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Towns drop Flock, buy another vendor
Flock is one of a dozen license plate reader companies, and until recently it was not the biggest. Vigilant and Axon sell the same kind of system, and the cameras are all over the United States and indeed all over the world, collecting the location of cars as they move.
One or two pings of a car do not reveal much. Put a camera on an overpass when a stolen car drives by, and that may be a good use of it. The cameras are increasingly everywhere, though, and networked together.
A little town in Tennessee or Arkansas that puts the cameras in joins a nationwide sharing network, where law enforcement agencies all around the country can see every car that passes through. Law enforcement puts a ton of pressure on towns to opt in. The result is several privately owned surveillance networks that government agencies across the country can use for whatever they want in many instances.
How does a plate reader read plates?
A camera, usually with infrared lighting, photographs each passing plate. Software then uses optical character recognition to turn the image into text, the same technique that digitizes printed pages. The system stamps the result with a time and place and checks it against lists such as stolen vehicles. The first automatic plate reader prototypes were developed in the United Kingdom in 1976.
Why do many pings reveal more than one?
Legal scholars call this the mosaic theory: individually harmless facts, when combined, reveal patterns that none shows alone. A federal appeals court applied the idea in United States v. Maynard in 2010, finding that prolonged GPS tracking of a car could reveal a person's habits and associations. Five justices of the Supreme Court signaled similar concerns in concurring opinions in United States v. Jones in 2012.
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