Stephen Williams

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

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

Here’s a real estate question I think more agents are going to start hearing:

“Most of my money is in crypto. How do I buy a house?”

That’s a very different conversation than simply asking whether a seller will “take Bitcoin.”

A buyer may have substantial net worth in digital assets but still need to think through:

• Converting crypto to cash
• Documenting the source of funds
• Mortgage underwriting requirements
• Tax consequences of selling crypto
• Timing the conversion before closing
• Whether a cash purchase makes more sense

The opportunity isn’t necessarily putting a Bitcoin address on a real estate contract.

It’s understanding how digital wealth can become real-world purchasing power.

As more wealth moves into digital assets, I believe real estate professionals who understand both worlds are going to have an advantage.

If a significant portion of your wealth were in crypto, would you use some of it to buy real estate?

#Crypto #Bitcoin #XRP #RealEstateInvesting

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

Truthfully? No—not in their current form. The traditional mall concept is dying because shopping alone isn’t enough to get people off the couch anymore.

But I absolutely believe the right concept could bring people back inside. I have one—and it’s much bigger than retail.

I’d explain it here, but I’d rather test it on a failing mall than donate the idea to the internet.

So, if there’s a slightly crazy rich person reading this who owns—or wants to buy—a dying mall, let’s talk.

I don’t think the mall is dead. I think we’ve just been trying to save the wrong concept.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@BethanyForTruth I got mine after I commented on some post and actually tagged @XMoney. And I’m rather new to posting.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

@Gunblaze1969 “I’m not afraid of any animal,” I say confidently while sitting here eating fried alligator bites.

Now, if the alligator is still attached to the bites, I’d like the record to reflect that I have reconsidered my position and am suddenly very open to negotiation. 😂

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

We may never agree on where the line belongs, but we can certainly still be friends. Being on opposite sides of an issue doesn’t make us enemies. Frankly, having our assumptions challenged occasionally makes both of us better.

And I don’t discount your experience. If you’ve used Flock to find murderers, locate missing children and bring people home safely, I understand exactly why you value it. I would too.

My objection isn’t to Flock existing. It’s to mass surveillance without sufficiently narrow constitutional safeguards.

I actually think there’s a reasonable middle ground.

Kidnapped child? Missing vulnerable adult? Amber Alert? Use it.

Identified criminal suspect? Use Flock—but where the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant, get one.

For everyone else, I would severely limit retention. Personally, I’d be comfortable with something like seven days. If investigators develop probable cause and need that historical data, go to a judge, get the warrant, and preserve it. We both know warrants can be obtained very quickly when circumstances demand it.

That’s where Carpenter and Chatrie matter to me—not because either case was about Flock, but because of the principle they represent. The answer wasn’t that useful location data can never exist. The constitutional concern was government access to revealing location information without the required Fourth Amendment protections.

That’s a distinction I can live with.

Your experience tells you how extraordinarily useful this technology can be.

My concern is what happens when an extraordinarily useful law-enforcement tool becomes an extraordinarily powerful government surveillance network.

Give police the tool. Give them the ability to save lives and catch dangerous people.

But give the innocent citizen something too: a warrant requirement where constitutionally required, short retention, strict access controls, audit trails and real penalties for abuse.

Because the constitutional protections aren’t there for the murderer you’re trying to catch.

They’re there for the millions of people you’re not.

That’s probably where you and I will continue to disagree—and I’m perfectly fine remaining friends while we do.

[Stephen Williams @SWFL5440]

This is exactly why your “Democrats” detour doesn’t work.

Let me eliminate that straw man right now: I’m no Democrat, and I have absolutely no interest in seeing Democrats elected. My objection to mass surveillance comes from the opposite direction—limited government.

Ron DeSantis just called the proliferation of Flock cameras “out of control” and warned that Florida cannot become a “surveillance state.”

Byron Donalds is calling for a “full pause,” warning that government cannot have the ability to “watch your every movement.”

Greg Abbott has halted Texas state funding for additional Flock cameras while the surveillance concerns are examined.

Add Josh Hawley, Thomas Massie, Tim Burchett, Chip Roy, Anna Paulina Luna and others raising concerns, investigating Flock or pushing restrictions.

These aren’t Democrats trying to pack the Supreme Court. They’re limited-government Republicans asking a question conservatives should be asking.

And I think I finally understand our disagreement.

You keep focusing on the technology in each case instead of the principle the case establishes.

Carpenter involved cell-site data. Chatrie involved Google location data. Flock involves automated vehicle-location data.

Different technology. Same principle.

Technology can turn individually innocent, publicly observable pieces of information into something fundamentally different when government can collect it, aggregate it, retain it and search it to reconstruct someone’s movements.

And Flock isn’t just a camera looking at a license plate. It’s a searchable data system recording what vehicle was where, and when, across a network of cameras.

Your argument that police still have to consult another government database to identify the registered owner doesn’t make that better.

That’s not anonymity. That’s an extra database query.

Nobody—including me—is arguing that Carpenter or Chatrie declared Flock unconstitutional.

We’re saying the constitutional principles established as surveillance technology evolves don’t disappear every time somebody invents a new surveillance device.

I support giving police powerful tools to pursue criminals.

I don’t support building powerful tools capable of tracking everyone and then relying on government restraint as the privacy policy.

DeSantis gets that. Donalds gets that. Abbott gets that. Apparently a growing number of Republicans get that.

You keep explaining why Flock is useful.

I don’t dispute its usefulness.

I’m asking the question limited-government people are supposed to ask:

Who limits the government when the technology becomes too useful?

[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.