[00:00] Introduction: Welcome to Registry Matters, an independent production. Our opinions are our own, and we don’t take instructions from anyone but us. We are thankful for the support of our patrons. You make what we do here possible. And always remember, FYP.
[00:20] Andy: Hey, recording live from FYP Studios East and West, transmitting across the internet, this is episode 383 of Registry Matters. Holy crap, Larry, it’s August 1st. Seriously? That’s what the calendar is telling us.
[00:34] Larry: Jesus, man. So how are you tonight? I’m nice and toasty with this heat dome parked over the western United States. It’s lovely. Tell me, what is a heat dome? I don’t know, but I certainly don’t like it when I wake up and it’s 100 degrees. Not really 100, but when it’s 103, and when I go to bed, it only drops to like 75. Normally, it drops in the 60s at night. And in the summertime, we’re having lows of around 74. It’s the low
[01:01] Andy: Now. We were talking just a little bit before pre-show. You brought up something, and I said, oh, we have to talk about this other thing that’s related to it. How would you set this up?
[01:41] Larry: Well, it was the accidental ones I was concerned about. If you aggressively are deporting, you’re bound to make a mistake sooner or later. So I’m saying it’s going to be humorous when somebody who’s a citizen gets deported. Lo and behold, quite a few have.
[01:57] Andy: And then you went on… You talked about people taking jobs and all that.
[02:04] Larry: Yeah, we’ve got 8 to 10 billion unfilled jobs that we can’t fill. But the theory goes that these illegals are driving down wages and taking Americans’ jobs. And I’m just thinking about how horrible it is. They’re taking our jobs that Americans won’t take. And they’re sending the money back to their loved ones. And they’re paying taxes and supporting the economy here. But it’s just horrible. We’ve got to get these people out of here.
[02:29] Andy: All right. Well, then that prompted me to think about a particular South Park episode. And this is old. This is an old episode. So if you can imagine the little animated cartoon, have you ever seen a clip of South Park?
[02:40] Larry: Can’t say that I have.
[02:42] Andy: Oh, jeepers, man. Okay, so it’s a really poorly animated comics TV show. But the whole point of the thing is they cover current events. And this is probably 15 years ago, maybe? And so a portal opens up, if you can imagine, a little like a bubble. And an alien shows up. This alien who doesn’t speak any English, he’s willing to do work. I think it’s in Colorado where they’re from, but I forget the exact town name. He takes almost nothing and does the job. I think he can’t get home through the portal. Anyway, more of them show up and are happy to do nasty, crappy labor. At first, the citizens of the town are very happy because they get super cheap labor and treat them like crap. But then the aliens start doing good work and taking jobs. So people start complaining at town hall meetings about “they’re taking our jobs.” By the end, everything gets so bad that it devolves to just bitching about aliens.
[04:21] Larry: Well, it’s kind of a sore spot for me because I’ve readily confessed since we started this program that I’m not nearly as smart as a lot of folks. But what I look at is simple facts. We have millions of jobs in this country that cannot be filled by Americans. In our state alone, anywhere from 18 to 25% of government jobs can’t be filled. These are usually pretty choice jobs with benefits, but we can’t fill them with Americans. And I don’t understand what jobs they’re taking from Americans because we can’t fill these jobs with Americans. They asked me why won’t they hire Americans? Well, because they’re not applying or whatever. But then they say, well, we should hire Americans, but they don’t want the jobs. And I said, no, we need workers doing the jobs. We go around and around.
[05:27] Andy: You make that distinction so cavalier. We need Americans doing the job, no, we just need someone to do the job.
[05:34] Larry: Well, in a country where income tax revenue is primarily individual, about 90% of it comes from individuals. So if we’ve got 8 to 10 million unfilled jobs, let’s do some math. Each person makes an average of $30,000 a year on those unpaid jobs—ranging from medical professionals like doctors and dentists to airline pilots. If you multiply that by 10 million times $30,000, how much social security revenue would be coming into the system that’s already strained? I just don’t understand this obsession. And in a free country, why do you want to require people to work? You have the choice of not working. If one partner in a relationship can carry the entire family satisfactorily, that’s your prerogative. If you can support your kids without working and afford to buy them Nikes and iPhones or whatever they want, that’s your prerogative. Why do you obsess so much over Americans? I’m worried about workers. We need workers participating in the workforce. I don’t care who they are. As long as they’re participating, they’ve gone through a process. They’re in our tax system and databases. I don’t care what nation they originate from.
[06:54] Andy: I recall when I was locked up living in Georgia around 2010, a particular governor had just gotten elected who said he would round them up personally in his truck. That kind of mentality. I remember people in prison saying, “Well, I’ll go work in the fields and pick vegetables and fruits.” But if I went out there now, man, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with someone 20 years old and in shape. I’m not super out of shape, but at the time I was in better shape than I am now. However, all that said, Americans can’t keep up either.
[07:44] Larry: It’s a strange thing. They have their hands raised with our antiquated quota system. They want to come in legally, but their number never comes up on the lottery because the quotas haven’t been adjusted since 1986. I’ve heard this. And they’re telling us, “We will pick your crops. We will lay your asphalt. We will roof and frame houses. We’ll work in chicken factories.” But we say no. I would be saying yes. Put your application in. Let’s check you for criminal history. You’ll go through DNA testing. We’ll put you in our database, biometrics included. If you get into trouble, you’ll be deported. But come here and work. I just don’t understand the objections.
[08:39] Andy: I’m getting a ton of pushback from a particular former transcriptionist person who says Larry is oversimplifying. With H-1B visas for tech, it’s built on lies and greed. All the big tech companies are firing Americans and then turning around to claim they need H-1B workers and filing for them.
[08:57] Larry: See, and I don’t know anything about that. So if that’s the true case,
[09:01] Andy: there is truth in it. I’ve heard of this. But I still would argue that we need these visas. I’d like to see
[09:07] Larry: documentation of that, other than just being on the talk shows. Are Americans truly not able to get those jobs? Because I’m hearing from the little bit of contact I have that they can’t hire people, period. Not that they’re fired.
