A friend sent me a post yesterday from a Charlotte local events page and I almost threw my phone. Some guy in a South Carolina town walked straight up to a whole row of Flock cameras with cans of expanding foam and sealed the lenses shut. The cops immediately jumped online begging for tips like someone just robbed a bank.
This is happening more and more and the local coverage is always the exact same softer-than-baby-shit garbage.
Then read it a again and something went cold in my chest because the department had written a sentence that no honest Flock salesman on this earth can explain and I do not think a single person in that comms office noticed it going out the door.
The vandals sprayed those lenses before the cameras had a chance to ID them.
Follow the logic on this because it only has three steps and it takes about nine seconds.
Flock Safety swears to your city council with its hand on the Bible that these cameras do not do facial recognition and cannot identify a human being. The department said its camera was trying to ID the people who walked up to it. There was no car in that story and no plate to read. Just men on foot in the dark with hardware store foam.
There is exactly one way a camera identifies a man on foot with no vehicle attached to him and that is by looking at his face.
Flock is lying.
Not spinning and not overstating and not being imprecise in a brochure. Lying. And the department that let the truth slip out at midnight on a Facebook post has been repeating that same lie at council meetings for two years. Flock is sitting on six billion dollars and that one denial is the only thing holding it up. The second the mainstream press works out that these things watch PEOPLE instead of PLATES Flock ends up in front of the Senate explaining why it let cops spy on people without a damn warrant, and the company ends up out of business. That is exactly why you will never hear this covered on mainstream news.
And I did not get there off one Facebook post. I got there watching these people say one thing in a press release and something else entirely out loud when they think the room is friendly, over and over, for years. That is not an accident of any kind and it never was. It is the business model.
So which is it? Either the cops, the city councils, and Flock all know exactly what the machine on its own pole does - including the facial recognition - or the company is lying straight to the faces of the taxpayer footing the bill for these cameras while everyone pretends otherwise.
I know which one I believe and I did not get there off one Facebook post. I got there watching these people say one thing in a press release and something else out loud when they think the room is friendly. That is not an accident of any kind and it never was. It is the business model.
These cameras are bullshit.
They Said It Twice
Two weeks before the foam down in Dougherty County Georgia somebody shot two Flock cameras and blew a third apart. The authorities explained that the shooters fired from a distance that made it impossible to identify them from the surveillance video.
Impossible from THAT distance is a sentence about range and nothing else.
Nobody on Godâs green earth says a shot was too far unless a closer one would have worked and if these cameras truly only read plates then the honest answer is there was no car so we have nothing. Instead a police agency stood out there explaining the working limits of its facial identification like a man apologizing for a lousy vacation photo. Sorry folks. Lighting was bad and the subject was moving and the fella was just too far out to get a clean read on him. Which is a heck of a thing to say about equipment that reportedly cannot see a human face any better than my dog can read a mortgage.
Two agencies in two states two weeks apart and both of them called this equipment a machine that identifies human beings. Neither one was lying and that is exactly why it matters. Nobody trips into a lie sitting relaxed at a keyboard typing a routine call for tips. They trip into the truth right up until some communications director hands them a card with the approved language on it.
What They Are Actually Selling
Flock quit being a license plate company years ago and the product that proves it is a camera called Condor. It sits on a pole running off the sun and it swivels and tilts and zooms and decides when to do all three on its own because its whole job is to grab a human being and follow that person around while it pipes live video to the police. Nobody has to be watching any of it because the thing hunts entirely by itself.
This past June a crew from InvestigateTV set up on a public walking trail and a Condor swung around and locked onto their reporter and zoomed in while she walked by. A Flock rep was standing right there. She asked him flat out whether Flock tracks people and he said no to her face while that womanâs own face filled the screen beside him.
I will be fair to that man for exactly one sentence. He has a mortgage and somebody handed him talking points and told him to go say them. Then I remember he was lying to a reporter about a machine that was at that moment scanning a woman without her permission and my sympathy runs out around the second syllable.
