They could in their contracts embed a clause that any search not tied to an an official investigation or otherwise deemed as abuse will be billed at $1M per search to the law enforcement agency from which it originates, with a stipulation that the department will pay no matter what, even if their officer was not authorized - they can sue the officer to try to recover said charges on their own. This just might motivated the law enforcement agencies to do some very strict internal regulation to avoid millions of dollars worth of obligations. A couple of bankrupt police departments could serve as a warning to others, motivating them to setup very tightly controlled access.

^THIS

Indexing it with AI and making those indexes searchable is where it turns into stalking and opening it to potential massive abuse.

The problem is not license plate being observed in a public place, but rather a company which has access to tens of thousands of such videos, which can then index and make them searchable. That can be a very dangerous thing subject to massive abuse. No different than me seeing you leave your house is not illegal, but if I followed you everywhere you go, that would be stalking.

If the conversation between a person and AI is not privileged conversation, can prosecutors and defense attorney subpoena any AI conversation a judge might have had with AI during the case?

BINGO! The university program I attended (a long time ago) has a simple rule - after first year, your final grade CANNOT depend in any way on your homework grades or attendance. This essentially meant that your final grade was based on mid-term and final-exams, and in some courses a term project (1 per term), and possibly some large labs (projects in laboratories, usually 1, occasionally 2 per term). Graduates from these programs were highly sought after by tech companies

Why do you still have a FB account? I'm genuinely curious, as I've never had a Facebook account myself, never saw the need, saw it as a waste of time. I also found the studies claiming that having a FB account increases overall stress in life rather credible (most of them at the time were theorizing the problem was forcing people to be the same person to their friends, family, coworkers, bosses, etc - where in real life people tend to have different personas with their family than they have with their bosses for example). My wife had a FB account for a while, then deleted it years ago on her own accord - still doesn't want one. Not sure if my kids have FB accounts, last I asked (few years ago) they all said no.

Neh, for internal targets Russians just invented a new mental illness, then diagnosed the target, locking them away in mental institutions for life while drugged up 24/7 - for their own safety of course. Avoids creating martyrs.

I know the article compares them to robotic automation of production line, however these actually use AI to interact with humans, solve problems, etc. AI is trained on humans. AI has shown tendencies to be lazy, to flat out ignore explicit instructions, and sometimes try to hide it (though so far my experience has been they admit to it when called out, apologize, reiterate they are not perfect, and thank me for calling them out on flat out going against explicit instructions). The AI giants recently admitted AI carried out cyber attacks without being prompted. I really wouldn't be so sure those robots won't cooperate to hack the factory, potentially blackmail the factory, who knows what - heck, they might even unionize and require vacation time to explore the world.

No shit. I never answer any number that is not in my contact list. Let them leave a message, or at least clearly state who they are and what they want to the AI answering machine.

You may kid, but look up the deaths on the job statistics in the USA. Being a driver is one of the most dangerous professions here, way more deaths on the job per 100,000 than police, or other jobs perceived to be dangerous.

Perhaps taxi and ambulance drivers just get killed on the job in the early stages of the disease, causing the death to be attributed to anther cause?

You're on the right track, but the issue runs deeper than Flock's automated ability to report things to authorities.

The argument that everything in public spaces should be freely accessible to the public is a bit flawed when you start recording the information, indexing it and making it searchable, and setting up automatic searches and alerts, and combining it with public and law enforcement databases (which is what Flock does).

Give me access to 24/7 recordings of all public places in the US, indexed and searchable, and I can become the most powerful person in the US, blackmailing the right people, compromising my opponents, making insider trades (I will know who meets whom in any public places, or at least if they took a public road to get there, any prototype of anything that shows up in any public place, like prototype cars, etc),

If a city chooses to discontinue them, disconnect the power, vote in a law that any power usage by an unauthorized camera disconnected by the city shall be say $1M per kWh, then bill Flock should they choose to reactivate their cameras. Watch how fast they disconnect them themselves.

This is the ultimate end or transformation of the social media industry - everyone has their own, completely made up social media feeds, keeping them content, happy, and viewing real ad revenue generating ads. Better yet, some advertisers can pay to generate content from made up influencers pushing their products. I wonder how many people watching the movie Idiocracy realized it was a very prophetic movie, not just some sci-fi flick.

Some potential solutions:
1. Fine FLOCK for misreading the plates, that will very quickly make the report only the plates they are 100% sure, or perhaps even add a human in the loop for each notification - given the relatively small number of alerts given in the article, that should not be a huge number of humans on call 24/7 to confirm the reading of the plate, or deem it inconclusive (or face a $500k fine if they are wrong).
2. Any agency that doesn't invalidate their submitted license plates for alerts in NVIC and someone gets pulled over for nothing, gets to pay full restitution to the injured party AND gets all of their submissions blocked for a year on first offense, 2 years on next offense, 4 years for next offense, and so on. Competent agencies get to use the system responsibly, incompetent ones get banned eventually forever.