Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/11/26 Eric Fowler on the Latest Form of Illegal Government Surveillance

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

Scott interviews libertarian activist Eric Fowler about the so-called Flock cameras being put up in cities to illegally surveil Americans. Fowler explains what the cameras are, how they work, what laws they violate and how libertarians in Arizona are fighting back. Discussed on the show: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman whattheflock.us Eric Fowler is Chair of the Maricopa County Libertarian Party in Arizona and a Senior Software Developer specializing in big data analysis.  Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Porton. All right, y'all. Introducing Eric Fowler and his dog, Macon. He is a libertarian that I met at a function.

I'd rather not disclose. But anyway, we had a great conversation about the flock cameras in the great state of Arizona and what libertarians like himself and others are actually. doing about it. And it was a great little little conversation here. So welcome the show. I'm happy to give you a chance to catch everybody else up on what y'all have been doing

and how they also maybe could do such things. So happy to have you here. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm glad we had a chance encounter at that particular event that, you know, I'd be given this opportunity to talk about all the stuff we've been doing in Maricopa County to try and push back against this awful mass surveillance network that was rolled out without our consent or much notification at all.

Yeah. You know what? So that's a good place to start. I only read a couple of smart guy books. Mostly it's all just current events stuff. You know what I mean? But I once read this smart guy book by Neil Postman called Technopoly. It was written like in the mid-90s.

And it's called the culture, sorry, the surrender of culture to technology. technology and saying that essentially, especially subsidized by the national government, the Silicon Valley and related industries, essentially anything that they can invent, they will invent and will eventually be implemented as soon as it's cheap enough to do it. And there's essentially no part of our culture, no part of our worship of the Bill of Rights or any other thing or holding it as some sacred thing or any other part of our culture can really withstand it. And the perfect example of this, going back to the mid-1990s, was as soon as the video cameras were cheap enough to put up everywhere,

they put them up everywhere. And it started where it was just a 7-Eleven to discourage theft. And then it was more and more kind of parking lots and things, whatever, it's still just private people protecting their property. But then within a year or so of that, two years of that, it was on all of the, well, at least in Austin, the entrance and exit of every road into town. Every one of them was covered by cameras. And then I know Houston was out ahead of us on the freeways, but by the turn of the century,

they had cameras up on all the freeways. And, you know, we're working on putting them on every intersection all up and down. It's all just in the name of traffic control, of course. although obviously they use them for law enforcement all the time. But the point of it was that the so-called democracy that you learned about in government school was just nowhere to be seen in any of this, right? There was not a vote on this.

There's no single candidate who ever ran on the platform that I promised to put up cameras because that's what we all want, right? And that's what I'm going to do for you. Nobody did that. They never held a referendum like on the city level or the county level. that is this what we want to do?

The state, I guess, appropriated the money for it. But there was no real debate about it. And, you know, if there was any period of public debate, it was nothing, not even a footnote. There was no essential, like, public discussion of it at all. It just happened. All of a sudden, there are surveillance cameras everywhere. And this is the thing to me, because I read 1984 in high school, and one of the major aspects of the controlled grid of slavery thing in 1984s,

there's cameras everywhere. So even if you want to meet your girlfriend out at a public rally, you've got to be like, hey, meet me in the bushes, because there's cameras everywhere. And so I thought that meant that was something we should never do or allow to happen to us. And yet we did right away. So now here we are 30 years later having this conversation, 25, 30 years later, yeah, 30 years related really having this conversation about sort of the ultimate in those ubiquitous cameras. And that is this flock camera, which is, I believe more than a license plate reader,

but I don't really know the extent of it. Can you please tell us like how bad these things are and how connected to Palantir it all is or how this works? So just a little note on my background. I'm a director of software development in my company. And I've been writing. software since I was in high school. So I like to think I'm qualified to talk somewhat about the technical aspects. So the cameras themselves, the main marketing thing that we're told is they're just taking pictures of license plates. And because it's in public, you have no right to privacy at all, even though the Supreme

