The Great Reset: Vehicle fingerprint – Flock turned on nationwide sharing and the police didn't even know.

"Everytime a vehicle passes, it takes a photograph of the back of that vehicle. The photograph is only the beginning. Software will read your license plate automatically. It's a camera that turns your plate into a searchable database entry, along with the exact time and the exact location. But these systems don't stop at the plate. The software also logs your vehicle's make, its colour, its body type, and identifying details. A roof rack, a dent in the tailgate, a bumper sticker. The company itself calls this a vehicle fingerprint. Even if a car has no plate at all, the system can still recognize it and follow it from camera to camera.

"One camera doing this is a traffic tool. Every one of these cameras feeds into the same company's network. And by this year, that network has grown to roughly 100,000 cameras across the country. The company builds sharing features directly into the product. There's a setting called statewide lookup, which lets other agencies in your state search your cameras. And there's a setting called national lookup, which opens your cameras to participating agencies across the entire country. Sharing isn't a side effect of this system. Sharing is the product. It's advertised."

"But when city after city sets its restrictions and the restrictions keep failing in the same direction, always toward more sharing, never toward less, that's not a run of bad lukc. That's the system's natural resting state showing through."

"A police department in Mountain View, California installed thirty license plate reader cameras with strict rules: no federal access, no sharing without a signed agreement. Then an audit revealed what was actually happening. A nationwide search setting had been switched on without the department's knowledge. Federal agencies from Kentucky to Virginia searched the data. A statewide lookup function let more than two hundred fifty California agencies — none of them approved — run an estimated six hundred thousand searches of the city's cameras. And when the city asked for the access logs, the vendor said it didn't keep them."

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