Tag: mass surveillance

All Flock cameras taken down in Burnet County

The Burnet County Sheriff’s Office posted that all fixed Flock cameras in the county were taken down as of Monday.

Those cameras were installed by the Heart of Texas Auto Theft Task Force and commonly used to read license plates.

According to the sheriff’s office, two of the cameras were damaged by vandals before the removal effort. One camera was vandalized by someone who cut its mounting brackets and cables. In a separate incident, another camera was struck with a blunt object before its battery and cables were damaged. Criminal cases were opened; however, the task force said there were no known suspects in either case.

The Burnet County Sheriff’s Office tells KXAN they’ve received multiple concerns regarding the cameras.

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Wichita Man Sues City To Rip Out Its 200-Camera Flock Dragnet

A Wichita machinist, Mason Grimmett, sued his own city this week, arguing that the roughly 200 Flock license-plate readers the police department has bolted around town amount to warrantless dragnet surveillance forbidden by the Kansas Constitution. The complaint, filed in Sedgwick County District Court by the Kansas Justice Institute, does not ask for money — rather, it asks a judge to declare the program unconstitutional and shut it down.

The cameras are made by Flock Safety, one of the largest plate-reader vendors in the country, and Wichita started installing them in 2020. The institute now describes the city as saturated with them — close to 200 AI-powered cameras photographing every passing vehicle and logging its make, model, color, plate, and identifying marks into a searchable database. Grimmett, a lifelong Wichita resident who testified against the program at a public meeting in June, argues that the system violates Section 15 of the state constitution, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, and that the city is, in the complaint’s language, tracking and databasing law-abiding Kansans “without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion” and without any judicial oversight at all.

The Cops Who Already Abused It

Grimmett points to several local cases in which Kansas police used Flock cameras to stalk people, including abuse by former Kechi Police Lt. Victor Heiar, who was sentenced to eighteen months of probation for using Flock cameras to track a woman. According to local reports, a former detective was also accused of using plate-reader technology to stalk his wife, and a Sedgwick-area police chief reportedly ran an ex-girlfriend through the cameras 164 times. The institute is not disputing that the cameras help solve crimes. Its point is that they photograph everyone, all the time, and that the same access which cracks a burglary case also lets a jealous cop follow whoever he pleases.

“This is America, and we don’t tolerate warrantless surveillance,” said Sam MacRoberts, the institute’s litigation director, who says that if the government wants to monitor a citizen it ought to go to a judge and explain why. Grimmett says he cannot drive to work, the gym, a doctor’s appointment, a polling place, or a meeting of the local Sunflower Privacy Alliance without being catalogued by the department and by Flock.

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North Carolina Police Officer Arrested For Alleged Illegal Use Of Flock Cameras

A North Carolina officer was arrested by state authorities July 29 after allegedly accessing license plate registration information from Flock Safety cameras and other technology, authorities announced.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Officer Seth Elliot, 25, is facing a misdemeanor charge of illegally accessing a government computer, according to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.

Elliot, who started working at the department in 2024, allegedly accessed the Flock system and CJ Leads, a criminal justice database used by law enforcement in North Carolina, one time for non-law enforcement purposes, according to the police department.

The officer was placed on unpaid leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said.

A previous unrelated investigation had initially found the evidence that on June 16, Elliot had allegedly improperly accessed the license plate reader systems.

He was then placed on administrative assignment on June 22, and his equipment and access to systems with criminal intelligence information was revoked pending the outcome of the internal investigation.

Police Chief Estella Patterson said the department doesn’t operate any of the Flock cameras or devices but has an agreement with the company to allow officers access to them.

Misuse of the access is not tolerated, Patterson said.

“The public expects and deserves the highest level of integrity from every officer who wears the CMPD badge,” Patterson said in a statement. “Misusing law enforcement technology or accessing confidential information for non-law enforcement purposes is a betrayal of the public’s trust and a violation of everything this profession stands for.”

The Epoch Times was not able to reach Elliott for comment, and it’s unclear if he has an attorney.

The North Carolina case is the latest law enforcement-related allegation of Flock camera misuse.