Court in the United States versus Carpenter in 2018 said that. that, no, you have to have a warrant to collect long-term cell phone tower data. So tracking somebody's location over time using cell phone tower data. The Supreme Court said, yes, you have to have a warrant. So there is some expectation of privacy there. There's another case. I believe it's Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore in 2021. That was a case where they were using UAV drones over Baltimore to surveil the movements of people

over time. Thankfully, that was found federally to be unconstitutional, a Fourth Amendment thing. So there is precedent that you at least have some aspect of privacy in a public place. So the talking points about it are generally incorrect. When it comes to flock, there's currently a case that is being done by the Institute of Justice in Norfolk. That it, flock one at the district level that is currently in appeals and will likely go to the Supreme Court. So when it comes to flock ALPR specifically, the constitutionality has not been decided, but their PR documentation says that it is very much Fourth Amendment compliant, which is extremely Orwellian, but what else would it be from that company? So how bad is it really? So they take a picture

of every car that goes by, they run it through some machine learning algorithm to not only get the plate, which they tend to read incorrectly, leading to false arrests and pulling people over incorrectly. It also categorizes the make, model, color the car, any dense, scratches, bumper stickers,

and classifies all that away, ties it with a timestamp and a GPS coordinate and puts it in a big gigantic database that they say is stored in Amazon's government cloud, but it is centralizing the movement location of every single vehicle that goes by any of these cameras. Now, it gets worse. I don't know that flock has necessarily done this yet,

but there's a similar company, Leonardo, or also ESL-E-G, I think. they make license plate readers that the federal government uses, and they are now combining that if some type of antenna that is going to sniff up all the signals that pass through as that car goes by. So that includes any kind of pings they can get off of any Wi-Fi devices in the car, Bluetooth, your AirPods, your headphones, your smartwatch,

the tire pressure monitor, you need, identifiers. So they want to grab every kind of unique identifier they can. Tie it with your license plate, which ties to you.

And why would they need all of that information if it's only about a license place, as they say? And then, even then like, at any given time,

there's a fugitive and we know what car he's driving and which way he's going and whatever. But instead, they're just digging pictures of everybody's license.

Like, and it's interesting, even there when you talk about the court precedent, I don't know when they originally, you know, ruled about just how much privacy anyone has the expectation for on any given thing. I know that one thing was, well, most of these cameras, government cameras up anyway, have to be video only not audio,

because some judge said, well, you might still have an expectation of privacy of having a conversation with someone walking on the sidewalk if there's nobody within earshot. Now, so they've ruled on that. Like, you have no right to prevent the government from surveilling you with a camera because if they were standing there, they could see you, right?

I guess. But then they sided with us sort of on, at least the audio part. But then what about the part where we're talking about mass surveillance of the entire society? That's not the same as saying, hey, man, if you go walking down the street,

you can't complain. if a cop drives by and sees you, or if anyone else in the public, drives by and, like, takes a picture of you, standing on the sidewalk or whatever, I guess, yeah. That's not the same thing as the government having cameras everywhere, monitoring where everyone is going all the time and whether they are meeting somewhere

because they are going to the same place and this kind of thing. This was one of the, I thought, the biggest outrages of the Snowden leak back now 13 years ago, if you believe it, was how they save everybody's, phone location data for five years. So that is, as you just think about it, that's every car you've ridden in and with who and everywhere you went, every living room and every bedroom you've been in and every whatever you've done for five years, they can pinpoint you virtually exactly what, within 10 feet or 10 meters or something on a Google map. So, and the thing is,

it's not like they have people looking at it in real time, but they don't need to. to the points they can go back and look at it whenever they want to, to know everything about you far beyond what should be tolerable. And then, of course, you just have, doesn't sound like you have a lot of statutes here mandating all this. You just have court decisions allowing it. And then they just go on, right? Yeah, well, the interesting part is the Fourth Amendment was very much drawn out

against what the founders called general warrants, which was a warrant out to the entirety of the population with no presupposition of criminality. And that's how we're being treated. It's very much a Fourth Amendment violation. The potential hope is that in the current appeals of the Norfolk case, the same court that ruled on the constant drone spying in Baltimore, the beautiful cities or beautiful struggle case. It's the same appeals court that's going to be hearing this Norfolk case. So there is, you know, a little bit of hope. But yeah, that hasn't been decided.