Then there is FreeForm which lets a cop type a plain English description of a person and go fishing through every feed on the network until it spits that person out. The example search on Flockâs own sales page is a man in a blue shirt and cowboy hat. Flock swears this is not facial recognition and the weasel they built to say it with a straight face is the whole con folded into one sentence. FreeForm finds people âby their clothes and their accessories and the way they moveâ. Not âbiometricsâ they tell you. Just observable characteristics any old fella on the corner could notice.
Bullshit.
Flock is using facial recognition AI and this is just marketing doublespeak to keep the company from being sued out of existence.
Your Face And Your Pulse
Condor zooms in on faces automatically and when sixty of these units turned up last December squirting video onto the open internet with no password the picture was clean enough to read the screen of a phone in somebodyâs hand.
That resolution number matters more than the zooming does. Researchers have been pulling a human pulse out of ordinary video for over a decade and the technique has a name and a literature behind it. Remote photoplethysmography reads the tiny color shifts running across your skin as blood moves through the capillaries and hands you a heart rate off thirty seconds of clean footage. Breathing falls out of the same video from the rise and fall of a chest. None of it needs special equipment. It needs a decent lens pointed at a person for a few seconds which is precisely what Flock engineered and bolted to a pole at the end of your street.
So this system is deliberately harvesting sharp close-up video of the face of every man and woman and child who walks past it and yes that includes yours and yes it includes the last time you walked into a doctorâs office or a bail bondsman or a church you did not want anybody knowing you go to. Somebody drew that up in a meeting and somebody signed the budget and somebody shipped it to your town and mailed your council the bill.
Not one soul at that company has ever explained what they are doing with the faces.
That silence is the thing that pisses me off more than the cameras themselves. A company sitting on a clean answer hangs it on the front page in bold type and buys ads about it and Flock has had two years and a public relations budget the size of a small country and has never once managed to.
It Is A Setting And Not A Miracle
Turning on face matching across a network like this is not a construction job. Nobody climbs a pole and nobody orders parts and not one physical thing happens in your town. It is a software change made by a guy at a desk and it takes about as long as changing a setting on your phone.
When researchers cracked one of these units open they found a five megapixel camera and a little computer built on the same chip family as your smartphone. They found a weatherproof phone with a solar panel strapped to a pole and aimed at your street. The camera already takes the picture and Flockâs computers already run artificial intelligence on it because that is how the thing reads your plate in the first place. Every piece required to recognize your face is already in place and running and aimed at you. The only missing ingredient is different software looking at pictures the system already has.
An engineer over there could flip it on across every camera in this country between lunch and quitting time. Your council would never hear a word because there is nothing to tell them and no press release goes out and there is no method on earth for you to find out.
So when Flock says its cameras CANNOT identify people they are describing a checkbox and calling it a law of physics. That denial has all the structural integrity of a wet paper sack and they are betting the whole six billion on you being too busy to poke it. Nobody outside that building can check either. No independent inspector has ever tested the software and no outside engineer gets within a mile of the code. What you get instead is a webpage. Six billion dollars of hardware watching a hundred million Americans and the entire audit trail is a marketing page somebodyâs intern updates on Tuesdays.
Not one judge ever signed a thing and there is no warrant out on you and nobody swore probable cause in front of a magistrate because the record was built on everybody in advance and it sits there waiting for somebody to think of a reason.
Your movements for the last twelve months can be reconstructed by a bored deputy on a slow Tuesday who thinks your wife is pretty.
They killed it on paper and then somebody worked out you can do the same thing to a whole country at once as long as you do it to everybody and call it public safety. Men died at Concord so a government would have to knock and show paper before it walked through your life and we handed it away for a vendor demo and a promise about stolen Hondas.
You were never the customer here and you never will be. You are the merchandise they are busy cataloguing and pricing.
The Machine Gets Built By Somebody
Every time I hear a preacher describe the system at the end of the Bible he is describing a mark and a number and a moment of decision like the whole apparatus shows up one Tuesday morning fully assembled and glowing, delivered by angels with a clipboard. That is not how the text reads at all.