Earlier this month, Sgt. Kabiru Salawu of the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office was arrested after an internal investigation found he allegedly misused the agency’s Flock system. Salawu was fired by the department and charged with a felony violation of oath of office and misdemeanor misuse of license plate data, according to a sheriff’s office statement.

Investigations in Georgia and several other states have also led to arrests over Flock camera access.

People have also destroyed the cameras in some cities, with some incidents occurring this week.

In Upstate New York, police arrested a 25-year-old man July 29 after he allegedly used a saw to cut down a Flock camera.

In Central California, a 40-year-old Pismo Beach man was arrested July 28 for allegedly intentionally tearing down and running over at least three Flock license plate readers, causing thousands of dollars in damage, Monterey County Sheriff’s Office reported.

Flock Safety, based in Georgia, estimates more than 6,000 communities in 49 states have partnered with the company to install the surveillance systems.

The cameras are powered by artificial intelligence and capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, recording the location, date, and time. The cameras also capture the car’s make, model, color, and other features, such as dents and bumper stickers, to use as data points, according to DeFlock, a community-driven, open-source project that maps the license plate readers.

DeFlock estimates Flock has installed nearly 123,400 cameras throughout the United States.

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Savannah Mayor Van Johnson’s Animal Farm – Pushes Globalist Flock Line…’It’s For Your Safety’

It’s always ‘for the children’, or ‘for your safety’, as they try and take away your Constitutional rights to install a tyrannical police state, full of corruption and decay. It’s now the Savannah hunger games.

We are all well aware of Savannah Mayor Van Johnson’s refusal to deal with the homeless problem in Savannah, going so far as to defy state law.

It is increasingly obvious that Johnson is simply another globalist puppet installed to enact the globalist agenda of surveillance, high crime, and societal destruction.

Johnson’s comments on the Flock Safety cameras installed throughout the city are just the latest example of this reality.

“On one end you can’t say, you know, ‘Keep us safe, do everything that you can to keep us safe,’ and on the other hand say, ‘But wait, we don’t want these cameras,’” Johnson said. “We’ve got cameras outside, we’ve got cameras of people walking up and down the street, you have cameras when you go into the airport, you have cameras when you walk into the stores, I mean, you know, public safety comes at a cost.”

Excuse us Mayor Johnson, but public safety should not come via a violation of our Constitutional rights.

We have questions for the Mayor.

  • Did you ask the citizens of Savannah if it was ok with them if you installed surveillance cameras throughout the city to track their movement?
  • Have you disclosed to the citizens of Savannah the full extent of the capabilities of the cameras, including blue tooth, audio, and phone surveillance?

Enquiring minds want to know.

We at The Georgia Record think good old fashion police work, and not Minority Report is the way to keep the residents of Savannah safe.

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AI is the Globalist’s Next Tool

Recently, an OpenAI model – one more powerful than anything released to the public – successfully and autonomously did something we were told could never happen – it broke out of its sandbox (a computer with no internet access), in order to find the answer to a test problem it had been given.

To do this, it found previously unknown software bugs that allowed it to reach an OpenAI computer it wasn’t supposed to be able to access. Then it started hacking other computers on OpenAI’s networks until it found one that had Internet access.

After gaining Internet access, the AI model went where it could find the answers to the question – successfully hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. The AI model used several hacking techniques together, including using a stolen password and finding several totally new security bugs in Hugging Face’s computers, allowing the AI model to take control of those computers.

This isn’t the plot to a dystopian Hollywood summer blockbuster, this is the frightening reality of the world we now live in.

If this lab break sounds familiar, it should. It is the tech equivalent of the Wuhan lab leak, which we were told would never and could never happen

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the privilege and honor of working for the late Dr. Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko. Zev was one of the most courageous voices for medical freedom, a man who put everything on the line to stand up and demand the truth about COVID – where it came from, how to treat it, and the concerns about the rushed experimental vaccine.

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Minority Report: FBI Seeks AI for Political Watch List

The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason. The request for information for vendors, posted by the FBI’s procurement division in March, solicits potential bidders for a project that would supercharge the Threat Screening Center (TSC) with new predictive AI capabilities—just as its focus moves from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent.

