Stephen Williams

Real estate. Finance. Technology. Independent thinking. Building wealth, businesses, and a life on purpose.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

You really should stop using the word “never.” The Supreme Court has now told you twice why your premise is wrong.

In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Court rejected the simplistic idea that moving through public automatically eliminates Fourth Amendment interests. Its words:

“A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere.”

Why did that matter? Because modern technology can take individual pieces of location information and assemble them into something qualitatively different: a detailed record of a person’s movements.

Apparently that warning wasn’t clear enough, because the Supreme Court just revisited the issue in Chatrie v. United States (2026).

There, police obtained Google Location History. The government argued, among other things, that the information involved movements exposed to public view and data held by a third party.

The Court held that accessing that location history was a Fourth Amendment search. And it expressly said the short duration didn’t eliminate the privacy interest: “It does not matter if the time period scrutinized was only two hours.”

So your theory—

“It happened in public, therefore there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy”

—isn’t merely oversimplified. It is incompatible with the direction of modern Supreme Court jurisprudence.

And now we finally arrive at Flock.

One officer sees my license plate on a public road? Observation.

A network of automated cameras captures it, timestamps it, associates it with a location, retains those observations, aggregates them across locations and makes the resulting history searchable after the fact?

That raises an entirely different constitutional question.

Neither Carpenter nor Chatrie holds that Flock itself is unconstitutional. I don’t need them to.

They destroy your proposition that information exposed in public can never implicate the Fourth Amendment once technology aggregates it into location surveillance.

Carpenter cracked that argument in 2018. Chatrie buried it in 2026.

The irony here is spectacular: you started this conversation correcting me about what Blackstone meant, and somehow ended up advancing a Fourth Amendment theory the Supreme Court has already moved beyond.

Seeing someone in public is observation. Building a searchable history of their movements is surveillance.

If you still can’t understand the constitutional distinction between those two things, we haven’t reached a disagreement about law.

We’ve reached the limits of the explanation.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@Gunblaze1969 Readers Digest

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@BigD5666 @Gunblaze1969 😂

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

You keep repeating “investigative tool” as though you’ve discovered a constitutional cheat code.

Investigative tools are exactly what the Constitution restricts.

Searches are investigative tools. Wiretaps are investigative tools. GPS tracking is an investigative tool. Cell-phone location records are investigative tools. The Supreme Court has imposed constitutional limits on all of them.

Why? Because “this helps us catch criminals” is not, and has never been, a blank check for government surveillance.

And nobody claimed Blackstone was discussing license-plate cameras. Blackstone’s Ratio expresses a principle: a free society intentionally accepts some risk that guilty people will escape rather than give government unlimited power in pursuing them.

Flock being useful proves nothing. Warrantless searches would be useful. Universal phone tracking would be useful. Putting a government camera in every living room would be extraordinarily useful.

Utility is not the constitutional standard.

The issue is where government power ends when it encounters an innocent citizen suspected of nothing.

You’ve now responded repeatedly without addressing that question, apparently because correcting an analogy you didn’t understand is easier than confronting its point.

So I’ll make it painfully simple:

“It helps catch bad guys” is the argument for surveillance.

The Constitution is the argument for limiting it.

If your entire constitutional philosophy fits on a Flock sales brochure, Blackstone isn’t the one you need to reread.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

That’s a tidy distinction—and a spectacular way to miss the point.

Yes, Blackstone’s Ratio concerns the justice system’s tolerance for letting the guilty escape rather than harming the innocent. Nobody claimed Blackstone was writing about license-plate readers in 1765.

The principle matters because it answers the underlying question: How much liberty and protection should innocent people surrender to make catching the guilty easier?

Your answer appears to be: track everybody.

And “Flock might prove me innocent” isn’t the defense you think it is. By that logic, warrantless access to your phone, location history, financial records and conversations is acceptable too. After all, any of them might exonerate you.

That’s not how a free society is supposed to work.

We constrain government power precisely because tools created for legitimate purposes can be abused, expanded and repurposed.

Blackstone warned against sacrificing the innocent in pursuit of the guilty.

Franklin warned against surrendering liberty for security.

You’re not rebutting either principle.

You’re demonstrating why we still need them.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@TomMoore2 Just added to your number, I’d appreciate your follow back

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@LakerGMC_ @Fla_Pol @RonDeSantis @AGGancarski His MO is freedom. A surveillance state is not free.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

It’s actually the principle this country was founded upon. I post this one more time for the uninformed…

For those unfamiliar with William Blackstone: he was one of the most influential legal scholars in history, and his writings profoundly influenced the American legal system and the Founders.