Revelation 13 describes a condition where no man can buy or sell without it and what that passage quietly assumes is infrastructure.
Total identification that is universal and continuous and impossible to opt out of and wired into ordinary movement so completely that stepping outside it means stepping outside the ability to eat. A system like that requires a machine that knows who every person is and everywhere they go and it knows it all the time.
That machine does not descend out of the clouds on the appointed day. Somebody builds it.
Somebody manufactures the sensors and writes the software and sells the contracts and somebody sits in a folding chair on a Tuesday night and votes yes on the invoice while the room is half empty.
I do not think the men building this understand what they are building. I think they go to work and believe they are selling a crime tool and most of them would be genuinely hurt if you said otherwise at a dinner party. It does not matter what they believe. A thing does not have to be understood by its builders to be what it is and a nation that can locate any citizen at any hour of any day without ever once asking a judge for permission is not a free country having a rough patch.
It is a holding pattern with better marketing.
They Are Also Watching You Complain About It
While all of that was happening journalists at 404 Media filed records requests and pulled a stack of law enforcement intelligence bulletins out of fusion centers. That is the office where local and state and federal agencies pool information and push it nationwide. Many of them carry a Law Enforcement Sensitive stamp and every single one is about Americans posting on social media. A bulletin from the Colorado Information Analysis Center names a specific Instagram account by handle and describes the man behind it posting daily videos and notes with what can only be described as concern that the comments show support for him. Another flags a man who posted that he used to install these cameras for a living and IDs him by username like he committed a crime by having worked there. Will Freeman built the public map of these cameras back in 2024 and told 404 Media his project has never once called for damaging anything and the fusion centers folded him in with the vandals anyway. One of those documents was nothing more than a summary of a news article about Flock circulated to a mailing list of FBI headquarters employees.
You cannot arrest an American for posting a video or going to a city council meeting. Not yet. But you can make sure the officer who pulls him over three months from now has already read his name in a threat bulletin. State security offices pooling intelligence across every level of government to write files on private citizens over political opinions they expressed in public used to be the thing we pointed at East Germany and called the defining crime of a police state. Now it is a Tuesday. It is routine American paperwork pushed out by mailing list with a citizenâs Instagram handle typed into the body. The men writing it go home at five and think of themselves as the good guys. They are clipping coverage of the people who cover them. If you are reading this article so are they.
Nobody Voted For This
They are lying to you in shifts. Flock does its lying in the glossy literature and the departments read that literature at the podium and then describe something else entirely the second nobody is coaching them which is how we got the four words that started all this. And the councils holding the pen got warned by their own neighbors on the record and signed anyway because a salesman with a slideshow about missing children beats a taxpayer with an inconvenient question every single time. It is not close and it never has been.
More than a hundred towns have already thrown these contracts in the trash and not one did it through the courts or through Congress which has done nothing and will do nothing because the men who would write that law are the men the network serves. Those towns won because regular people pulled the contract and showed up to the meeting and refused to be polite about it.
So find out how many are up in your town and pull that contract because it is a public record and they are required by law to hand it over. Go to the meeting and make them answer in front of their neighbors. Ask whether your department runs Condor units and whether it uses FreeForm and who went digging through your townâs data in the last twelve months and what they were looking for. Ask every bit of it in writing so their answer has to exist in writing too.
They are betting you will not. Six billion dollars rides on the assumption that you will never read the contract and never show up and never ask the question out loud with your own name on it.
You are not furniture and you are not a cog in some rich manâs machine and last I checked this was still supposed to be America.
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Lily finished her journalism degree and spends her summer riding herd on children at a camp which has taught her more about crowd control than any newsroom ever could. And every time you share one of these a wolf gets one step closer to filing records requests from somewhere that isnât alongside a highway.
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
Civil liberties are the first to go under the guise of "safety". What's a astounding to me is the mental gymnastics that people have to go through in order to try to justify how this isn't a blatant disregard for the Fourth Amendment.
If they donât remove what is there, then put them in politicians homes and offices.