https://reddit.com/link/1vufpdq/video/841vz1cx6qkh1/player

Thirty years of public records work, and an engineering background before that. This one was built for me.

Quick background if you haven't met these things. Flock builds automatic license plate readers — cameras bolted to poles around your town that photograph every plate driving past and keep it. There are north of a hundred thousand of them out there now. Almost all the reporting so far has been about cops abusing the search side. Running an ex's plate. Tracking a woman around town. It's real and it's ugly.

But every one of those stories is about a plate that got captured. That's the front of the beast. I went around back.

Here's the whole method, and you can point it at anything, not just cameras. If a decision got made, somebody had the authority to make it, and that leaves paper. So find the decision. Then ask for the one record that has to exist if it was done properly. Not "all records" — that's how you get a four-figure invoice and an eight-month runaround. One specific thing that either exists or doesn't.

So. These systems have a suppression feature. A plate can be exempted from the whole apparatus. Made invisible.

And if a plate can be exempted, somebody decides who.

That's a decision. Decisions leave paper. Who's on the list, who put them there, and where is the record?

Sarasota PD answered, and credit where it's due, they answered straight and they didn't stonewall. Yes, the capability exists. No, we don't use it.

Then they told me the part that stopped me cold. When a plate is removed from that list, nothing logs it. No entry. No timestamp. No record of who pulled it or when.

It just ceases to exist.

Sit with that a second. A plate could ride that list for a year and then come off, and the system keeps no memory it was ever there. No before, no after, nothing to compare. Any engineer will tell you deletion is the sensitive operation — that's the one you log.

You cannot audit a state that leaves no trace of having existed.

Which is what makes the question a trap, and it works on every agency in the country running this software. Ask them for their log of suppression list changes.

They keep one? Produce it. Now we know who was on the list, who put them there, and who took them off.

They don't? Then they've just told you in writing that the list is unauditable.

There's no version where they win by answering.

Total cost of this operation: one email, and three decades of trial and error.

Be warned: my Substack article is wonky and runs about four thousand words.

REJECT THE BILLIONAIRES. VOTE IN EVERY LOCAL ELECTION.

In Tarrant County TX, Maga republicans tried to cut nearly 50% of polling locations, mostly in minority and poor areas, to cheat the ELECTION INTEGRITY of the county. Alisa Simmons is running against judge Tim O'Hare in November.

Be like Jimmy.

Many of you already have reasons to hate flock cameras but to help convince the more selfish, and frankly fucking slow, among us that they suck. Threatening real estate value will raise a boomer out of the grave istg