[09:22] Andy: That’s right. Go ahead. I’ve heard there are many, many IT jobs out there. And we just don’t have enough Americans to fill them. We lack the technical skills for many of these positions. Maybe with all the layoffs at Facebook and Microsoft due to AI, things might change. But maybe not. All right, shall we move along? Sure. What are we doing?
[09:47] Larry: Well, we’re going to have a lot of fun tonight. I’ve been praying about this for a long time. We were planning to discuss something that has been vigorously debated on the NARCEL listserv—flock cameras and automated license plate readers and what the Fourth Amendment currently allows regarding them. Also, we had planned to cover a PFR failure to register case, which we’ve discussed in the past. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough time this week to properly address it, so we’re moving it to a future episode. The case is State of West Virginia v. Honorable Paul Gwaltney Jr. and William McGow. We also have a comment from a listener that it’s rather sad, and then we have a question from a listener that I doubt I can answer. But anyway, those are the topics for tonight.
[10:52] Guest 1: Picture getting fingerprinted just for making a new email account. That’s West Virginia, where registrants must report every username and screen name in person. A federal judge just let a free speech challenge move forward. Registry Matters digs into fights like this because it is a nonprofit and your support literally funds the fight. Become a patron at Patreon dot com slash Registry Matters.
[11:16] Andy: All right. Well, this one is pretty sad. It says, Hey, Andy, I know that you’re a super busy guy, but I wanted to send something your way in regard to a valid topic idea within our community. You may have covered this at some point already. I’m working my way back through your podcast from the beginning, currently on episode 13. Oh, my God, Larry, he’s got a long way to go, right? He does. And those were the goofy ones before we had our system that we follow. That’s very true. So, but a young man at my treatment facility committed suicide last Halloween. He was at the eight year mark of a 10-year sentence and seemingly doing good. On the surface, at least, it was incredibly bizarre. Law enforcement didn’t notify treatment, probation or his family. Everyone thought he was on the run until someone within his family was notified a month ago, notified almost eight months after his death. We’re in the system in so many ways. Fingerprints, DNA, but prints, you know, all those things. So why did it take eight months for anyone to notify treatment, probation and his family? Bizarre. My wife and I and a few others and his sister, his victim, went to a small memorial service for him at a park. That’s all you’ve received. Sadly, a small gathering at a park. Anyway, I thought I would pitch this to you and Larry, as we all know, the heavy mental and emotional weight that this label and the cruel and unusual punishments that we endure daily. Thanks for all you do.
[12:50] Larry: And I thought about that and I decided to put it in because. I don’t generally have a habit of strongly defending law enforcement, but I do on occasion and I’m not sure that I can see anything that they would have done wrong here. A death would trigger law enforcement if it’s unattended. That is correct. If it’s an unattended death, but then the body gets transferred to the medical authorities for autopsy and identify a source and cause of death to say foul play is involved. Which would bring law enforcement back into it, but since apparently there was no foul play mentioned here, I mean it was suicide, but that’s not self-inflicted so I don’t think they were worried about something subject to prosecution and so therefore the treatment people perhaps maybe it would have turned up in some of the law enforcement checking that he was on the PFR list. But I’m not sure how they would know what family to notify unless he was carrying information with him of who to contact in an emergency, and I don’t think we could blame law enforcement for not notifying the family. The way the system works here and in most states is if there’s an unintended death after an investigation is completed and there’s no foul play, they’re hoping that a family member steps forward and starts checking hospitals and morgues. Apparently he doesn’t have a lot of close family ties or anybody who missed him.
[14:28] Andy: Don’t probation people take references or referrals if you go rent a car? Don’t they take your entire family tree in case you run off with the car or something like that? Doesn’t probation have someone to contact in case of an emergency?
[14:45] Larry: Likely, and probably do, but the problem is he said that probation wasn’t notified. And I’m saying I don’t know that probation would have been notified because when they found the dead body, their concern was to figure out if there was foul play. So their focus was on getting him to the office of the medical investigators—we call it the coroner or whatever the appropriate authority was—for an investigation. When the body was released saying it was self-inflicted death and there was no foul play to investigate, perhaps maybe someone could have run him through NCIC to see if he was on the PFR list, but I doubt it even. I don’t think it came together the way he thought it did. I just don’t think there was any conspiracy; well, he’s a PFR—we’re not going to notify a soul. I just don’t think law enforcement is that sinister. I think it just followed their protocols. Remember, we’re a protocol-driven society. The computer tells everyone what to do.
[15:55] Andy: One last question and gosh, did it just leave my brain? Um, yep, it left. Sorry, I’m old; it vanished poof—gone. Well, uh, well seriously, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
[16:10] Larry: For the guy that this is all he’s got, and it’s very sad. But I hate to point a negative finger at law enforcement; we do that all the time, but it’s justified. This may not be justified.
[16:22] Guest 2: Hear you, police drew a circle on a map and scooped up the phone locations of three totally innocent people this year. The Supreme Court finally called that a search. Andy and Larry break down what it means for your privacy. Patrons get bonus segments you won’t hear anywhere else. Join the crew at patreon.com/slash/registrymatters.
[16:47] Andy: Um, all right, well then moving over to a question from a friend of mine, Ryan. I’m a long-time listener of the show and I’m trying to get into business myself and helping other PFRs. Since getting hired has been a challenge unfortunately. The modern market requires me to market through large-scale social media businesses like Facebook and Instagram. And these platforms have policies against PFRs. From my armchair AI research, I’ve discovered that they are considered the marketplace of ideas which means they’re not going to be the marketplace of ideas. They’re going to be the government can’t ban me from usage however the businesses themselves can ban me since they are private companies. It’s a rather convenient way of preventing me from marketing my services to a wider audience and ensuring that I fail. I’d like to file a lawsuit against Meta for preventing me from reaching my market but I do not know under what grounds I can sue. I don’t care about the social media aspects of the platforms as I consider them a waste of time, however, I do need to reach the people who may be potential customers. I’m in the IT field and I’m helping a friend set up a business in home repair but I have to keep telling him that I cannot do online marketing through these companies in addition to not being able to sell my personal brand. Am I stuck spending loads of cash on a marketing firm when I know I could do the work myself? What avenues do I have for filing a suit against Meta?
