## The Camera You Destroyed Is Now the Evidence Against You: The Exploitation Stack part 4 of 5 **THE EXPLOITATION STACK** David Torres told his attorney he had been home all morning on the date in question. The personal injury defense hinged on it. The plaintiff claimed Torres had been driving through the intersection at 8:47 AM. Torres said he had not left his house before noon. His attorney prepped him on the point. Torres repeated it at deposition without hesitation. Opposing counsel served a subpoena on Flock Safety three weeks before trial. The return showed Torres’s plate captured at a camera two blocks from the intersection at 8:31 AM. Another camera logged him on the return route at 9:14 AM. The timestamps bracketed the accident. The camera record did not explain what happened at the intersection. It made every other element of his testimony worth questioning. Torres had not lied deliberately. He remembered the morning differently. He had no idea the cameras existed. He had driven that route hundreds of times and never noticed the pole. He could not have destroyed the record because he did not know there was a record to destroy. *[David Torres is a composite character based on documented patterns in location evidence use across personal injury and commercial litigation. No specific individual or matter is depicted.]* This is Part 4 of The Exploitation Stack. Parts 1 through 3 examined Section 702 government databases, the wrong number that creates a database entry, and the employer handbook that functions as a pre-signed privilege waiver. Each prior part involved a government surveillance layer that a private adversary then exploited. Part 4 is different in one important respect: no government involvement is required at any stage. The cameras are privately operated. The database is privately held. The subpoena is civil. The Fourth Amendment is not at issue. The exploitation is purely between private parties in a courthouse. [For the government surveillance dimension of the same Flock Safety network, see “Every Phone in the Room, Part 2,” Morris Legal Technology Blog, 2026.] **The Network No One Sees** Flock Safety operates the largest vehicle surveillance network in American history. As of 2025, more than 100,000 cameras across 49 states. Over 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 6,000 communities. Twenty billion license plate scans every month. The company raised $950 million in total funding and carries a $7.5 billion valuation. The cameras are unremarkable. Mounted on poles, solar-powered, weather-resistant. Most drivers do not notice them. There is no requirement that they be posted, announced, or disclosed. They photograph the rear plate of every vehicle that passes, record the time, log the GPS coordinates of the camera, and transmit the data to Flock’s servers. They do not distinguish between suspects and commuters. Every car gets scanned. Every scan gets stored. The default retention period is 30 days. Many agencies extend it. In Virginia, a retired veteran named Lee Schmidt filed suit after discovering that 176 Flock cameras across Norfolk had logged his location 526 times in a four-and-a-half-month period, an average of more than four times per day. His co-plaintiff, Crystal Arrington, had been logged 849 times in the same period, averaging more than six times daily. Neither was under investigation. Neither was a suspect. They were simply people who drove through a city that had purchased Flock’s surveillance-as-a-service subscription. When the cameras capture a plate, the data does not belong to the driver, the municipality, or the agency that licensed the system. It belongs to Flock. The driver has no access to it, no right to delete it, and no notice that it was collected. In November 2025, a Washington state court ruled that Flock camera data constitutes a public record, accessible via public records requests even when stored on a third-party vendor’s servers. The data exists. Multiple parties can reach it. **The Civil Subpoena Mechanism** Every attorney who has litigated a civil matter in federal or state court knows how to serve a third-party subpoena. The process is straightforward: identify the entity holding relevant records, serve the subpoena on their registered agent or at their designated legal address, specify the records sought, and await compliance or a motion to quash. Flock Safety publishes its evidence policy on its website. The policy is explicit: non-law enforcement requests must be properly served via Flock’s registered agent or at their physical address in Atlanta, Georgia. Flock reviews submissions for valid legal basis, responds within 14 calendar days on standard requests, and can provide witness testimony when required. Emergency or exigent requests receive expedited handling. The policy does not distinguish between criminal and civil proceedings. It does not require a warrant. It does not require probable cause. It requires a properly served subpoena. A plaintiff’s attorney in a personal injury case, a spouse’s attorney in a matrimonial dispute, or opposing counsel in a commercial litigation matter can all serve that subpoena. The mechanism that law enforcement uses without a warrant is also available to any private litigant with a civil action and a 14-day wait. The subpoena returns timestamped photographic evidence of every Flock camera that captured your client’s plate during the retention window. If the camera was within range of the relevant location during the relevant period, the return places your client’s vehicle there with the specificity that surveillance cameras provide: exact time, exact location, license plate confirmed, vehicle description logged. **What the Record Does to Testimony** The camera record does not prove what happened inside the vehicle. It does not prove the driver’s state of mind. It does not establish fault, intent, or causation. What it does is place a vehicle at a location at a specific time with a degree of precision and objectivity that human memory cannot match and cross-examination cannot easily dislodge. Torres’s deposition had been consistent and credible. His attorney had no reason to doubt him. The camera record did not establish what happened at the intersection. It established that Torres’s vehicle had passed through the area within sixteen minutes of the accident, bracketed by two independent camera captures, at a time Torres testified he had been home. Every other element of his account was now in play. The impeachment function is the primary application, but not the only one. In commercial disputes, a party who claims to have been in a particular city for a meeting on a particular date generates a Flock record if they drove through any camera-covered area. In employment matters, an employee who claims workplace exposure on a specific date leaves a vehicle record if they drove to work. In matrimonial cases, a spouse who claims to have been somewhere other than the location their partner alleges can be placed or contradicted by camera captures they never knew were being taken. The asymmetry matters. Opposing counsel who knows to subpoena Flock has this information before deposition preparation begins. The attorney who does not know, or who does not think to check, prepares their client on facts the record may already contradict. **The Title’s Premise: You Cannot Destroy What You Do Not Own** The parked angle for this piece was originally titled “The Camera You Destroyed Is Now the Evidence Against You.” That title