Tag: mass surveillance

Proper Flock’d: What This Cop Did Raises Major Red Flags…

A Naperville police officer turned a statewide camera grid into a personal tracking app, ran a man’s plate about 150 times, and then retired like the file never existed.

The story serves as yet another example of how the burgeoning mass surveillance grid is being abused on a regular basis.

Patrick Dowhen was not a suspect. He was the ex. After Officer Oscar Maldonado started a relationship with Dowhen’s fiancée, Flock became the shortcut. No warrant. No case number that mattered. Just a badge, a login, and a national lattice of plate readers that can reconstruct where you went, when you went, and how often you go there.

“Anywhere I went in the country, I was being tracked,” Dowhen told ABC7 Chicago’s I-Team. “It was scary, it was really scary.”

Internal records obtained by the I-Team show the pattern started after Maldonado’s relationship with Dowhen’s then-fiancée began. Investigators found evidence he searched Flock for Dowhen’s vehicle approximately 150 times over a three-month stretch last year.

Chicago Tribune reporting, from a separate FOIA haul, put the plate runs between June 18 and Sept. 15, 2025, and said Maldonado tracked plates for non-police reasons hundreds of times.

Dowhen said the surveillance was not abstract. “My ex-fiancée would tell me where I was at, or what I was doing, and he [Maldonado] was feeding her information,” he said. “He’s an officer, feeding a civilian, you know, inside information.” He tore his truck apart looking for a tracker. Then he went to Naperville Police Chief Jason Arres. That complaint opened the internal case last September.

Maldonado’s story to interrogators was protection: the woman, himself, his family. Naperville investigators did not buy it. They wrote that the “evidence contradicts Maldonado’s explanation that he only used Flock for the safety of himself, his family,” and Dowhen’s ex-fiancée.

The report also concluded there was “a preponderance of the evidence that shows Maldonado did commit the crime of Official Misconduct,” adding that he “admitted to using FLOCK for personal reasons.”

Then on May 1, 2026, Maldonado retired. Department spokesman Rick Krakow said the internal case was complete but not closed because discipline had not been imposed. “However, the officer resigned before his disciplinary meeting with the chief, which essentially closed the case.”

No arrest. No plate charges. A referral to the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board. Will County prosecutors would not confirm or deny a criminal review. Dowhen later obtained a stalking no-contact order that noted Maldonado “was tracking my plate since 06/2025.” That order was dropped after both men agreed to a two-year mutual no-contact deal.

“He could very well get a job as a police officer again and have, you know, all these same electronic things available to him at any time and stalk anybody you want,” Dowhen said, “because at this point he has no criminal record.”

ABC7 chief legal analyst Gil Soffer laid out the gap that let a 150-search campaign end in a retirement party. “It’s not enough to say that a police officer violated internal laws, you’d have to show that a police officer knowingly violated a law, a statute, a constitutional provision,” he said.

He added, “An official misconduct statute in Illinois won’t necessarily cover the simple situation where a police officer accesses license plate information for an improper purpose.”

Maldonado’s own lawyer, Jeff Tomczak, made the same point from the other side of the table. “I’m a defense attorney. It should be a crime. It should absolutely be a crime. The legislature should act, create the crime of misuse of Flock. Don’t require the state’s attorneys to be creative.”

A private company sold cities a warrantless movement database. Departments wrote policy memos. The statute book never caught up. When an officer treated the grid like a jealous-ex app, the fallback was an employee manual and a quiet exit.

The I-Team says this is not one suburban rogue. It identified 14 Chicago-area cases of officers accused of misusing Flock, with at least five sent to prosecutors. Berwyn’s mayor, Robert Lovero, issued an executive order this week suspending the city’s cameras.

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Flock Is Discovering That Americans Do Not Want to Live in a Surveillance State

Morale inside the surveillance company has deteriorated so badly amid the public backlash that employees are considering leaving. Flock has now introduced a voluntary separation program offering severance, subsidized healthcare, and additional time to exercise vested stock options. People familiar with the program believe a significant number of Flock’s roughly 1,500 employees could apply. This is what happens when people finally discover what has been constructed around them.

Flock was sold to communities as a crime fighting tool. Put cameras around town, read license plates, find stolen cars, catch criminals. It always begins with something that sounds reasonable. Nobody walks into a city council meeting and announces, “We would like to construct a nationwide surveillance network capable of recording where ordinary citizens travel.” You sell it incrementally under the banner of safety. Then the network expands, databases become interconnected, thousands of agencies gain access, and suddenly technology created to find a stolen automobile can potentially reconstruct the movements of people who have committed no crime whatsoever.