And additionally, here in Arizona, we actually have a state constitution privacy clause. It's Article 2, Section 8, that no person shall be disturbed in their private affairs without the authority of law. Now, when I was doing research on that, there hasn't exactly been a court case that elevates the Arizona state constitution to what you would consider more than what the Fourth Amendment argues. But the fact that it was put in there since the founding of the state, there was at least a recognition that there needed to be more than the Fourth Amendment. Additionally, in Washington state, they have a similar privacy clause. and when court cases were going on in Washington State, a judge there recognized that in Washington State, in Washington State it met that level, and the judge there considered those cameras to be public records and thus queriable by the public,

so all the cameras came down immediately. They definitely didn't want people to know how extensive this spying apparatus really is. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So now take us through here because you wrote me a little thing where you talked about the step by step since you got involved with this, what all you've been able to accomplish.

And it's really quite remarkable and I hope precedent setting here. It started in the end of 2025. Is that right? Yeah. So my first endeavor in this was, you know, I started doing public comments last year for the first time, which I would encourage everybody to do. It's not that scary.

You get up and say your two or three minutes speech, and that's that. But I started doing that as a part of my libertarian activism. But the part in 2025 was the Scottsdale, legislative agenda was one of the items up for discussion. And one of the things on there was that they wanted to have the police up to date on all things, technology, including real-time crime centers, drones as first responders, license plate readers, and kind of every other key word that's in the modern police technology sphere these days

with this really just, how can we violate the citizens' liberties just a bit more? But on that public comment, I really talked about all of Flock and how those cameras were put up in Scottsdale with no city council vote, no public comment. And I believe they were put in as a budget line item as technology upgrades. So nobody would have known, hey, yeah, they're putting up all these cameras. and Scottsdale is pretty extensive in the amount of cameras that they have. It's like every in and out road and then everything around like the downtown area

is heavily covered. No public comment, no place for input. But after I made my comment about all of this, they struck language off of that legislative agenda to be more generic of just keeping police up to date on technology. So all the real-time crime center drones as first responder,

license plate reader, all of that was struck. So it was kind of a nice first foray into, you know, you can kind of put some pressure on this and get some little tweaks. So that was the first part that was encouraging.

And then what happened next was it in January's the beginning of the legislative session in Arizona and a bill called SB 1-1-1-1 or 11-11. That got introduced. right at the beginning of the session. And you could very much classify it as the Flock Protection Act. It was a horrendously bad piece of legislation that, as I had mentioned before,

Arizona State Constitution says that your privacy clause says, you know, should not be disturbed in private affairs without the authority of law, Right. So that's kind of the key piece there. So this piece of legislation was to head off potential lawsuits against flock. So they could say, well, there's authority of law behind this now. But the thing that was horrendous about the legislation was they talked all about how it had all these guardrails. And of course, there's nothing, nothing at all. And the most egregious part of it was that the law specifically, prevented, banned any type of FOIA requests around any of these systems at all. They do not want the citizens to know how pervasive this is,

what kind of queries they're doing, how they're using the system, because there's no warrants involved at all. The police are able to query at will. They have policies that say that it's supposed to be for these things, But again, those are police policies, not law. They don't have any teeth to them.

Hey, did you guys know I'm a coffee? Yep, there it is. Scott Horton's show breakfast blend from Moondos Artisan Coffees. Get it, they hate Starbucks. So they're Moondos Artisan Coffies. And it's really great stuff. I drink it in the morning and in the afternoon so that I don't go to sleep. And it's reasonably priced.

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from Moondos, artisan coffees. And, you know, one of the things that we brought up pretty early on this was that, you know, we opposed the law at first. And with myself, this group here in Arizona

called EZ, AZ, which is a nonpartisan group, and Jen Barber, who does Gen Stucense, a journalist. We come together and our first try at it was, hey, let's just propose a set of amendments to this. Like, this bill exists. Let's try and amend it. Maybe citizen action will work here. So we proposed a set of amendments there up on what the flock. U.S.

But based on that effort, we were able to stop the bill for the most part. It did pass out of committee. And they didn't take our amendments even when it went to the Senate floor. But based on us just calling and calling and calling these legislators, we essentially killed the bill. They came back with 1138. which was essentially a rerun of it. It's still blocked.

I'm sorry. Parentheses, L-O-L. They called it 1138 for this horrible dystopian thing. That's an old George Lucas reference. This first movie. And then it's in all the Star Wars movies. THX-1138. Robert Duval.

Yeah. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah. So they, so a, what we would call a, you know, like a cousin bill of 1111, 1138 came out, it had minor tweaks of stuff. Nothing, nothing that would really do anything. And, you know, it of course banned all the FOIA requests, the freedom information about the system. And one of the other things was that, you know, the crux of the issue with the bill is that it regulated the police use of it.