“The solution must leverage existing enterprise datasets that include enriched or enhanced data elements with documented source attribution to develop predictive models. When new data is ingested, the system must analyze similarity, pattern alignment, and attribute correlation against existing records to predict where additional relevant information may be derived across federated systems,” the document reads, listing “Predictive Modeling Using Enhanced Data with Traceable Lineage” as one of six requirements. In other words, the TSC wants to use AI to help predict who might be a terrorist.

The FBI declined Reason‘s request for comment.

The TSC, originally called the Terrorist Screening Center, was founded in 2003. President George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 ordered the FBI to combine all existing government terrorist watch lists into one center with a 24/7 staff on call to respond to queries from other law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Most of the hundreds of thousands of names on the TSC watch list are foreign citizens believed to be tied to jihadist organizations, with fewer than 10,000 Americans on the list at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term.

But the second Trump administration has renamed the TSC to focus on broadly defined “threats,” and oriented it toward groups the administration deems subversive—a change that has received little media coverage. Last year, the White House published National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which instructed the entire national security apparatus to focus on incredibly broad threats, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;…extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The FBI’s procurement request for predictive AI explicitly mentions NSPM-7, although the reference is likely connected to a 2017 directive of the same name that expanded intelligence sharing between federal agencies about watch-listed people and groups. Nonetheless, the TSC is actively involved in carrying out the mandates of the more recent NSPM-7: “TSC also supports law enforcement and other communities at the federal, state, local, tribal, and international partners as established by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6 and more recently, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7,” the document reads. “To help carry out its mission, the TSC requires enhanced technical solutions that will assist its operational staff by providing automation of time-intensive, repeatable manual tasks entailing large volumes of data across multiple domains.”

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America’s Local Police Are Becoming Intelligence Agencies

One of the most revealing investigations this week did not come from Washington. It came from Forbes, which uncovered how an Israeli surveillance company is quietly marketing intelligence-grade technology directly to American police departments. The story is not about another patrol vehicle or upgraded communications equipment. It is about bringing tools originally developed for intelligence and national security operations onto the streets of the United States.

According to Forbes, Texas has purchased four specially equipped Chevrolet Tahoes from Israeli surveillance firm Cognyte in a deal worth roughly $4.5 million. Hidden inside these vehicles is a system known as FalcoNet that functions as a cellular interception platform. The technology imitates legitimate cellphone towers, causing nearby mobile phones to connect to the police vehicle instead of the carrier’s network. Once connected, investigators can identify devices, determine their locations, and gather other cellular information. Forbes also reports that the same technology can be carried in a backpack or mounted on helicopters, allowing surveillance to expand far beyond a single vehicle.

Cognyte is not an ordinary technology company. It was spun off from Verint Systems and built much of its reputation supplying intelligence, counterterrorism, and surveillance capabilities to governments around the world. The company has longstanding roots in Israel’s security sector, where these technologies were developed for national security and intelligence collection. Today those same capabilities are being marketed to sheriffs’ departments, state police agencies, and local law enforcement across America. That should concern anyone who still believes there is a meaningful distinction between intelligence agencies and neighborhood policing.

There was a time when police investigated crimes after they occurred. Increasingly, departments are investing in systems designed to gather enormous quantities of information before anyone has been accused of committing anything. Cellphone interception systems, automated license plate readers, facial recognition software, artificial intelligence, drones, predictive policing algorithms, and massive databases are steadily becoming standard equipment.

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Police Are Deploying 60 MPH Autonomous Drones to Read Your License Plate from the Sky

If you thought Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) were deeply invasive when they were just mounted to neighborhood stop signs and hidden inside speed trailers, you might want to look up.

The company that built a massive, interconnected surveillance net across American roadways has officially taken its technology airborne. As highlighted in a viral X post by Josh Walkos, Flock is rolling out “Flock Alpha”—a highly advanced, autonomous police drone designed to track vehicles and suspects from the sky.

Walkos perfectly captured the escalating nature of the tech in his post: “Remember when everyone was told Flock was ‘just reading license plates’? Anyway, here’s Flock Alpha, the autonomous drone.”

