It’s not about proprietary stuff, it’s about US software patents. The codecs are open source, but you can’t use them under US law because of patents. Fedora cares about that because they are closely tied to Red Hat which is an American company. Community distros without any corporate affiliation like Arch or Debian generally don’t give a shit since there is no commercial entity to sue. IDK how Canonical circumvents that though.

I wrote up

I don’t think you did.

You think USA government agencies never thought of using public surveillance cameras to spy on people before now? That’s like basic stuff for any domestic security agency, in any country. The only difference is that now the data is shared with regular police with all the incompetence and abuse it implies. You have always been spied on.

Any “license plate reader” has a camera and can be used for anything. This was true before flock.