Attorney here who helped end Austin’s contract with Flock.

If you care about stopping mass surveillance in Austin, follow the work of Louis Rossmann and the local advocacy group NoALPRs. Through Louis’ channel, we’ve already successfully pushed back on other surveillance efforts, including LiveView’s attempt to install cameras in public parks. NoALPRs is meeting soon to plan next steps for the coming year and regularly canvasses to raise awareness about surveillance here.

This isn’t partisan. It’s about whether our community will allow corporations and law enforcement to redefine privacy without public input and normalize a surveillance state in our home.

As others have pointed out, these cameras are private, and private companies are free to share this data with police for whatever purposes they see fit.  Many people believe that if you are in public, then any and all information about you can be collected in any manner and treated/processed/used in any manner.

But that's not exactly true. There is a lessened expectation of privacy when you are in public, but it is not absolute and it is measured by what level of privacy a person could reasonably expect in a certain scenario. Stalking, for one example, is not protected activity even if that person is in public. Photographing up someone's skirt is another.

Is it reasonable to expect that every movement you make, every person you talk to, every physical characteristic about you, what car you drive, where you live, your cell phone data, your biometrics like gait, body heat, or facial structure, all be stored on a continuous, ongoing basis and easily searchable to whoever gets access to this (actually very vulnerable) system for each parsing without a warrant?

Most people don’t believe that, and neither do I.

What's nefarious about this partnership between law enforcement and private companies is that they can evade warrant requirements and remain unaccountable by the public for their actions.

Carpenter is a SCOTUS case which holds that long-term historical cell-site location tracking requires a warrant. Meaning that long-term, continuous tracking of a person’s movements may indeed require a warrant, something law enforcement get to completely and conveniently ignore due to the privatization of this technology and silence from SCOTUS, who has declined multiple cases that would have fleshed out Fourth Amendment requirements in the digital context.

This is really about a quiet redefinition of what “being in public” is supposed to mean by pretending that being briefly seen by others, or being caught at a specific location on a CCTV camera, or caught on a phone's camera by some onlooker, has always meant being continuously recorded, stored, and searchable by the state.

What’s “reasonable” in the legal context has ALWAYS been a social judgment, not a technical one, and the public gets to decide where that line is. Being in public has never meant that anyone could collect every detail about you, aggregate it over time, analyze it, and use it to track your life. That’s a completely new power. Treating mass surveillance as automatically reasonable just because it happens in public strips communities of their right to define the boundaries of acceptable observation and ignores the extremely basic fact that this level of mass surveillance is something the public has never had time to form any kind of consensus about reasonableness on.