Leave You Alone | Reclusive Libertarian

The new argument is that Flock is a civil liberty.

Someone on X put it in those words this week. A police officer wrote the essay underneath them, in Works in Progress: Flock lets officers be surgical. Fewer mistaken stops. Faster recoveries. The critics have the right instinct, the essay says, police should intrude as little as possible, and they have simply misunderstood the tool. More than anything, Flock allows the police to leave you alone. A follow-up from the same magazine boiled it further: the world before Flock was worse for everyone besides the criminals.

Take that at full strength, because parts of it are true.

A hot-list ping on a stolen car is not a general warrant. An officer who would otherwise pull over ten beige sedans, hoping one of them is the one from the radio, and instead waits for the plate that actually hit the list is, in that moment, more precise. The officer’s own hit-and-run is a real investigative use: model, color, a time window, a car entering his jurisdiction and leaving it with a new dent. Parents who want a kidnapped child found are not 5G cranks. If the only comparison on offer is a night of random Golf-colored stops versus an alert on the plate that belongs to the thief, the alert wins on paper.

The comparison is a cheat. They are selling two products as one. I already took apart the “not interested in you” version in You Might Be Right. This one just puts a civil-libertarian hat on the same machine.

The first product is the alert. This plate is on a list. The FBI’s stolen-car file, a wanted person, an Amber Alert. Narrow, in principle. A camera that only pinged those plates and stored nothing else would still raise questions about who puts names on the list and how long they stay there. It would not be a map of every driver in town.

The second is the archive. Every plate. Time-stamped. Location-stamped. Searchable later by description: a white Tacoma with a roof rack, the essay says, looked up while the officer is still on scene. Officer-built hot lists that are not the FBI’s, plates of drivers with suspended licenses, plates shared locally or nationally. That is not a barcode scanner waiting for a stolen item. That is a rewind of whoever drove past. Flock does not sell the first without the second. Precision at the stop is purchased by recording everyone in advance. The innocent plate is the raw material.

A barcode scanner assumes inventory. A free people is not inventory. A cop glancing at a plate in front of him is a look. A vendor cloud that stores the look, indexes it, and lets any login rewind it is a search of everyone who used the road. The essay leans on a 1983 Supreme Court line about cars on public thoroughfares. That case was a beeper in one barrel of chloroform, followed on public roads. It was not a national mosaic. Treating Knotts as a blessing for Flock is how you get from “the officer may look” to “the company may keep.”

The essay says Flock cannot search for individuals, only cars, and that even a felon’s known vehicle still requires the officer to see who is driving. Fine. The registered owner is a person. The plate is how you find him. “We only track cars” is a sentence that works until you remember what a car is for.

It also says recorded plates are now kept seven days, down from thirty. Treat that as the company’s current setting, not as the Constitution. A week of everyone’s travel, queryable across agencies, is still a mosaic. And the setting is Flock’s to change. I have already written what happens when the vendor’s paperwork moves under the city that signed it, in Sold as Local Control.

The crime numbers in the essay are doing more work than they can bear. Flock’s own study claims its cameras solve 10 percent of reported crime in the United States. That paper was built from a survey of Flock’s customers and extrapolated. Forbes took it to criminal-justice academics. A Columbia law professor doubted it would survive peer review. A University of Texas sociologist called the leap close to ludicrous without extraordinary evidence. A working paper on stolen-car arrests after deployment is a narrower claim, and a real one if it holds. Stolen cars are not the Fourth Amendment. “This alert caught a thief” does not get you to “therefore a searchable map of every car is liberty.” Atlantic City’s shooting drop after an ALPR expansion is a before-and-after in one city. Before-and-afters are not nothing. They are also not a warrant.

And even if you grant the catch, Flock is still only an investigative tool. It finds a car. It does not try a case. It does not keep anyone in a cell. If the complaint is too much crime, the leak is usually downstream of the camera: charges not filed, bail that is not bail, a sentence that evaporates. Catch and release. Flock enables the catch. It does nothing for the release. Building a rewind of every errand so you can locate a man you will not hold is how you spend the constitutional capital and keep the offender. Want less crime? Put actual criminals in jail. That is a legitimate use of the police power. Photographing everyone else is not a substitute for it, and it does not become one because an alert made the arrest easier. The populist right will hear that and reach for the cameras anyway, as if a grid were incapacitation. The progressive left will hear “jail” and smell a brief for locking up the innocent. Both are looking at the same failure and refusing the line. The person who committed the crime should be held. The person who drove to work should not be in the file.

Abuse is conceded in the same essay, then filed under “like any software.” Officers have used it to stalk. Innocent drivers have been stopped on misreads and on stolen front plates. The answer in the essay is that Flock logs a reason, flags suspicious searches, and that the Institute for Justice found most of the officers in its sample were charged or fired. An audit written by the party being audited is not a substitute for a warrant. Catching the cop who searches his ex is not the same as never building a file on everyone else.

The moral-panic line is the tell. Data centers, Covid vaccines, 5G, pasteurized milk, fracking, now Flock. Some of those panics were stupid. Some of them were people noticing a real machine and using the wrong words. Dumping a Fourth Amendment argument into the same bin as raw milk is how you refuse to steelman the other side while demanding to be steelmanned yourself.

That one-liner dies in the same place. The unwatched innocent is not a criminal. He is the person the amendment was written to leave unwatched. A world with more solved thefts and a rewindable map of every errand is not “worse only for criminals.” It is worse for anyone whose life is now a query.

This argument is coming, in the same week, from the same magazine and the posts around it. That is influence. It is not a receipt from Flock. The claim still has to stand on its own, and it does not. The civil-libertarian case for Flock is the general warrant’s old pitch in a better suit: we will bother you less at the roadside if you let us watch the road. Watching the road, in this product, means watching you.

The courts are the next dodge. Every appellate panel that has spoken, we are told, has blessed the cameras. That scoreboard is real, and it is not the amendment.

Next: What the Courts Actually Said

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