The Three Legged Stool of public policy
There are three factors to consider for all public policies- 1. Is it fiscally achievable (can we afford it?) 2. Is it legal? and 3. Is it moral?
Without all three legs you end up with a 'chair perilous', a resting place of most dubious reliability.
We have certainly paid for Flock with physical coin- so that leg of the stool I will leave be (for now...) however the legal leg of this hypothetical stool is looking more than a bit wobbly. Challenge after challenge is being issued, especially with regards to retention and aggregation, and several jurisdictions have decided this is a stool they just don't want to risk sitting on.
The last leg of this stool- and quite possibly the most important one- is the moral one. No one has explained why the vast majority of law abiding people are subjected to the same relentless observation as that fraction of a fractional percent of criminals. The question is not 'If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to fear?'- but rather 'If you haven't done anything wrong, then *why are they tracking you anyways*?' Your privacy is a gift from God, intended to be held secure against government scrutiny by the 4th amendment. This is the damage- the normalization of the violation of your rights and the gradual acceptance that the government can do things to you without recourse. They can construct from this cloud of persistent data a digital gestalt, a near twin, of your habitation, place of worship, friends, and general movements. It does not take much to imagine a world where this is wielded as a weapon against the people- the UK is already there.
The arguments presented during October's city hall meeting of 'we own the data, how would we ask for it?' is not particularly compelling. The purchase with physical coin merely answers who owns the contract, it does not answer if it was paid for with *moral* or *legal* coin. You cannot answer a moral question with a fiscal declaration.
The more troubling concern is the council's emphasis that 'this restriction is unworkable'-with regards to Councilor Sherrick's proposed amendment requiring a warrant in order to ensure lawful access is dutifully constrained. The problem is there is currently *no* lawful constraint. Why the system is permitted to function without a judicial check or a balance on law enforcement is simply beyond the pale. If there truly is no mechanism to lawfully control this, than the system must, perforce, be abandoned. The default is not 'the system continues' but rather 'the people's privacy remains secured'.
The idea that somehow it is right and just to spy on the innocent in the hopes of perhaps gleaming some info about the guilty- Blackstone himself would frown with disapproval at the shoddy legal argumentation... turning his ratio of justice into an error of several magnitudes of order. "It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer."*
* Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Book 4, Chapter 27 ("Of Trial, and Conviction"). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1769.