An Idaho sheriff ran his wife's plate 700 times. The vendor calls stalking rare

When the chief is the stalker

The IPVM report argues that license-plate-reader systems like Flock should require a warrant, and it builds the case from the people you'd least expect to abuse them: police chiefs, the most senior officers in a department. The Institute for Justice has documented at least 18 cases nationally of officers using the tools to track partners or rivals. The numbers inside those cases are the argument. A Jerome County, Idaho sheriff ran his wife's plate more than 700 times in three months. A Sedgwick, Kansas chief queried an ex-girlfriend's plate 164 times. A Holiday Hills chief tracked one man somewhere between 140 and 178 times.

The report also dismantles Flock's "we track vehicles, not people" defense: query a single plate over and over and you have, in fact, made that person the target. Flock's own Chief Legal Officer, Dan Haley, called stalking "actually the most common thing" in one breath and rare in another. And the comparison that closes the case is procedural: GPS trackers, cell-location data and wiretaps all require warrants. The plate readers don't.

The thread splits on whether warrants even help

The most upvoted reply in the thread actually rescued the Flock exec from the contradiction.

"He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse… The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know." — a high-karma commenter parsing the logic

Others wanted the blame moved off the vendor entirely.

"This problem is 99% cops and 1% flock." — a high-karma commenter

Bitcoin Core cryptographer Greg Maxwell rejected the report's own premise from the other side.

"No it shows why mass surveillance systems should be outlawed." — Greg Maxwell (gmaxwell), Bitcoin Core cryptographer

And one reply questioned whether the proposed fix is anything more than paperwork.

"Not sure how much warrants are going to help when a judge will see a stack of requests from a police chief and just rubber stamp them all without looking. This is already a problem in places where warrants are required." — a commenter on rubber-stamp warrant practice

The report wants a warrant requirement; the thread's two ends want either no system or no faith that a warrant means anything. Between them sits the awkward fact that the documented abusers are the same officers who'd be signing the request.