The abuses are precisely why the public has become angry. Neowin recounts cases involving officers allegedly using Flock to track women with whom they had personal relationships. In Georgia, an officer was accused of searching for his former girlfriend and her teenage daughter hundreds of times. In San Jose, an officer was fired after authorities said he used the system to obtain location information involving a woman and shared information with a man accused of abusing her. There have also been reports of innocent motorists being stopped after automated systems incorrectly identified vehicles.

Flock cameras are operating in roughly 6,000 communities across every state except Alaska. Hackers who obtained data from a Flock camera found that the devices could capture far more information than merely a license plate. WIRED reported that the recovered material showed cameras taking numerous images associated with vehicle detections and detecting people as well as automobiles. Data associated with one city’s system could reportedly be accessed across a network involving more than 2,000 agencies. Flock maintains that tampering with its equipment is illegal and says researchers should use authorized security-reporting channels, but the technical revelations illustrate why people are asking how extensive this system really is.

Now the backlash is hitting the company itself. Cities have been terminating contracts. An anti-surveillance group identified 90 cities dropping Flock during August alone, while Florida and Texas have also moved away from using the company’s technology in certain contexts. Flock CEO Garrett Langley has acknowledged that the controversy has damaged internal morale. In August, he publicly apologized for instances in which the technology had been abused and announced additional safeguards.

This is what I have always said about government surveillance. The question is NEVER whether today’s politicians promise to use a technology responsibly. The question is what the NEXT government can do with the infrastructure you surrender to them today. Once the cameras exist, once the databases exist, once your movements can be searched, the political promises surrounding their original purpose become meaningless.

Most people had no idea this infrastructure existed. They did not realize how extensive license plate surveillance had become, how broadly information could potentially be accessed, or how easily technology designed for legitimate police work could allegedly be misused by individual officers. The technology expanded faster than public awareness.

There was a time when following somebody required manpower. The government needed agents, vehicles, warrants, and resources. Those practical limitations themselves provided a degree of protection because governments could not physically monitor everyone. Technology removes that barrier. A computer does not sleep. It does not demand overtime. It can potentially search billions of records in seconds.

This is why privacy cannot be dismissed with that ridiculous argument, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” That turns the entire principle of a free society upside down. The government is supposed to have probable cause to investigate YOU. You are not supposed to prove your innocence every time you drive down the street.

Flock may survive this controversy. It may change its policies. Governments may impose stronger safeguards. But the larger issue will remain long after this particular company disappears from the headlines. Every government in history has sought more information about its citizens because information is power. AI has now made gathering, analyzing, and connecting that information cheaper than at any point in human history.

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Flock Safety Offers Buyouts As Abuse Scandal Deepens — Georgia Should Take Note

Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company that’s built a surveillance network of license plate readers across the country, is offering employees the chance to leave with a packet of cash and benefits in what the company is calling the “most generous” severance package ever offered, Wired reports.

The crisis for Flock Safety is centered around the misuse of its surveillance technology by law enforcement. In August The Washington Post detailed 46 instances of police officers using Flock cameras to track people including ex-girlfriends, wives, and even partners of domestic violence incidents. The revelations led to a firestorm of cancellations across the country.

Florida and Texas announced they would no longer use the license plate readers. An anti-surveillance group also said that 90 cities had dropped Flock contracts in August, a fourfold increase from the previous month. CEO Garrett Langley called the “biggest damage” to his company from the controversy to “internal morale.”

As for why this is a big story for Georgia, the Atlanta-based company is after all headquartered in the state where its extensive network of cameras across neighborhoods, highways, and smaller cities and towns is secretly monitoring the vast majority of vehicle travel. And Florida and Texas have seen enough to stop using the surveillance system.

For now, the voluntary buyout move by Flock Safety’s management is an effort to contain the crisis while avoiding the appearance of mass layoffs. However, the core question remains: who will watch the watchers when the largest surveillance company in the US discovers that there are limits to what the public at large, as well as the company’s employees, are willing to accept?

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SHOW ME YOUR ID: Carney doubles down on sweeping internet regulation bill

Prime Minister Carney says his government will push ahead this fall with sweeping social media regulations that would create a new federal Digital Safety Commission and impose new rules on online platforms.

“We are fighting for Canada to lead the world in building the smart, safe digital tools of the next decade,” Carney told Liberal MPs ahead of Parliament’s return.

