What they're not telling you: Riverside County issued three encroachment permits for 500+ Flock surveillance cameras to the wrong permittee and based on incomplete applications. Then it let them lapse for over a year. Bianco and Flock continued to operate them.
The real scandal here isn't administrative incompetence—it's that we're treating mass surveillance deployment as a permitting problem rather than a constitutional one. Bianco's 500+ Flock cameras operating without proper authorization is footnote material compared to what should be the actual story: why does a local law enforcement official need zero meaningful oversight to blanket a county with automated license plate readers in the first place? California's encroachment permit system is theater. It regulates *where cables go*, not whether dragnet surveillance should exist. That Riverside County botched the paperwork is almost irrelevant. The cameras were installed. They captured data. That infrastructure now exists regardless of whether some official checked the right boxes. What interests me is whether Bianco's operation revealed just how thin the actual legal framework is. My read: these permits lapsed because the system has no teeth. No one's building enforcement mechanisms into these deployments. The local government didn't shut anything down. The cameras stayed live. This is what regulatory capture looks like in real time—not industry blocking rules, but government agencies so aligned with law enforcement that they treat surveillance deployment as inevitable and mere paperwork as the constraint.