I've often thought to spook legislators by crowd-sourcing this and scaling it. Any member if of the public can upload dashcam footage, and can search any number plate captured by the network: including legislators, town councilors and school board members. Access is gated by uploading dashcam and having it corroborated by other footage to avoid faked footage, e.g. cross-checking license plates in the same area.

My concerns are the decision makers may rake the wrong lesson from this, my own moral injury, and/or legal exposure when this information is inevitably used to harm someone. Also, Law enforcement would happily co-opt this service. Perhaps making the searches themselves public would alleviate same of the challenges.

I've thought about doing this, but ironically you'd be sued into oblivion where I'm from. Likely prosecuted by the both the state and city attorney for violating privacy laws already on the books. Yet somehow Flock is deploying cameras everywhere.

My system would have been much more open on purpose. Like the private bittorrent tracker of security cams. You stream footage to the centralized cloud for aggregation, and get access to the full dataset in return. Perhaps with some "ratios" built in to incentivize sharing like you do for seeders vs. leechers on the BT network.

It's a fascinating technical problem - but the legal minefield is crazy even if you're doing it as a form of protest.

I also think the lessons would be lost on the general public. If anything, it would result in laws that made such things only legal for private licensed companies or some such - I'd simply be assisting in furthering regulatory capture.