“This fall we will press ahead with the Act to protect Canadians online,” he said.

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, was introduced by Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller in June.

The legislation would create a Digital Safety Commission with regulatory and enforcement powers over the online platforms covered.

It would require regulated platforms to address seven categories of “harmful content,” including child sexual exploitation, any content that ‘foments hatred’, incites violence or promotes terrorism or violent extremism.

The legislation also targets content that “undermines, weakens or destroys fundamental institutions or political, economic or social stability in Canada” when it could cause a serious risk to the health or safety of the public.

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Flock Isn’t Public, But the Cameras Are—and One Unit’s Data Is Out

Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers are now one of the biggest privately constructed surveillance systems on the roads in the United States. The company, which is legally known as Flock Group Inc., is headquartered in Atlanta and was established in 2017 by Georgia Tech graduates Garrett Langley (who is the CEO), Matt Feury, and Paige Todd. Purchases by homeowner associations came first, after which police departments joined.

Flock is not a publicly traded company; it has no ticker symbol and has not announced an IPO. The company is controlled by its founders and by its venture investors. Among the investors who have been disclosed are Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Meritech, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Bedrock, and Greenoaks. Valuations in the private market were reported as being around $7.5 billion following a $275 million financing in 2025 and about $8.4 billion in April 2026.

It earns money through leasing rather than by selling the cameras outright. The package—covering hardware, software, the cellular connection, cloud storage, and maintenance—is priced at around $2,400 to $2,500 per camera each year, together with a few hundred dollars for installation. Flock generally retains ownership of the device.

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Anthrax Attacks Paved Way for COVID-Era ‘Junk Drugs and Vaccines’

The anthrax attacks that followed 9/11 did more than frighten Americans — they helped create the legal, regulatory and biosecurity framework that later enabled the government’s response to COVID-19, according to Dr. Meryl Nass.

Speaking at the Turning the Tide: 9/11 25 Years Later conference last week in New York City, Nass drew a direct line between the anthrax letters of 2001 and the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s worth thinking about the similarities between the COVID experience and the anthrax letters because it seems that both were inside jobs planned by the same cabal for the same purpose,” Nass said.

Nass, an internal medicine physician who has conducted extensive research on biological warfare and anthrax, outlined what she sees as striking parallels between the two events.

“Each had an uncanny, scripted simulation preceding it,” she said, pointing to the Dark Winter tabletop exercise in 2001 and Event 201, a pandemic simulation, in 2019.

“Each was blamed on countries the U.S. government had already targeted,” Nass said. The anthrax attacks were initially blamed on Iraq while COVID-19 was blamed on China.

“A huge, expensive biodefense gravy train resulted after each of them,” she said.

Both events were also accompanied by “a massive amount of false narrative construction and control of the media to project the false narratives.” And neither received a serious investigation into who perpetrated the event, according to Nass.

In addition, both crises “led to a mushrooming of the surveillance state,” Nass said.

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Flock Camera Ping Jails Innocent Woman For 13 Days

A 23-year-old Palm Coast Florida woman spent 13 days in a Volusia County jail cell facing life in prison after Florida Highway Patrol troopers treated a Flock Safety camera hit like a confession.

Lindsey Brooke Isaacs did not cause the crash. Her black Dodge Durango had no collision damage. A 911 caller had already described a maroon Durango and a partial plate that was not hers. None of that stopped the machine-assisted hunt.

The October 4, 2025 hit-and-run on eastbound I-4 near DeBary killed motorcyclist Joaquin Deno, Flagler County Deputy Administrator Jorge Salinas, and Salinas’ wife, Nancy. A fourth person was badly hurt. Witnesses described a Dodge Durango fleeing the scene. Investigators searched nearby Flock cameras for a black Durango and found Isaacs’ tag, RJVN10, crossing the Seminole-Volusia line at 9:51 p.m., about three miles west of a wreck that started around 9:53 p.m.

That ping became the case.

Troopers later pounded on Isaacs’ door while she was asleep. “I thought I was getting set up. I didn’t understand what was going on,” she said. They seized the Durango for months and claimed “marks” consistent with the crash.

Photographs later showed an immaculate 2025 SUV. “Where is the damage on the vehicle? Because I’m standing right in front of it and I don’t see any damage,” Isaacs recalled.

On April 17, 2026, FHP booked her on eight felonies, including three counts of vehicular homicide and three counts of leaving the scene of a crash involving death. She was held without bond, then sat in G Block for 13 days. “Being incarcerated, falsely incarcerated, in jail, in G Block, was the worst 13 days in my life,” she said. “I was devastated, I was scared. I thought my life was over.”

