Criminal justice researcher Matthew Cavedon joins Terms of Engagement hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to discuss democratic and legal implications of Flock cameras. The company’s roughly 120,000 license-plate reading cameras in the U.S. are now able to log time, location, and vehicle details on a scale that makes comprehensive movement-tracking possible without a warrant. The episode explores documented cases of misuse—including officers using the system to track romantic partners and at least one wrongful detention traced to a system error—the constitutional implications of aggregated, long-term surveillance of ordinary activity, and what control ordinary citizens have over the growth of mass surveillance in America. They also discuss what meaningful oversight would require and why Cavedon sees the stakes as reaching beyond law enforcement into the health of democratic self-governance itself.
About our Guest:
Matthew Cavedon is the Director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice. His work concerns the rights of the accused and jurors, government accountability, and the Second Amendment. His scholarship has appeared in the Arizona State Law Journal, Cato Supreme Court Review, and Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy. His commentary has been published by The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, JURIST, and MSNOW. He is a member of the Council on Criminal Justice. A former Georgia public defender and fellow at the Institute for Justice, Cavedon has also has taught law school courses on criminal law and procedure, as well as the First Amendment. He clerked for Chief Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia and Presiding Justice Nels S. D. Peterson of the Georgia Supreme Court. Cavedon, who is based in South Carolina, earned his BA in religious studies at Harvard College and his master’s in theology and JD at Emory University.