And it did nothing to regulate the vendors like flock, axon, M.O.Torola, all of them. So essentially it put light gloves on the police usage of it and didn't touch anything with the vendor at all, which was immediately very easy flaw to spot in the legislation. So we campaigned against that. That bill got sidelined. And that's what? To explicitly restrict the company from sharing their information with,

what, anyone else outside of the county or whatever? it is. Putting any kind of restrictions on them because the way flock words their terms of services, they claim intellectual property right forever and they can use

the images however they want from all the cameras. So before and as the video comes off of it, they claim forever perpetual license of those images which is every person, every car, every whatever that goes past that. They claim that,

in their contracts, you know, that they want to remix it, use it for training, and whatever. But they claim forever rights to that. And, you know, one of the things there that stuck out as like a massive problem there is that, you know, they're told that this is used for local stuff. It's only shared in the state. But with that type of license, even though they, will say to the customer, hey, this data is deleted after 30 days. Their contract terms essentially allow them to keep it forever if they feel like it.

They just don't have to deliver or store it for the client after the 30 days. So huge problems. Yeah, I can go further in the legislation. Yeah, well, in fact, just take a slight detour, but stay on that track. But tell us a little bit about this group that you were able to put together, because it turns out that there are, I guess, some other activists going up to your Capitol Hill there who you made common cause with pretty quickly, huh?

Yeah, so, yeah, EZ is Marissa Caldwell. She's Republican, but is, I guess, formerly a libertarian before I had moved to Arizona. And I'm sorry, what did she say the name of her thing was? EZ, AZ. Oh, okay. So, yeah, making things easy. So she does like civic engagement and stuff.

And her libertarian background made this a very common. We had a lot of commonality on this one. And you got Institute for Justice, which that's the coctopus, libertarian types. And also the ACLU to support you on this, right? Yeah. So that is in the new legislation. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm skipping ahead here.

you know, so the first effort was for us to kind of push a citizen set of amendments, which that they didn't go for that, which was fine. But we did have some meetings with legislators to kind of say like, hey, look, this is why this particular language is horrendous. And so they started to kind of understand, okay. But that was kind of the thing was Senator Jake Hoffman, who's the chair of the Freedom Caucus in Arizona, he was also quite aware of this bill and how bad it was. And he was the one who made a passionate speech in the Senate against SB 1111 and SB 38.

And one of the critiques that came back was that there wasn't an alternative proposal. And we were trying to amend this existing bad legislation. So when that came about that, hey, you know, there's no alternative proposal. we said, okay, we will give you one. How about that? A lifetime ban. A permanent ban on ever trying this again. How about that? Yeah, yeah. Well, if only the police would go for something like that. So we started that effort. And again, this is, Jake Hoffman has done a great job. And he's, he's been the one championing this. So, you know, credit goes to him on this for sure.

but he invited myself from the Maricopa County Libertarian Party. Like you were saying, Institute for Justice, who's involved in the Norfolk case. Their local guy was involved. ACLU Phoenix. I mean, those are kind of the main people that I can think of. They've been along for the whole ride on this part, which is HB 2917, which was the alternative legislation.

So we kind of answered that call of we need an alternative proposal. So we worked together. And Jake came up with a framework called Truth in Surveillance. In Arizona, there's a previous set of legislation called Truth in Taxation that essentially says that if a city council wants to raise property taxes, they have to have multiple public hearings. they have to hear, like, those that are going to have their taxes raises have to have their voices heard, which is great. Not every state has such a lovely thing, but Arizona's a bit more free than others. So the idea was to mirror that type of citizen involvement, civic involvement, that when contracts come up, new contracts come up or renewals, obviously the legislative detail is actually being worked out. this week.

As we're talking now, it is, it's Thursday the 11th. And tomorrow, Friday, the 12th is going to be what I'm told is the last day of legislation. So this legislation that we've been working on is, is, should be going up for a vote tomorrow. So it'll be very interesting to see when, when this is up if it did in fact pass or not. But we, we worked on that framework and it's gone through many, many iterations. and I've had multiple meetings where, you know, I've been always grateful to be involved that libertarians are having a voice on legislation. And it's been a crazy process to see how the sauce is just made. Well, man, I got to tell you, I can't promise when this podcast will come

out, but I do know that if you can try to get, you know, your state libertarian party email list to promote the thing, put out phone numbers of the legislators who need working on. And also, you know, at different times in the, throughout the morning, need to call talk radio and get right-wing talk radio on a movement to call your congressman. I know, especially in Arizona, they got Defend the Guard passed this way. It just took one or two AM radio shows. We're talking about Defend the Guard.