Attorney Patrick McGeehan did the work the camera search replaced. A time-and-distance analysis using the same Flock timestamp put Isaacs past the crash site when the collision happened. “In Lindsey’s case, there was nothing indicating that she was ever there,” he said.

A 911 caller described a maroon Durango and the partial plate “458.” Paint transfer on a struck Ford Focus was maroon. Isaacs’ plate did not match. Witnesses had described three different vehicles: black, white, and maroon. “For some reason, [Florida Highway Patrol] never went past the black Dodge Durango,” McGeehan said. “They hooked onto this black Dodge Durango to the exclusion of everything else.” He called it “confirmation bias, to the highest degree” and “a major failure of basic investigative skills.”

“Lindsey wasn’t even at the crash scene,” he told NewsNation. “These were investigators that got it in their mind that there was a black Dodge Durango involved. They got on Flock, found the first black Dodge Durango, that belonged to Lindsey Isaacs, and pinned that on her.”

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George Orwell’s Warning to Britain

Great Britain, where I live, once prided itself on eccentricity, irreverence, and the right to say unpopular things. Today, people living in my country have been arrested over social media posts and other digital communications. Some have been imprisoned. Online censorship has become more sophisticated, surveillance technology continues to advance, and cancel culture has taught millions of people that expressing the wrong opinion can carry severe consequences. As a result, people are self-censoring out of fear of reprisals.

Books have a particular role to play here. They give people permission to explore ideas away from the noise and intimidation of social media. A reader can encounter something privately, consider it, question it, disagree with it, return to it, and perhaps find the confidence to openly express an opinion they had previously been afraid to voice.

This is why my publishing house, Free Speech Press, is launching with a reprint of George Orwell’s 1984.

For this special edition, I asked the British writer and broadcaster Neil Oliver to write a new prologue. Neil travelled back, intellectually and geographically, to the circumstances in which Orwell created his final novel.

What follows is an extract from that prologue:

George Orwell was dying when he wrote 1984. Like the setting sun, he had travelled into the west: to Jura, the Deer Island in the Inner Hebrides off Scotland’s west coast. George Orwell was his nom de plume – Eric Arthur Blair is on the stone over his clay in the churchyard of All Saints’ Church in Sutton Courtenay, in Oxfordshire – and 1984 would be his swan song. As well as dying (he did not know it then) he was grieving the loss of his wife. It was with his sister Avril then, that he arrived at the lonely farmhouse of Barnhill in the north of the island in May of 1946. Eileen Orwell had died the year before, during a hysterectomy, and the couple’s son Richard joined father and aunt, along with housekeeper Susan Watson later that summer.

Barnhill was remote and on the point of being reclaimed by the elements, until the infusion of life, lives saddened, and from an unlikely source. Jura can be hard to love. Sparsely populated then as now, a place of blanket bog and bare rock. Getting to Barnhill was a matter of two ferries – first to Islay, second to Jura – then 20 miles by motor vehicle until the road dwindled and the last four had to be covered on foot. Food, fuel and the rest had to be carried along with everything else required. “Extremely un-get-atable” is how Orwell described their billet, and he loved it. He was middle-class – a literary type, obviously – and while he had written about the travails of the workers – including the degraded and degrading lives of coal miners and their families in Lancashire and Yorkshire in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) – and had put in time in self-inflicted poverty as a Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) – by 1946 he still hankered after the hardship of other men’s lives, and the possibilities of a life lived far from the madding crowd.

If it sounds as though I am being unkind, it is not my intention. 1984 was a book I was given to read at school and along with many I have had reasons to think about George Orwell over and over in the years since. Most recently, when it has seemed for all the world as though his last novel is received and used less as dire warning of totalitarianism and more a must have How To handbook for would-be dictators everywhere, I have learned to see the author as nothing less than a seer.

That he was drawn to the Deer Island for the writing of it says to me that his last months and years were ordained for a vision, or a dreary dream the telling of which was nothing less than a calling, or perhaps a penance. It is Highland tradition that deer, the Red Deer, are portents of death. When the deer come down out of the hills and walk the streets of human habitations, their fleur-de-lis hooves clipping through the quiet dark, it is deep sadness they are foretelling. Dying of Tuberculosis still undiagnosed, though it had him coughing red blood while he wrote and wrote within the white walls of Barnhill, he and the world around him were also grieving all that had been lost in the World War just past. It was a shell-shocked world, and Orwell no stranger to its ways. Homage to Catalonia (1938) had been the product of his time fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and there he had been shot through the throat by a sniper, the wounding leaving him with a voice rendered faint. 