His famous principle became known as Blackstone’s Ratio:

“Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Flock flips Blackstone’s Ratio on its head:

Track everyone. Record everyone. Build a database of everyone’s movements—because someone might be committing a crime.

That isn’t presuming innocence.

That’s treating the entire population as suspects and calling it “public safety.”

And before someone trots out, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” Benjamin Franklin had something to say about that mentality too:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Blackstone understood the danger.

Franklin understood the trade.

Two and a half centuries later, we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that surrendering privacy is progress—as long as the surveillance comes with a nice app and the word “safety” attached.

The cameras got smarter.

The argument didn’t.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@JohnLenderBuff @Fla_Pol @RonDeSantis @AGGancarski How about only activate them in such a circumstance. Such as with an amber alert etc. scan the tags delete any that do not match immediately. No database…. no search….unless there is a match.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

I’ve posted this elsewhere, but it’s applicable to your argument…. For those unfamiliar with William Blackstone: he was one of the most influential legal scholars in history, and his writings profoundly influenced the American legal system and the Founders.

His famous principle became known as Blackstone’s Ratio:

“Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Flock flips Blackstone’s Ratio on its head:

Track everyone. Record everyone. Build a database of everyone’s movements—because someone might be committing a crime.

That isn’t presuming innocence.

That’s treating the entire population as suspects and calling it “public safety.”

And before someone trots out, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” Benjamin Franklin had something to say about that mentality too:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Blackstone understood the danger.

Franklin understood the trade.

Two and a half centuries later, we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that surrendering privacy is progress—as long as the surveillance comes with a nice app and the word “safety” attached.

The cameras got smarter.

The argument didn’t.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

For those unfamiliar with William Blackstone: he was one of the most influential legal scholars in history, and his writings profoundly influenced the American legal system and the Founders.

His famous principle became known as Blackstone’s Ratio:

“Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Flock flips Blackstone’s Ratio on its head:

Track everyone. Record everyone. Build a database of everyone’s movements—because someone might be committing a crime.

That isn’t presuming innocence.

That’s treating the entire population as suspects and calling it “public safety.”

And before someone trots out, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” Benjamin Franklin had something to say about that mentality too:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Blackstone understood the danger.

Franklin understood the trade.

Two and a half centuries later, we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that surrendering privacy is progress—as long as the surveillance comes with a nice app and the word “safety” attached.

The cameras got smarter.

The argument didn’t.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@DougChico @Fla_Pol @RonDeSantis @AGGancarski Technically, New Hampshire led the way this time with legislation. Florida is trying to catch up.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@itsrosesm You forgot to include the address where I can send my check

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@DanD703 Happy to add to your following.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@SDSLLC_USA Good advice..thank you

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

Why would I name one? I never claimed one. You’ve spent four replies demanding I defend a MAGA slogan you hallucinated because the actual argument—NFL profits don’t prove “wokeness” caused them—was beyond your comprehension. So you fabricated a dumber argument and started fighting it in public. That’s no longer a straw man; it’s your emotional-support scarecrow. The only thing you’ve demolished is any remaining suspicion that you can follow a basic argument.

Go away troll

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

I never mentioned MAGA, politics, Kid Rock or boycotts. You dragged them in the instant your imaginary Target bankruptcy collapsed. That maneuver has a name: losing. You couldn’t answer the economics, so you switched to tribal slogans and hoped rage could finish what intelligence couldn’t. You’re no longer debating me—you’re hiding from my argument inside an opponent you invented. Every reply you post now is just another signed confession that you lost.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

Target didn’t go broke—it had $93.6 billion in sales and $5.1 billion in operating income. You compared two completely different companies, ignored every other business variable, invented a bankruptcy, and crowned DEI the cause. That isn’t analysis; it’s a toddler connecting dots with a crayon. You didn’t refute correlation versus causation—you climbed inside the fallacy, locked the door, and started screaming “LMFAO.” The only thing bankrupt here is your reasoning.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

The NFL made more money because multibillion-dollar broadcast contracts kept getting larger—not because someone knelt during the anthem. Ice-cream sales and drownings both rise in summer, but nobody thinks Häagen-Dazs is killing swimmers. That’s correlation, not causation. Your argument doesn’t prove “going woke” worked; it proves you don’t understand how proof works.