[18:10] Larry: I think you’ve got a recording issue here.
[18:15] Andy: This is running, that is what you mean? This run by the strangest collection of people, sorry, not that one.
[18:21] Larry: One Clinton, oh
[18:23] Andy: That’s one. Okay, so but you don’t think that Meta is run by the craziest bunch of lunatics and whatnot?
[18:34] Larry: Not ready to say that. They’ve been pretty successful, though. And now remember this is out of my expertise level, out of my area of expertise. But he’s spot on as far as they’re considered private companies and they can ban people. The closest comparison I can make was back in the 70s when I worked in a small town radio station, and advertising was desperately sought but carefully reviewed for appropriateness. There was advertising periodically that was declined by the station, and it was considered to be a proper use of their discretion because they were the protectors of the radio station and they were the protectors of the public airwaves and community standards as they were called at that time. And uh, so I remember the owner which was also the manager declining an advertisement for um, I don’t want to call it birth control but family planning services in a small suburb of Atlanta in the 1970s. He said there’s no way in the heck you can do that. We can run anything like that on this station. And uh, and they declined it. So what is best? I can understand it. He’s wanting to advertise his services on Meta platforms. Do I have that right?
[20:01] Andy: Yeah, probably that. Further, like LinkedIn and other places, yes. Okay, well.
[20:07] Larry: I would doubt that the jurisprudence as it’s developed has evolved to give him much strength for a challenge on this because again, they’re privately owned companies and they’re selling advertising. You would have to put forth a theory that you have a right to advertise, and I’m not sure that you do.
[20:33] Andy: Would that potentially be a freedom of expression First Amendment thing?
[20:39] Larry: I don’t know that advertising would fall under that. I’ve actually made the suggestion that people who want to communicate might be able to claim that it’s a public utility, much like an electric company. If you have one unitary electric company, they can’t decline service; they can put standards in place—you’ve got to put up a large deposit if you have bad credit or whatnot—but they can’t just say we won’t serve you. But in this instance, since there are multiple platforms, the court when it looks at free speech things would consider alternative platforms. Would Meta be the only method he has of reaching his customers? Would that be the only way you could reach them?
[21:20] Andy: I’m gonna definitely say that they are not the only platform. Facebook and Instagram are certainly significant ones, but you could use Google as well. You could also use LinkedIn; LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Google is obviously owned by a company called Alphabet.
[21:40] Larry: Well, it would be a very expensive lawsuit. I doubt he would find a lot of assistance. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt he’d find a lot of people stepping forward to fund it. And Meta would have unlimited resources.
[21:55] Andy: Yeah, they do. Just as its own entity, register that. You would have to use the personal Larry account to then create the business Facebook account. But could he get his mom to open up a Facebook account and then use it to open the Ryan IT Consulting website? Would that fly in the face of internet identifiers and Florida’s requirement for tracking accounts? I mean, if it’s the Ryan IT Consulting company, it wouldn’t necessarily be tied to his internet identifiers with the Florida registry. I’m just thinking that would be a way to work around it.
[23:02] Larry: It certainly does sound like it has potential, particularly if they made that relationship solidified in a business agreement arrangement where it’s not just voodoo. Because I just about bet you that 300 pages of disclosures in terms of service that you sign, there’s something in there that says you can’t do voodoo to avoid bigotry. But if he has a relationship with mom, and it’s part of a legitimate business relationship, maybe that would fly. And then that would avoid having to be reported.
[23:36] Andy: Could you then possibly use something like LegalZoom or something similar to set up some very basic incorporation things? And have mom as a partner so she could set up the business to market?
[23:47] Larry: Well, that’s above my level of expertise, but I would talk to a person who does that. And then I would ask them to go to that area of law and find out if they’ll actually talk. Rather than you having to send a form in and wait for an AI bot to take a look at the form and respond back to you. If you could have a one-on-one discussion with an attorney who practices in an area similar to what we’re trying to do here, that’d be a good question to ask. Because what if Florida thinks he should report that as one of his identifiers, and he doesn’t, and he ends up getting prosecuted? I would never want to recommend anybody do anything that would get him prosecuted.
[24:28] Andy: Agreed. And even by extension, if you went to the person’s office and helped them with their marketing while they watched over your shoulder, that wouldn’t be your internet identifiers. I would personally go do it, Larry. If it were me, I’d walk into your office, take over your computer, set up your internet marketing for you, and then leave. It’s an interesting concept. But maybe because my experience was so unique, I might get away with it, but someone else might end up handcuffed.
[25:17] Larry: Yeah, I hate to use you as the example because it was so unusual. What they let you do was really exceptional.
[25:29] Guest 3: All right. Alabama tried to bar a father from ever sleeping under the same roof as his own child for life with no off-ramp. A federal court just said parental rights are fundamental. Registry Matters walks you through the whole ruling. Patrons get every episode early and a feed with no ads. Support the show at patreon.com/slash/registrymatters.
[25:54] Andy: Well, to be continued, Ryan. I think this should be continued dialogue about figuring out what you can do. Because in Florida, you are not the only person there. And there’s a fairly large affiliate group there for NARSOL. They’re pretty active, although not necessarily effective. But they have a lot of people. And I’m certain that you could find someone else that does similar work in Florida who could give you some guidance on what you could or couldn’t get away with.
