solve real crimes: a mass shooting, missing children, stolen cars recovered before they crossed state lines. They have also been used to track a woman across state lines after she ended her own pregnancy, and to hand federal agents access to data that state legislatures voted specifically to keep out of their hands.
Is this technology about fighting crime? Government overreach? A violation of the Fourth Amendment? Or all three at once?
What the Flock? is the first book to lay out, case by case and court filing by court filing, exactly what this technology does, what the Constitution currently does and doesn't say about it, and what more than eighty American cities have already decided to do about it.
Drawing on court records, state legislation, company disclosures, and investigative journalism from outlets including 404 Media, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Wired, this book traces the technology from a single Atlanta start-up to a nationwide surveillance infrastructure now sitting one Fourth Circuit ruling away from a definitive constitutional answer. Along the way, it follows:
- The Supreme Court doctrine, from a 1983 case about a chemical drum fitted with a radio beacon to a 2018 ruling on cell-site data, that courts are still struggling to apply to a nationwide camera network
- Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, the case testing whether tracking one driver's car 526 times in four months requires a warrant
- Documented instances of the network being used for immigration enforcement in states whose own legislatures voted to prohibit it
- The business behind the badge: how a company backed by nearly a billion dollars in venture capital came to describe data comprehensiveness, not crime-solving, as its core source of value
- More than eighty American cities that have already canceled their contracts, and what actually worked when they did
- A practical, state-by-state guide to finding out what's already been installed in your own community, and what you can do about it
This is not an advocacy book, and it will not tell you what to think. It presents the strongest version of the crime-fighting case directly, using real, named cases, before subjecting those same claims to independent scrutiny using cities' own crime data. Every fact is sourced to a specific, citable public record.
Whatever conclusion you reach about the camera on your own corner, this book makes sure you reach it with the facts, not a company's marketing or an advocate's alarm, in hand.
Larry Johnson is a #1 Amazon Bestselling Author, prolific writer, educator, researcher, and National Registered Paramedic with a background in public safety and health spanning nearly five decades. His investigative work is built on the same rigor and public-record discipline that first drew him to emergency medicine and public safety: get the facts right, because people's lives depend on it.
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