Should you love or hate Flock cameras?

The fight over Flock cameras might be one of the few topics where many Democrats and Republicans agree, even if they come at it from different angles.

Flock cameras are the license plate readers on poles that log every car driving past, and there are more than 120,000 of them across the country. Republican Senator Josh Hawley warns those cameras build something close to a gun-owner registry by tracking people headed to gun shows and the like. Critics on the left worry about the next immigration crackdown. And in at least 36 states, people have sawed the cameras down, shot them, or rammed them with trucks.

I can see both sides of this argument.

I’ve had thieves steal from my home and my car, and cameras like these might have caught them. They could catch plenty of worse criminals, too.

But I also traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, where the KGB alone was estimated at half a million people. Watching an entire country used to take an army of agents. Now, it just takes cameras on poles and a basic online search.

In one case, an officer searched nearly 20,000 cameras across more than 1,500 cities and gave his reason as “LMAO.” There have been several cases of cops tracking exes or other women they are (or want to be) romantically involved with.

Generally, you have no expectation of privacy in public. A cop can stand on the corner and watch you all day without a warrant. But the Supreme Court ruled that aggregating that information, say, by putting a GPS tracker on someone’s car, is a search.

So is a Flock camera the cop on the corner, or the tracker on your bumper? Federal judges have come down on both sides.

I don’t have a neat answer for this one. I lay out the best case against the cameras and the best case for them, including some good uses that have nothing to do with crime. But is a camera on a pole really where privacy makes its last stand, considering how much of it most of us gave up a long time ago?

You can watch the video here and see what I learned.

And another one!

Last week we published “What’s the deal with Mormons?” It’s not a takedown video. Mormonism is one of the most mocked religions in America, yet by almost all of the quality-of-life metrics, Mormons are doing better than the rest of us. I wanted to know whether the unusual parts of their religion have anything to do with that.

You can check it out here.

– Ken