[26:22] Larry: That’s a
[26:22] Andy: good suggestion. All right. Well, as I said earlier, this is going to be a little bit different. There’s no big Supreme Court decision to score here. No bill working its way through some legislative body somewhere. This is a topic segment about surveillance. Specifically, it’s about a company called Flock Safety. And I just want to set the table here because I’ve been down the rabbit hole in this one. I spent a few hours working through this earlier today. Flock makes these automated license plate readers, which are called LPRs and their cameras mounted on poles next to public roads. They photograph basically every car that goes by. There was a federal decision, Schmidt versus the city of Norfolk out of the Western District of Virginia in January that we’re going to use as the legal backdrop. But most of what I’ve got here is investigative reporting. The Electronic Frontier Foundation or the EFF did a year in review at the end of 2025. And 404 Media has been filing public records requests. I want to walk you through what these cameras actually are, because I think you’re going to have a lot of questions.
[27:34] Larry: Sure, I’m going to have a lot of questions, but I’m going to tell you right now, I’m not that technical or technically savvy. So you’re going to be the one explaining how this box and contraption works, and I’m going to be the one asking the dumb questions when I don’t follow what you’re trying to say. Is that fair?
[27:52] Andy: That is absolutely fair. So let me start with the mechanism itself, because everything depends on it. A Flock camera is a stationary camera mounted on a pole. It doesn’t follow you around; it just sits there. When a car passes by, it takes a photo. I don’t even like calling this AI. This is more like machine learning stuff, but whatever—it reads the license plate off of that photo. And here’s the part people miss: it also records what Flock calls a vehicle fingerprint. The make, type, color, and any distinctive features—roof racks, bumper stickers, dents. So even if it can’t read the plate, it can log that a silver SUV with a roof rack and a Bernie sticker went by this intersection at 4:42 in the afternoon.
[28:40] Larry: Huh? So let me make sure I got this so far. It’s this camera on a pole. It photographs the car. It does not photograph me or the driver. It doesn’t know if it’s me driving or my wife driving, or my neighbor who might have borrowed the car. It’s just taking a photograph of the vehicle and cataloging all that data. Correct?
[29:02] Andy: And hold onto that because it’s going to be the whole ball game later. The camera cannot tell who’s driving; the court in Schmidt said this plainly. Flock cameras quote “do not provide information to users about the location of individuals beyond public roadways or outside of vehicles.” End quote. And the court drew the contrast itself, saying that unlike a cell phone or an ankle monitor, quote, “they do not follow individuals inside buildings, homes, or anywhere else.” End quote. They photographed vehicles on public roadways where the stationary cameras were located.
[29:38] Larry: It’s dumb as far as the device goes. In a technical sense, it doesn’t do anything. It knows the car was there, but it doesn’t know if a person was there necessarily or who that
[29:48] Andy: person was. Right. And now here’s the data flow, which is genuinely surprising. When a camera took that photo, the image got uploaded to an encrypted server and the data was quote “securely stored for designated retention period.” But here’s the thing. The police department did not hold that data; Flock held it in Norfolk. The department had 176 cameras. They paid Flock a subscription fee. The data lived on Flock’s servers. The department rented access to this data.
[30:28] Larry: So say that again, because it’s not a small point. The city of Norfolk deployed those 176 cameras. They collected images of every car in the city that went by, but they didn’t own the pictures. A private company owned the pictures taken by the 176 cameras that some governmental entity paid for. Is that correct?
[30:49] Andy: Correct. So a private company owned the pictures. The locality paid a recurring fee, kind of like Netflix. Flock stored everything. The department logged in through a web interface or mobile app with a username and password and could run queries. You could search for full or partial plates, fingerprint characteristics, or pull up everything a particular camera saw during a specific time window.
[31:22] Larry: So the public paid to collect the data, but the vendor held the data. One of my questions right up front is who is actually holding this and if it’s even the government at all, because I had to ask the police department for their records, and those records are sitting on a corporation’s server under a subscription agreement. That’s a different animal. So they could say, “Huh, we don’t have it.” Right?
[32:00] Andy: So yeah, it is a different animal, and it’s a good instinct you’ve got there because it’s going to matter for who can get at it. Now, let me give you the retention piece because you asked earlier. A statute took effect July 1st, 2025, just over a year ago, dropping the retention period from 30 days to 21 days. So the default now is a rolling 21-day window. Every day after 21 days, the routine images age off.
[32:28] Larry: Okay. Well, 21 days. So that sounds like there was a guardrail in place for three weeks and it just poof, it went away.
[32:35] Andy: It is a guardrail just like that. But read the opinion. The court said, quote, “the retention period does not prevent the long-term retention of ALPR data that is downloaded from the Flock system.” End quote. So the 21 days applied to the rolling database. If someone logged in on day one and pulled the data down into an investigative file, that copy was no longer subject to the 21-day clock anymore.
[33:01] Larry: Oh, you’re making my head spin. So that’s my second question answered, and I don’t like the answer. If retention is 21 days, what happens to what got downloaded on day one? And the answer is whatever the person who downloaded it wants to happen to it. I’m guessing the 21-day period protects the stuff nobody bothered to grab. And that really isn’t much.
[33:25] Andy: Nope, not a shield at all. And even the court acknowledged in a footnote that at the very least, data involving an ongoing criminal investigation could be retained longer than the default. So the three weeks was the floor for a routine sweep, not a ceiling on anything anyone actually cared about.
[33:43] Larry: All right. Before you get into the abuses, I know you’ve got a list. Let me plant the legal flag. Because people need to understand why any of this is legal in the first place. The instinct of most folks is that this can’t possibly be allowed. So walk me through why it’s legal to do this?
[34:04] Andy: All right. Well, let’s go over the plaintiffs in that case we just brought up a minute ago. So in Schmidt, Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington sued the city of Norfolk under Section 1983, saying the 176 camera network violated their Fourth Amendment rights. Their cars got photographed a lot. The opinion set approximately 400 to 475 and 325 times, respectively, over about four and a half months. Full plate matches on average two to three times per day. And the court, Judge Mark Davis, granted summary judgment to the city. The cameras were held constitutional. Now you take it from here, sir, because this is where I hand it off.