And that was enough to completely blow up the phone system up there. And they were like, okay, okay, we'll pass it. Whatever it is, leave us alone because it just worked that well. So especially if you hit them at the last minute, hey, everybody's a big crusade against the flock cameras and it's today. All we need is you to call these people and tell them you mean it. And you know what I mean? Get that out there on the AM radio. AM radio is still a thing.

People who don't listen to it don't know that, but it is. So the people who do listen to it, they're still out there. And the thing is they're all listening to the same thing at the same time and can, you know, be motivated to act on that basis. So I sure hope you can do that. and I sure hope you can wrangle the support to keep up your winning streak here. Yeah, we didn't do the AM radio, but we did do a huge push when we were killing the SB 11-11, L. SB. 38. We called so much. I called myself, and they were like, are you calling about this thing?

And I was like, uh-huh. Yep. Yeah, me too. It's like, yep, note me down. Another opposed. So look, are you going to be phone banking tomorrow? Uh, probably. Okay, so if people went to what the flock.com, assuming this comes out in time, which it may or may not, but if they went to what the flock.com, they could find information about that?

Whattheflok.us. Oh, dot us. Sorry about that. At us. Um, so that's, uh, it's going to be state senators. So state senators in Arizona, that is your list. Um, all their, all their phone numbers are publicly available. their legislative numbers are.

And yeah, so we'll be up on that. The hope is that, you know, through these various sets of negotiations and changes to the law that will end up getting, you know, enough agreement to get something passed, you know, because this is, it's a very good framework to work off of. Yeah.

You know, I don't think this issue is by any bit done. But currently their existence in Arizona is essentially a gray zone where the law hasn't spoken on it. So there's nothing that says they can't do it, but there's also nothing that says that they can do it. So this would be the framework that allows, you know, if the city councils or county border supervisors vote to allow it by a 65% majority, assuming, you know,

again, this is in progress text, would allow it. And so if it is allowed, which we are obviously hoping that, various city councils will say, no, you know, we hear our citizens. We hear the people that voted us in our representative system here, that they do not want this, that we would have pushback there and cancellations of contracts. But in the places that it is allowed, this is going to be some of the toughest restrictions in the country when it comes to the legislative sphere. That's good. And only a first step, too.

You could roll it back better next year, you know, possibly. Possibly, yeah. So the main thing, and this is like the big thing that we've been on, is right now there's no warrants when it comes to searching any of this stuff. So what this would impose is if allowed in a particular city, they'd be able to query within 24 hours of history without a warrant, but going farther back into 30 days of allowable recorded storage, they would have to have a warrant. So if you're going to be looking into the past, which is... That's already a big compromise, yeah. Well, that's the way the sausage is made. Trust me, the proposals that I put through were mirroring what New Hampshire law has. New Hampshire is really the best. Surprise, surprise.

But New Hampshire has a policy that allows for three minutes of video storage and processing. So think about it allowing... toll booth. Right? So as your car goes past, they read the license plate, they do electronic tolling through that. That's allowable.

Then the other part of it is if that, they call it a hit-based system. So if there's already, let's say a stolen car, if that stolen car, that plate is already in the system with a warrant to notify, then that actually goes out of the system.

Right. Couldn't get that. Maybe next year. All right, listen, I'm sorry. I got a run here, but it's what the flock. US, right? Yes, yes. And if this happens to hitting time, everybody, on Friday, go there and see if you can find

some phone numbers to call and get involved in this process. And hopefully we'll get an update from you sometime soon. Yeah, I got one more plug for you. So on LPmercopa.org, the county website, we're selling these shirts. Oh, great. Not Spy on Me. Yeah, for everybody listening, it's Do Not Spy on Me. and it's a flock camera there on a pole.

Yeah, it's a play on Gadsden. Right. But yeah, if you want to get that, support the cause, that would all be great. Great. All right, you guys, that's Eric Fowler. Thanks so much for your time, man. Appreciate it.

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