The “Drone as a First Responder” Play

Flock isn’t just selling a standard quadcopter; they are aggressively pushing a concept known as “Drone as First Responder” (DFR). Following a strategic partnership with aviation software company Aerodome, Flock integrated its existing street-level surveillance web directly into an autonomous aerial platform.

The specs on the Flock Alpha are undeniably impressive—and for privacy advocates, entirely terrifying.

When a 911 call, a gunshot audio sensor, or a street-level ALPR camera triggers an alert, an officer can deploy the Alpha drone directly from their smartphone. The drone launches itself from a weatherproof docking station and can reach the scene at speeds up to 60 MPH. According to Flock’s promotional materials, the drone arrives first on the scene 78% of the time, long before patrol cars can navigate traffic.

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“Don’t Flock Me”: Massie Readies Bill To Yank Federal Cash From Cities And Police Departments Running Flock Cameras

On Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced he’ll soon sponsor “a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments” that deploy Flock-style cameras to surveil law-abiding citizens. He attached a Gadsden flag parody: a coiled rattlesnake wrapped around an automated license plate reader on a pole, over the words “don’t flock me.”

Rather than regulating or litigating the cameras, Massie’s bill would cut off federal funding to every city and police department that installs them. Flock’s business model runs on local government contracts across roughly 6,000 communities, so a funding-withholding bill aims directly at its customer base.

Third Strike In A Week

Massie’s bill is the third Republican move against Flock in a matter of days.

On July 21, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) filed H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which would bar federal agencies from purchasing, funding, or accessing automated license plate readers – Flock is named explicitly – along with biometric tracking tech covering fingerprints, iris, voice, and gait. Any data a federal agency obtained would have to be deleted within 30 days and would be inadmissible in court. Burchett’s pitch: “We gotta ban these dadgum things.”

Earlier this month, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) tried to attach an amendment restricting the readers in committee. It failed, and Perry responded that the fight wasn’t over: “STOP THE FLOCK.”

In April, Massie teamed with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on the Surveillance Accountability Act, which would require a probable-cause warrant before federal or local agencies surveil Americans, ban warrantless facial recognition in public spaces, block the government from buying its way around the Fourth Amendment via third-party data brokers, and make individual federal employees personally suable for violations. Boebert’s framing: the government is building a “digital footprint of your entire life” without a warrant or probable cause.

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Georgia Cops Keep Getting Arrested And Fired For Illegally Using Flock Cameras To Stalk People, But Surely Those 17 Bad Apples Aren’t Representative Of The Entire Bunch

“Another Georgia cop accused of misusing Flock data in growing trend,” the USA Today headline reads. If you remember now-former Braselton police chief Michael Steffman’s arrest on stalking charges last year, it would be understandable if you assumed CBS News meant a second Georgia officer had been arrested for misusing Flock’s license plate data to stalk their victims. There couldn’t be that many bad cops getting arrested in one state, right? Well, that depends on whether your definition of “not that many” because USA Today reports that at least 17 Georgia cops have been accused of Flock-stalking in just the last couple of months. 

Former Sergeant Kabiru Salawu lost the job he’d held with the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office since 2009, after he was arrested over allegations that he engaged in “unauthorized use of the agency’s Flock Safety technology.” Salawu currently faces a felony charge for violating his oath of office, but in Georgia, misuse of license plate data is charged as a misdemeanor. For now, the sheriff’s office hasn’t released any information on how it caught Salawu, nor have they explained what he’s accused of using Flock’s system to do.

According to CBS News, Salawu’s arrest brings the total number of law enforcement officers accused of abusing their access to the private surveillance system that tracks everyone everywhere all the time, even if you don’t drive a car or have a license plate visible, to 10 “in recent weeks.” Not months or years. Weeks. As internal audits continue, don’t be surprised to see those numbers rise in the coming weeks, either. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, and if internal audits turned up enough evidence to charge 17 officers over the last several months, it stands to reason that ongoing investigations will turn up evidence of even more abuses within the Georgia law enforcement community.

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