[34:47] Larry: Oh, well, this is the heavy part. The whole case turned on a line in the Supreme Court decision in Carpenter and before that, a case called Knott’s—maybe like Don Knotts. The baseline rule for Knott’s was that, quote, “a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.” Unquote. That was the starting point. So if you’re out in public on the road and everybody can see you now, I’ve said that myself: When you go out in public, you shouldn’t get mad if someone takes a photograph of you because you have no expectation of privacy when you’re in a public setting, be it street or public accommodation.
[35:43] Andy: The only point I would argue against that is someone taking a picture of you is different from being photographed at every corner. From here to wherever your destination is, that’s my pushback against the idea that you don’t have privacy. However, these things are positioned all over the place. Sorry.
[36:03] Larry: Yeah, and I tend to agree with you. See, I hadn’t thought that through when I’ve pontificated that it’s one thing for someone to snap a picture of you. It’s another thing for someone to chronicle every movement you’re making.
[36:20] Andy: Five. And three twenty five for the two people three
[36:21] Larry: times a day that they’re chronicling every movement that they’re making on the road. Now, that is not quite the same thing as taking a picture. I’ll agree with that.
[36:29] Andy: Yep. All right. Well, then. But still, how does anyone ever win one of these kinds of cases?
[36:43] Larry: So Carpenter was the cell phone case where the government pulled 127 days of cell site data and were able to get location data and reconstruct a man’s entire life. And Carpenter said there is a point where the tracking becomes so total that it does invade a reasonable expectation of privacy. The phrase the court used over and over was “the whole of a person’s physical movements.” That was the line: individual snapshots on a public road, no privacy interest, but a catalog of somebody’s movements now you’ve crossed that. And I tend to agree with that logic.
[37:21] Andy: The Fourth Circuit had a case like that, right? The Baltimore one.
[37:25] Larry: Yes. Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. I’ve never heard of this until our research staff uncovered it. Baltimore, you’re paying that research staff and a lot of money. Yes. Baltimore flew surveillance planes over about 90 percent of the city for 12 hours per day. And the Fourth Circuit in Blank said that crossed the line because that program tracks every movement of every person outside in Baltimore. It created a detailed encyclopedic record of your movements. That was like an ankle monitor on every person in the city. So it’s okay to put an ankle monitor on someone who’s done something and track their movements because you’re being punished. But I’m not sure in a free society we have the same opportunity to track everybody’s movements.
[38:20] Andy: So why then isn’t Norfolk the same thing? Because from where I’m sitting, 176 cameras photographing every car sounds an awful lot like a plane flying over the whole city.
[38:32] Larry: Because of exactly the limitation you told me to hold on to. The court said the Norfolk cameras were in 75 clusters across 66 square miles over 9 million feet of road. And the judge wrote the line I actually love: “Under the best conditions, defendants’ ALPR system has many thousands more blind spots than it has unblinking eyes.” The plaintiffs got caught two to three times a day, miles apart, 45 to 50 minutes between hits. Carpenter had 100 plus data points a day. The court said that the captures in Carpenter were 30 to 50 times greater than in this case. So the judge said it didn’t reach the whole of your movements, not in Norfolk, and not today. He wrote that the answer to whether ALPR crosses the line is elusive. But that “at least in Norfolk, Virginia, the answer is not today.” And here’s the part I want people to hear because it’s a tale: Several judges, including this one, caution that these cameras multiply. The balance could conceivably tip the other way. So basically, the court is telegraphing that you need to be careful what you’re doing. Judge Davis said, “The undersigned agrees with these cautionary statements.”
[40:06] Andy: So hold on, he agrees that it could tip the other way and he rules for the city anyway?
[40:11] Larry: Because you didn’t get there yet. He’s telling you that you’re getting closer, I’m getting concerned, but you need to give me more proof. You need to be more convincing. So he agreed it could tip, but he ruled for the city anyway. And I want to be precise because this matters. The caution could conceivably tip the other way. That’s dicta. It’s not a holding. The holding was that the system on the facts is constitutional. And dicta does not limit anything. It’s the judge clearing his or her throat about the future while doing nothing about the present. Don’t get giddy about that line. But it also is good that the court is saying, be careful, because somebody may bring a case that changes this down the road.
[40:57] Andy: Something I don’t think is going to come up here at all is that this is similar to what happens in a lot of our cases where we challenge that this registry scheme is unconstitutional. And they’re like, no, this one is constitutional. But if you keep stacking these things on there, we’ll have to reevaluate this later. This sounds very, very similar to that storyline. It does. All right. So then, OK, so where does the court say the fix should come from, if not from him?
[41:26] Larry: From you and we. The fix should come from the legislature or local governing bodies, not from me. The court said the guardrails were best achieved with input from the public and erected by state legislators or local governing bodies. I agree with that. But nobody voted for any of this. It didn’t arrive through a statute; it arrived through procurement. A department signed a subscription agreement, which is how the surveillance got built. Not a bill, not a hearing, just a purchase order.
[42:12] Andy: And also probably licensing it the way they did. They didn’t have to pay the upfront cost of installing 176 cameras; they’re just paying a monthly fee. That changes it on accounting from a capital expenditure to an ongoing expense.
[42:30] Larry: The old bad federal government probably paid for those cameras because since 9/11, there’s been a fixation on getting cameras all over the country. And the federal government has been paying the cost of this surveillance. Now every city, including mine, has cameras everywhere.
[42:46] Andy: So then going back a second, that’s a good bridge to the reporting, because now let me tell you about these networks actually getting used. The court was describing stolen cars and Amber Alerts. But the EFF—remember, that’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I can wholeheartedly attest to; you should donate money if you can—I do every month. Blah, blah, blah. The EFF looked at more than 12 million searches across more than 3,900 agencies and documented categories. First one: protest. Agencies logged hundreds of searches tied to demonstrations. For example, the February 50501 protest. I don’t know what that is, but that’s what they found. The April hands off protests. And No Kings protests from June through October. EFF said 19 agencies ran dozens of searches targeting No Kings protesters alone.
