We’ve never had a central data store that would make it practical to achieve such a feat. Now we have one that could answer questions like this, forever.
Mass surveillance at scale is not a trivial problem to solve, but Flock is both making it happen and making it clear that they are fine with enabling bad actors to take advantage of it.
While I don't love the FBI's history of data collection, there is a world of difference between warehousing data from government records, and building a graph of warehoused data from all possible sources and selling access to any small town police chief that can convince the city council to pay for it.
Plus, data in FBI custody is nominally subject to laws and oversight in a way that privately held data is not.
Mass surveillance at scale is not a trivial problem to solve, but Flock is both making it happen and making it clear that they are fine with enabling bad actors to take advantage of it.