✏️ Legal Pad
Flock Has Heard of You
Last week, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing called "Always Watching: Flock's Nationwide AI Surveillance Network." Chairman Josh Hawley opened with the line of the week: "If you haven't heard of Flock, Flock has probably heard of you." Four CEOs were invited, including Flock's Garrett Langley, and all four declined. If you run a network of more than 120,000 cameras, you'd think you wouldn’t be afraid of appearing on camera yourself.
The star witness was Lindsey Isaacs, a 23-year-old Florida woman jailed for 13 days on vehicular homicide charges after a Flock camera recorded her black Durango three miles from a fatal crash, two minutes before it happened. Witnesses described a maroon one. She sued two Highway Patrol sergeants, not Flock. Flock's answer is that its cameras provide "investigative leads" and accurately recorded her car. That's the whole defense: it was only a lead.
Now compare that to the sales pitch. Yesterday, CBS News reported that Langley has said Flock helped "clear just over a million crimes" in 2025. A company spokesman later described the figure as "approximately 1 million investigations and incidents," including leads, cross-jurisdiction help, and searches, and a criminologist called the original number "probably a gross over-estimate." So the camera solves crimes when Flock is selling and merely provides leads when something goes wrong.
The hearing raised worse. Senators heard about at least 19 Georgia arrests or terminations tied to unauthorized searches, including stalking and tracking estranged partners, and testimony that Flock removed officer names from external searches and stripped plates from audit logs. Those are concerns raised at a hearing, not findings, and Flock has since added safeguards like case-number-linked searches and shorter retention. But a surveillance network is only as trustworthy as its audit trail, and the vendor writes the audit trail.
The legal question underneath is an old one. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), held that the government generally needs a warrant for historical cell-site records, because a detailed log of where you've been is different in kind from a single glimpse. A searchable, cross-jurisdiction database of where every car has been for 30 days looks a lot like that. The Fourth Circuit, which covers both Carolinas, applied Carpenter's logic to Baltimore's aerial surveillance program in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, 2 F.4th 330 (4th Cir. 2021) (en banc).
Closer to Home: Florida ordered Flock cameras off its state roads, with a deadline that passed yesterday. North Carolina went the other way: its budget, signed July 7, made the state's plate reader program permanent, with a 90-day default retention period. South Carolina's H.4675 would cap retention at 21 days, require a warrant to search the data, ban AI tracking by vehicle appearance, and bar agencies from storing the data on third-party servers, which happens to describe how Flock works. As far as I can tell, it's still sitting in committee.
If Flock is right that it only provides leads, it shouldn't mind a warrant requirement.
💡 Sidebar
Lawyer Trick No. 203: Ask the Witness to Draw It
Hand a witness a marker and a blank sheet of paper and watch what happens. The confident ones slow down. The vague ones get specific. And the ones who were coached discover that "it came out of nowhere" has to come from somewhere, and somewhere has to be drawn.
Words let people hide. A witness can say "the truck was in my lane" or “Flock cameras don’t make mistakes” for an hour without ever committing to which lane, how far, or at what angle. Or that Flock cameras are creepy and shockingly inaccurate. A drawing makes them put an X on the page, and that X is evidence. It's fixed, signed, and marked as an exhibit, and it doesn't drift between the deposition and trial the way an answer does.
Here's how I do it. Ask them to draw the scene: the road, the intersection, the room. Don't help. Then have them mark where they were, where the other person or vehicle was, and where it happened. Have them label and sign it, then walk you through it. Bad art is a feature. Nobody trusts the guy whose diagram is perfect.
Then do it with your own client first. I'd rather learn in my conference room that the crash a client described on intake doesn't match the crash they just drew than learn it at trial. If they don't line up, you've found the problem while it's still cheap.
⚖️ Closing Arguments
Open the Door
I complained twice this week about my job. Once because a hearing got moved, and once because I had to skip lunch for a mediation. Then I read about Smit Machchhar.
Machchhar is a 38-year-old FlyDubai captain. On Wednesday, he was flying a 737 MAX 8 to Tel Aviv when he was stabbed in the cockpit. According to the Wall Street Journal, the wounds to his neck and hands were so bad that his left hand almost split in half, and the cockpit "was full of blood." While all that was happening, he apparently alerted air traffic control, opened the cockpit door, and let the passengers and crew in to help. A dentist on board restrained the attacker and treated him. Reserve pilots took over and landed in Saudi Arabia.
Think flying a plane is hard? Try doing it in a knife fight when you're the only one without a knife. His first moves weren't heroics. They were procedure: tell somebody, open the door, let in help. A former supervisor says his name means "smiling mosquito," which is the least intimidating name in aviation, objectively hilarious, and describes my backyard to a tee.
There's a lesson in there for people like me, who think a bad day is a judge who runs late. Stay calm, do the next right thing, and don't try to land the plane alone. The next time Pat wakes up at 3 a.m. and I'm sure I can't do another one, I'm going to think about a man who asked a dentist to send a message to his kids and then went right on trying to live. He's recovering in the UAE, and I hope somebody buys him a very large drink and a very quiet flight home.
Court is in recess- see you next Friday.