[43:41] Larry: So the system sold to towns for stolen cars gets pointed at people carrying signs. Well, that’s funny.
[43:47] Andy: But it got worse. Category two: ethnicity. EFF found more than 80 agencies used stereotypical language in their queries between June 2024 and October 2025. Now I have to read this one because it’s ugly, so let me do that. Grand Prairie PD in Texas searched using a racial slur six times through a feature called convoy, which identified groups of vehicles traveling together. The query text included, quote, “Roma traveler” and, quote, “possible G word,” the slur for Romani people. They typed that into the search box.
[44:24] Larry: Well, see, and I’m not smart enough to know. Roma traveler and G word. And so I need a little more explanation.
[44:33] Andy: According to Wikipedia, Romani people are an ethnic group originated in northern India and migrated into Europe roughly a thousand years ago. So kind of in your time frame. They’re Europe’s largest ethnic minority. The older exonym is Gypsy, which came from a medieval mistake that Europeans thought they’d come from Egypt. Now it’s widely treated as a slur, which is why EFF rendered it as G asterisk PSY in the reporting. Their persecution history is severe and continuous—enslaved in Wallachia and Moldavia until 1856 and beyond. It’s like similar to the Holocaust and so forth in how they were treated.
[45:21] Larry: Okay, well, tell me why this is the tightest analogy and the segment tighter than ice.
[45:28] Andy: Well, look at the EFF findings, what they actually describe. More than 80 agencies putting ethnic descriptors into query fields. Grand Prairie PD running a slur six times through the convoy feature, the function that identifies groups of vehicles traveling together. That’s the part that’s worth sitting with—the tool and the prejudice fit each other. Exactly. A feature built to flag vehicles moving in groups aimed at an ethnic group stereotype for traveling in groups. There’s no crime in the query. The searches are run against people around because their presence is suspicious. That’s a pure status search with no offense attached. And that’s why it maps onto our audience better than the immigration material does. The ICE searches, at least gestured at an immigration violation. The Romani searches gestured at nothing. Queries were run against an ethnicity because the officer found its presence suspicious. Structurally, Romani Americans occupy a position similar to register registrants—a group with a durable stereotype, essentially no political constituency and no organized offenders who will take a public cost for them. And that’s the actual mechanism behind your original point. It isn’t the sentiment transfer; it’s the search that happens when nobody will make it expensive.
[46:52] Larry: They typed in an ethnic slur into the audit log, which means that it’s recorded. The bigotry is memorialized and the query executes anyway. And I was saying, I didn’t think technology could be biased, but apparently it can.
[47:16] Andy: Yep. So then let’s move on to the final category and I’m sure this is going to trigger some number of people on both sides. Category three is abortion. Texas deputies used facial recognition data in October to investigate a woman’s self-managed abortion. They characterize it as quote, death investigation of a quote non-viable fetus. And a Johnson county official ran searches with a note that said, quote, had an abortion search for female end quote. One of those queries reached 80,830 cameras across nearly the entire country.
[47:48] Larry: One query, 83,000 cameras. Is that what you said? That’s what I said, buddy, to find a woman who ended a pregnancy. Now I want to name what all three of these have in common, because it’s the spine of why this matters to our audience. Every one of these was a status search on protester Romani, a woman who had an abortion. They’re not searching for a specific crime with a specific suspect and specific evidence. They’re searching for who a person is. That’s the move they’re making: a query run against a person for who they are rather than what they’ve done.
[48:33] Andy: And that’s before we get into the federal piece. 404 Media got records out of Danville, Illinois police department, and they showed flock search logs from departments all over the country. More than 90% of them were from the state. And 4,000 nation and statewide lookups done at federal direction or as quote informal favors or with an immigration focus. Justifications officers typed in included quote immigration, ICE, ICE plus ERO, illegal immigration, and ICE warrant end quote. And ICE has a contract with Flock? Nope. That’s the thing, Larry. ICE had no contract with Flock. None. None. None. None. None. None. None. Just by a phone call. A favor. Hey, buddy, can you look this up for me? And here’s a wild one. 404 Media found Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission police, the wildlife cops, ran 38 flock searches with immigration justifications in January. Each one reached more than how many? 5,000 different flock networks. That became possible after roughly 800 of their officers got enrolled in the 287G program, which handles state officers’ federal immigration authority now.
[49:45] Larry: You just said 287g and I’m not familiar with that. What is that?
[49:48] Andy: So this is section 287g of the Immigration and Nationality Act. It’s the provision that lets ICE deputize state and local police to do federal immigration work. From ICE’s own page, it authorizes ICE to delegate to state and local law enforcement officers the authority to perform specified immigration officer functions under the agency’s direction and supervision. A local agency signs a written agreement with ICE, ICE trains and certifies specific named officers, and those officers can then exercise federal immigration authority while remaining employees of the sheriff or the state agency. ICE runs three models: jail enforcement task force and warrant service officers.
[50:41] Larry: Let me make sure I’ve got this correct because there’s a big question. Um, ICE needs no contract, no warrant, no new statute, no new authority; it just needs a phone call to the local department that already has a FLOCK login. Is that what you’re telling me?
[51:02] Andy: The whole apparatus was already built in and it’s been paid for. FLOCK’s response, for what it’s worth, was that it blocked immigration cooperation in cities and states where cooperating with federal immigration is against the law, end quote, which tells you the default everywhere else.