contains a precise legal problem worth unpacking. Spoliation doctrine punishes parties who destroy evidence relevant to litigation. Courts impose sanctions, adverse inference instructions, and in extreme cases default judgments, when a party destroys documents or data they had a duty to preserve. The duty to preserve attaches when litigation is reasonably anticipated. But spoliation requires that the destroying party controlled the evidence. Torres never controlled the Flock record. He did not know it existed. He could not have deleted it. There is no Flock application on his phone that would have allowed him to review his scan history and choose to purge it. The camera data sat on Flock’s servers, outside his reach, from the moment it was captured. The title’s irony is that the conventional spoliation concern does not arise. The unconventional problem is worse: the record exists, the party has no access to it, cannot anticipate it, and cannot prepare for it, because the infrastructure that captured it operated invisibly. The camera Torres could not destroy became the exhibit he could not explain. **The Constitutional Question Is Unresolved and Irrelevant to This Piece** Courts have split on whether warrantless government use of Flock data violates the Fourth Amendment. A Norfolk circuit court ruled in June 2024 that collecting location data from the city’s 172 Flock cameras constitutes a search requiring a warrant. In October 2025, Virginia’s Court of Appeals reversed. In January 2026, a federal district court in Schmidt v. City of Norfolk granted summary judgment to the city, finding the ALPR program complied with the Fourth Amendment given the limited camera count, short retention period, and absence of continuous monitoring. The Supreme Court has not addressed the question. None of that analysis applies to civil litigation between private parties. The Fourth Amendment constrains government action. It does not constrain opposing counsel in a personal injury case. There is no constitutional barrier to a private litigant subpoenaing a private company’s records. The warrant debate is irrelevant. The subpoena mechanism is available regardless of how the constitutional question resolves. Flock has pushed back against characterizations of its network as mass surveillance. The company argues, accurately, that most courts have found no Fourth Amendment violation and that its cameras capture only vehicles visible on public roads. That argument addresses the government surveillance context. It has no bearing on a civil subpoena. The camera’s legality and the subpoena’s legality are separate questions. Both answers are currently yes. **The Steelman: The Record Serves Justice in Both Directions** Location evidence cuts both ways, and this deserves acknowledgment. The same Flock subpoena that places Torres near the intersection also exonerates the defendant who was genuinely elsewhere. In matrimonial cases, ALPR data has corroborated clients who were disbelieved by their spouses and by courts operating on incomplete information. In hit-and-run investigations, the network identifies vehicles that left the scene before law enforcement arrived. The surveillance infrastructure that creates the trap for the fabricated alibi also builds the escape for the truthful one. The stronger steelman is that the evidentiary value of objective location data reduces the premium on witness credibility contests. Litigation that turns on who is more believable in their account of where they were favors the more polished witness, the more sympathetic party, and the more experienced cross-examiner. A camera record is none of those things. It is a timestamped photograph that does not perform better for one side than the other. The limit of this argument is that the record is only as complete as the camera coverage. In rural jurisdictions with sparse Flock presence, the absence of a camera capture proves nothing about where a vehicle was. Opposing counsel who obtains a null return from Flock cannot represent that the client was not at the relevant location. They can only represent that no Flock camera captured the plate. That distinction matters in deposition and in closing argument. **The Vulnerability This Argument Cannot Close** The civil subpoena application of Flock data is, as of this writing, an emerging tactic rather than established practice. No published appellate decision has addressed a private litigant’s use of a Flock subpoena to impeach opposing party testimony. The mechanism exists. The legal basis is uncontested. The practical application has not generated reported case law. That absence cuts in both directions. Attorneys who adopt this tactic have no established framework for opposing a motion to quash, if one is even available. Attorneys defending against it have no precedent for exclusion. The doctrine is being made in real time in trial courts that are not publishing opinions. What this piece identifies as an emerging tactic may become routine in two years or become constrained by judicial decisions not yet issued. The uncertainty is real, and practitioners should monitor it rather than assume the mechanism is settled. **What Catherine Does Thursday** Two specific additions. Both are checklist items, not research projects. First, in every civil matter where party location is contested, add Flock Safety to the third-party subpoena analysis before depositions begin. The relevant question is whether any Flock camera was operating in the geographic area relevant to the dispute during the time period at issue. Flock’s website allows agencies to check coverage. For civil litigants, the public records request framework, confirmed as applicable by the Washington state court ruling in November 2025, provides a supplementary access route in some jurisdictions. Know what the record shows before your client testifies to what it does not. Second, add one question to deposition preparation for any matter where location is a live issue: “In the period covered by this dispute, were there times you drove through the relevant area that would appear inconsistent with your account?” This is not a trap question. It is an inventory question. If the answer is yes for a benign reason, Catherine needs to know before opposing counsel has the camera record. If the answer is no, the deposition goes forward with the client’s account documented in advance of any contradicting evidence. The Flock subpoena costs the same as any civil subpoena. It requires no technical expertise. It requires only knowing to ask. [See “Every Phone in the Room, Part 2,” Morris Legal Technology Blog, 2026, for the government surveillance dimension of the same network and the suppression arguments available in criminal matters.] **The Pole Torres Never Noticed** The pole was there every time Torres drove that route. Solar panel on top, camera angled toward the road, plate reader running continuously. He drove past it the morning of the accident. He drove past it on the way home. He drove past it dozens of times before and after. He never saw it. Nobody told him it was there. No law required anyone to tell him. By the time Torres sat down to prepare for his deposition, the camera had already told its story to Flock’s servers. The data sat in a database in Atlanta, timestamped and waiting, while Torres and his attorney worked through his account of the morning. The account was honest. The account contradicted the record.

Originally published on LinkedIn Newsletter: The Technology Blind Spot