Oct 2, 2026 · 35 min · 13 segments
In less than 48 hours last week, Dutchess County's network of 65 Flock license plate reader cameras went from bipartisan law enforcement tool to switched off. A packed community forum in Pleasant…
There's something that I think is nagging at me, and I wonder if it's nagging at you or at our listeners.
Now they go out with those radar beam cameras and they come up behind you and they give you tickets and so forth.
And I think many of us want that kind of tracking as a method of keeping our roads safe.
Can you try to go into a little bit more of the fine point, Athan, of what exactly the privacy objection really centers on?
Yeah, well, number one, the flat cameras are always on and they're much more powerful than the cameras in police vehicles.
They are using artificial intelligence to analyze many different aspects of a vehicle, not just the license plate.
And part of it is that flock specifically has been found to be used across the country in instances that either helped federal agencies uh carry out objectives that i think people in the forum objected to so i'm talking specifically about immigration enforcement and enforcement of um laws around women's reproductive rights.
And that's certainly a big part of people's concerns is Flock is a private company.
They've been found to mislead the public about what they're doing with their data in the past.
Can we really trust them? Are they using the data to help the federal government? do things that we don't want them to do.
But I also think its use of artificial intelligence and the power that these cameras have to capture so much data and then put it into this massive database that can be searched and accessed by so many different groups is just a much more comprehensive level of surveillance, as I understand it, than the cameras in the police vehicles.
So the police vehicles, it's a kind of a highly localized, very specific moment, like a flash moment in time, just used for a local and very specific purpose, right? It's radar to stop somebody who's speeding, for example.
And what you're articulating with the flock cameras is a much more systemic network of cameras in use, as you say, 24-7, 365 days a year to do a whole bunch of things that somehow offend the sensibilities of people who want to protect their neighbors.
And I think there's also this fear because flock has networks around the country that that there's kind of this attempt to create a national surveillance that they're being installed to eventually create kind of a national surveillance system where everybody, is being surveilled by the federal government or the federal government is using flock cameras everywhere to surveil people.
There's something that I think is nagging at me, and I wonder if it's nagging at you or at our listeners.
Now they go out with those radar beam cameras and they come up behind you and they give you tickets and so forth.
And I think many of us want that kind of tracking as a method of keeping our roads safe.
Can you try to go into a little bit more of the fine point, Athan, of what exactly the privacy objection really centers on?
Yeah, well, number one, the flat cameras are always on and they're much more powerful than the cameras in police vehicles.
They are using artificial intelligence to analyze many different aspects of a vehicle, not just the license plate.
And part of it is that flock specifically has been found to be used across the country in instances that either helped federal agencies uh carry out objectives that i think people in the forum objected to so i'm talking specifically about immigration enforcement and enforcement of um laws around women's reproductive rights.
And that's certainly a big part of people's concerns is Flock is a private company.
They've been found to mislead the public about what they're doing with their data in the past.
Can we really trust them? Are they using the data to help the federal government? do things that we don't want them to do.
But I also think its use of artificial intelligence and the power that these cameras have to capture so much data and then put it into this massive database that can be searched and accessed by so many different groups is just a much more comprehensive level of surveillance, as I understand it, than the cameras in the police vehicles.
So the police vehicles, it's a kind of a highly localized, very specific moment, like a flash moment in time, just used for a local and very specific purpose, right? It's radar to stop somebody who's speeding, for example.
And what you're articulating with the flock cameras is a much more systemic network of cameras in use, as you say, 24-7, 365 days a year to do a whole bunch of things that somehow offend the sensibilities of people who want to protect their neighbors.
And I think there's also this fear because flock has networks around the country that that there's kind of this attempt to create a national surveillance that they're being installed to eventually create kind of a national surveillance system where everybody, is being surveilled by the federal government or the federal government is using flock cameras everywhere to surveil people.
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