[51:21] Larry: Now you see why I keep circling back to the first question: Who’s holding the data? A vendor who can query it, anyone the vendor gives a login to. Anyone with a login is doing you a favor; there’s no statute connecting these steps and there’s no statute forbidding them. So they’re not authorized, they’re not forbidden. And here’s the principle I want people to sit with: The absence of a law forbidding something is not the same as a rule against it. There’s no law that says ICE can pick up the phone, but there’s no law that says it can’t. With that gap, the phone just rings and guess
[52:01] Andy: Well, let’s talk about some money because you asked who profits. FLOCK raised 275 million dollars in March of 2025 at a 7.5 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. More than 300 million in annual recurring revenue up 70 percent year over year. It’s a Y Combinator company; TechCrunch called it “Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling.” Now, some of those terms are right up your alley because you watch a lot of the markets and send me stock ticker stuff every day. So there’s venture capital
[52:37] Larry: And this is what you’re saying, which means their returns riding on the expansion business model is subscriptions to towns—every town you sign up is future recurring revenue. So the incentive isn’t fewer cameras; it’s more towns, more clusters, more coverage. And that answers who profits and who the public got to vote against—which is nobody. You didn’t get a ballot saying shall we let a venture capital-backed company blanket the county and rent the pictures back to the police? It just showed up. You gotta admit that’s funny and
[53:15] Andy: I should say because we’re being careful, there is a company called Palantir that had a big ICE contract for immigration OS, which is what that one’s called. It was finalized last April and Palantir received federal money enormously—roughly a billion dollars in obligations in one fiscal year. But I want to be clear about what we are not saying:
[53:37] Larry: We are not saying Flock feeds Palantir. There’s no documented pipeline from one to the other, and I’m not going to assert one. That’s not the argument. The argument isn’t a secret integration; it’s an assembled capability with no connecting statute. Local cameras collected by Flock stores that local police can be asked to run it, and the federal government has platforms for using the data for fusing immigration data. No law connects the steps, and no law forbids them. That’s plenty—I don’t need a conspiracy. The pieces sitting next to each other are the problem.
[54:14] Andy: All right now, I’ve got one other thing that I want to cover, and that’s to flag up front exactly what it is because it cuts against a lot of what you just said. And I think that’s the point of keeping it—that it’s not from the Schmidt opinion or 404 Media. A paralegal who follows the program wrote to us, and he was relaying an account about his daughter who’s a law enforcement officer in Virginia and uses Flock alerts on her patrols. So I want to be honest this is secondhand and two versions removed whatever her operational account is firsthand to her. Nobody on the show witnessed any of it, and I can’t independently check a word of it. I’m going to keep her generic—a law enforcement officer in Virginia—good report as what it is—and go ahead and tell us what she said. All right so her account is on her beat they rarely use Flock for anything but stolen vehicles and AMBER alerts. They’re too busy to use it for much else. She confirms she cannot tell who’s driving—not from behind, not at all. The data stored entirely by Flock. Her locality pays for the subscription. An officer can set the system to detect a specific plate but needs a documented reason. Department policy makes misuse a terminable offense. They’re actually trained on real cases of officers abusing plate lookups. It’s not used for registrant notifications in her case. A hit is live—it tells them a car is present right now—so they can respond and on approach if the driver is not the person they’re after, the vehicle’s released immediately no delay. That’s her account so this
[55:57] Larry: is a department using it narrowly with discipline, with training on abuse cases and with misuse being oh well you get fired. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t just hear that you read a minute ago and here’s how I hold both things at once: the abuses documented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and 404 Media happened in departments where the policy didn’t hold or it didn’t exist. This is a department where a policy apparently does hold, and the difference between the two is a policy, not a law. Discretion is not a protection; a policy that can be revoked is not a right. Her department could get a new police chief tomorrow with a different memo, and the capability is still identical. The restraint is real and it’s exactly the point: the departmental and it’s revocable. It’s the department imposing discipline on itself.
[56:58] Andy: Now she also volunteered a couple honest things too. She doesn’t think the public understands how limited these are. Her own explanation for why Flock keeps beating legal challenges is that you’re not on the law, you’re on a public road so your privacy interest is diminished, which is exactly what the courts’ baseline and the Schmidt court runs on.
[57:26] Larry: An honest person she talked herself right up to the edge of it but
[57:31] Andy: here’s the case that brought it up. I think this is the spine of the whole segment, and again, I can’t verify it—no case name, no court, no date—and uh, a trial level acquittal in Virginia didn’t show up in any reporter or database, so there’s nothing to look at. It’s a person’s account: a man was approaching a woman on a public park walking trail three separate incidents allegedly ran up, grabbed them, and ran off—mild descriptions, no leads. An officer in another county made a connection to someone they’d apprehended before, and flock data placed a plate registered to the suspect in the area for all three incidents. He was brought in, questioned, charged, tried; didn’t testify; verdict: not guilty.
[58:18] Larry: My screen died.
[58:21] Andy: My god
[58:24] Larry: So I’m trying to get it back. Where were we, okay?
[58:27] Andy: Well, somewhere down towards the end, I’m highlighting the areas where we were all discussing.
[58:34] Larry: Right, got it. So what was the defense argument against that?
[58:43] Andy: Oh, so one sentence: The state’s best evidence, the FLOCK data, established the presence of a registered vehicle. Not the presence of the defendant; his vehicle is not him.
[58:56] Larry: There it is. That’s the whole thing. I want the registry audience to hear this because it’s the one useful weapon in the entire segment. The same limitation cuts both ways. Schmidt survives constitutional challenge partly because the system tracks a car and not a person, which is why it doesn’t reach the whole of your physical movements. And the identical limitation is why it fell apart as proof at trial. The system is constitutional because it can’t identify you, and it’s weak evidence for exactly that same reason. Evidence the car was somewhere is not evidence that a person was somewhere, and it cannot identify the driver who was actually driving. It’s proving a vehicle passed a poll; that’s it.
[59:43] Andy: Well, then, so how does this reach our audience concretely?