Made gaunt anyway by war’s privations, broken hearted, during that harsh cradling on Jura he saw the future as clear as any Highlander gifted or cursed with the Second Sight. The future he saw was populated by citizens denied hope, made hopeless. Everything shaped to grind souls to lifeless matter. Tasteless food, ill-made and ill-fitting clothes. War everywhere and forever, pointlessly consuming whatever the proles made in soul-sapping factories. No privacy. Big Brother watching over all. The world of 1984 is as familiar to my generation as a half-remembered dream and yet for so many of us the last handful of years have had us sense its version of reality not as a dream but as an inevitability. Big Brother is made real in the apparatus of panopticon surveillance and those we are expected to call leaders foment war after war. 

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Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective

A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.

The arrest stemmed from an investigation into bank fraud cases in April and May 2025. Detectives reportedly reviewed video of a woman using a fake US army ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars.

By using facial recognition software, the investigators identified Lipps as a possible match. She was charged with eight felonies, the most serious of which carried a 10-year prison sentence.

But Lipps had never been to North Dakota in her life, and bank records later confirmed she was more than 1,200 miles away at the time of the alleged crime.

She was held in a Tennessee county jail for 108 days before being transported to North Dakota. Jail staff allegedly denied her access to her dentures and medication for extended periods.

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FBI Surveillance, Social Media, AI, Partnerships Draw Scrutiny at Senate Hearing

The FBI is not collecting data from license plate readers, it is merely looking at data that is already collected by somebody else. This is how FBI Director Kash Patel explained the use of this surveillance tool during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 15.

“They collect information, not the FBI,” said Patel, adding, “Private companies have and private municipalities and towns put up cameras around traffic circles in the neighborhoods and the like.”

He also said that this is information “where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, basically publicly available information.”

As for the FBI, it “partners” with those who collect the data “on a case-by-case basis and not a rolling access basis.” And he repeated, “We have to use it lawfully, but we the FBI don’t continue to access that on a rolling basis.”

As examples of how this works, he mentioned the Brown University shooting, where “we weren’t able to get any facial recognition on the individual, but what we were able to get based on a Flock camera was a license plate,” which helped locate the suspect who “died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in New Hampshire.”

And then there are kidnappings across state lines, where “we have saved children over and over again,” Patel said.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) brought up Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has not been reauthorized and has been expired since June 12, but is still in use thanks to the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order, which runs out in spring 2027.

Lee’s concern is not that the government is allowed to collect data of non-US persons abroad, which is the purpose of 702, but what happens to the data of Americans who are in contact with those foreign targets and get swept up in the process.

Lee asked why the FBI cannot be required to go to the FISA court for a warrant before being able to query this data. He said that the current system, based on the government’s “internal procedures” is not sufficient to protect Americans’ privacy, and that the past abuses have shown this.

Lee said a query should have “nothing to do with an agent wanting to vet a potential tenant for his rental property, vet a romantic interest, investigate his father…for a suspected extramarital affair.” He added, “These are real-world examples.”

Patel’s response was that the FBI is “flying blind” and cannot establish probable cause for a warrant because it does not know what information it is looking for in the first place. “We don’t have access to that information. We don’t know what we don’t know. And we wouldn’t be able to establish a predicate probable cause because we don’t have access to the information,” he said.

He also said that “what the FBI does not do is collect on U.S. citizens. What the FBI does do is access pursuant to the federal statute already lawfully collected information.”

The FBI director also said the FBI is “responsible for three percent of 702 collection,” with the rest belonging to the intelligence community. He said 702 had produced “terrorist attacks that we’ve prevented, children that we found, on narco traffickers that we were able to annihilate and arrest.” He added, “Were that to go dark, we would have a lot of problems or we would have no ability to trace that information.”

Senator Cornyn asked if it is true that 702 makes up 60 percent of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and Patel confirmed this.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked about how the FBI uses private sector partnerships, specifically to catch predators. Patel said that the FBI must work with the private sector.

He also said that the FBI is “utilizing the fact that this great information has been collected and sitting on the shelf,” referring to data harvested by private companies, and that the FBI is now “professionally partnered and officially partnered” with more private sector companies in social media and AI than ever before.

He spoke about a 600% increase in AI investment, and then a 605% increase “since I hit the seat,” and credited these partnerships with “the largest reduction in violent crime in American history.”

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