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My point wasn't that Flock allows this, but that it allows an entire class of surveillance that was previously not available.

What wasn't previously available? Automated license plate readers have been around since the 70s, and started being widely deployed in the 1990s as technology got cheaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...

It's not new tech.

The closest thing to it was repo companies sharing data.

This is very much a new thing.