[59:48] Larry: Here’s the practical part, and I want to be careful not to get into opinions because the opinion solidifies that a sex offense registry is a status list. Exactly the kind of list that one of those abuses queered against immigration status, ethnicity, reproductive status. A registry is who a person is, not what they did. And it’s already assembled, shared between jurisdictions, and in most states tied to a specific vehicle. Nothing new would have to be built or authorized to run the same query that I allegedly ran. So what stops a registry compliance unit from running the query? Department policy if you’re lucky, and nothing at all if you’re not. So what do you think actually happens? I think registry compliance units will have to be built for this data once they figure out it’s there. And it won’t arrive as an announced policy; it will surface in a failure-to-register prosecution down the road, if it hasn’t already, for an exclusion zone case or a loitering allegation. Suddenly, the evidence is a string of Flock hits on your plate near a school or park. When that day comes, the defense that works is the one that’s already worked in that acquittal on the reasoning of the Schmidt court itself: supplies a vehicle is not a person; Flock output is location evidence, and the registered vehicle is not proof that you were behind the wheel. Make the state prove who the driver was because the camera cannot.
[1:01:23] Andy: And the Fourth Circuit has Schmidt on appeal number 26-1227. The ACLU and EFF filed an amicus in April. Doesn’t that fix it?
[1:01:37] Larry: And that’s where I want to manage expectations because people love to pin hope on the next appeal, but the Fourth Circuit does with Schmidt; I don’t think it delivers a rule that stops any of this. Here’s why: Even if there is a registered favorable ruling, it won’t help much. Everything in Schmidt is about collection step one where they’re taking and storing the pictures is a search. Even if a court someday holds collection needs a warrant, that reaches only the collection; it doesn’t reach the vendor holding the data, it doesn’t reach the money, and it doesn’t reach the informal phone call. That’s the part I keep hammering: people think a warrant requires a warrant, but it’s not the case. The court is not the department; the problem isn’t process. The problem is collection plus informal access. You can put a warrant on the front door while the whole thing walks out the side door.
[1:02:27] Andy: Nothing really gets undone here.
[1:02:29] Larry: Nothing here gets undone by litigation. The capability is built, it’s paid for; the money’s on the expansion side and it keeps growing faster than law tracking it. And I’ll be honest about the old shape of this because it’s not a good thing—it’s not a good decision. I can score a win or a loss, but it’s a landscape, and the landscape is moving against everybody on the list. Courts blessed the collection; documented misuse ran against one disfavored group after another. The money is accelerating, and the only thing standing between the register and the status query is a department internal policy—which is to say nothing that a memo can erase immediately.
[1:03:10] Andy: As usual, Larry, you’re pretty doom and gloom. That sounds pretty good, oh well.
[1:03:14] Larry: I just can’t help myself.
[1:03:15] Andy: Can I?
[1:03:20] Larry: So do you want me to read all this gobbledygook?
[1:03:24] Andy: Don’t you don’t have to if you don’t want to, so
[1:03:26] Larry: I think we’ve covered this as best we can do.
[1:03:29] Andy: You think? So if we, if we collectively, if we all voted and said no flock, I mean, does that have to come from your sheriff? Does that have to come from your city council? Does that have to come from your state?
[1:03:43] Larry: Well, I don’t see that as a possible vote to take because the law enforcement apparatus is going to cry foul. They’re going to say that they need this; these are vital tools that solve countless crimes. That’s what they’re going to say. And it’s very difficult to get a city council or county commission or a state legislature to say you can’t do these things. Rather than going to lawmakers, we need to develop the policies to present and try to get them adopted. We need to be the model of the law ourselves and take it in. But there’s going to be extreme pushback when something is established, particularly how much money did you say was involved? It was hundreds of millions.
[1:04:24] Andy: They’ve raised a crap ton. Um, so Flock raised 275 million in March, so over a year ago, almost a year and a half ago, at a seven-and-a-half-billion-dollar valuation. The market capital company is quite large.
[1:04:40] Larry: Yes, so I didn’t even know they existed with that machinery.
[1:04:43] Andy: I didn’t even know they existed. I’d never heard of it till this thread started. Oh, I see. All right, yeah, I’ve been following it because what I have heard and we didn’t put any of this in there is that they’re putting Bluetooth beacons on the cameras themselves. So now they get your car, and if your Bluetooth is turned on on your phone—almost everybody’s is—and they actually have a ping of your phone now. Is your phone unique? No, but you eliminate a lot of people with them indeed. You can definitively say it’s not that person, it’s not that person, and that leaves us with you. Same thing with the Bluetooth beacon: so now everybody in your car as they take a picture of it all of them would show up pinging their Bluetooth signals as you’re driving around. Too sounds promising, doesn’t it? Perfect. I like it that we have a surveillance state. Let’s keep it up because you know, if it saves one child…
[1:05:51] Larry: But it’s
[1:05:51] Andy: the natural progression of
[1:05:53] Larry: Technology progresses faster than any lawmaker can react. That
[1:06:01] Andy: is very true.
[1:06:01] Larry: We don’t know all the sinister things they’re going to think of until they’ve been done, and then it’s hard to unravel them because they’ll tell you that they’ve solved so many crimes because of these cameras.
[1:06:13] Andy: Well, hey if you like this kind of segment then please head over to registrymatters.co. You can find links to everything—show notes, places to buy merch and whatnot. Email us at registrymatterscast@gmail.com. You can leave Larry an old-fashioned voicemail message at 747-227-4477. And thank you to the patrons hanging out tonight—all dozen or so of you. That’s at patreon.com/registry_matters. We are independent creators here, and we rely on your donations to make it all worthwhile for us to keep this up. You can also head over to fypeducation.org/shop to find some cool merch.
[1:06:55] Larry: Don’t have any merch but I’m waiting for the chance to buy that shirt for someone who wears it to the polygraph exam.
[1:07:03] Andy: That’s right, that’s right. Anything else before we head out? We’re running a tad long, but I think this was fine. No, I think we got it covered. All right, well, I hope you have a good night and stay safe. And I’ll see you next time. Bye.
[1:07:16] Andy: You’ve been listening to Registry Matters.
[1:07:20] Introduction: Thank you for tuning in. Stay safe and we’ll see you next time. Bye.