53 cities dropped Flock Safety over federal data sharing, then handed identical pole mounts to Axon
In city council chambers across the country, officials have celebrated the removal of Flock Safety cameras as a privacy victory. Within months, Axon installation crews often appear on the same poles, bolting in replacement plate readers. According to TechTimes, 53 cities have canceled Flock contracts, citing unauthorized federal data access, false alerts, and mass surveillance of innocent drivers. Many aren’t abandoning license plate readers altogether — they’re switching vendors. The surveillance footprint isn’t shrinking. It’s rebranding.
How deadset the politicians are on instituting mass surveillance shows the pressure they’re getting from their donors. The Epstein class must really be afraid. Not surprising since you got 2:
and
This doesn’t get enough publicity. What the hell is the point of going after flock if they just immediately replace it with something that is arguably worse?
All this uproar around Flock cameras and no one even notices the surveillance with their home Ring cameras.
Yeah they feed Amazon and Palantir data. Corporate surveillance.
If the video is not on your local machine, you are being data mined.
Never installed those.
So this is a Coke vs. Pepsi thing?
JFC.
Those can be cut down and disabled just the same as Flock.
Unless we get the whole corporate surveillance industry under legislation control they will just get a lot better at hiding the cameras and devices.
Yeah that’s how this stuff seems to work. For some reason it’s really difficult for decentralized protest to scale its efforts in match of the scaled sophistication of their oppressors. Rather than protest getting more sophisticated, we just hope the protest gets bigger.
But honestly feel like a clear path through this would be to match their sophistication. Meaning, we need hactivist entities that specialize in hiding their identities, making public disclosures, and backing up their claims with actions.
The guy leaking the GTA6 material? He’s on the right track. We need more of that across various sectors.
I would argue it should work similarly to why the US struggles capitulating Iran — their guard is decentralized. They don’t need instruction from the top to carry out support.
Do they really think people won’t notice? Like what is the goal here? Are they really that stupid that they don’t understand that the company is not the main problem?
They know for a fact that if they remove “flock” and it gets replaced by the same company of a different name that a large chunk of people will think they won the war and go back to Netflix and cheeseburgers. It’s why it’s so important to be annoying about this shit and never shut up about it.
How do they know that?
Are they really that stupid that they don’t understand that the company is not the main problem?
They’re not stupid, no. They just think voters are stupid and, I mean, they’re kinda correct. They’ve systematically defunded and sabotaged education for like 50 years, which materialized into electing DJT TWICE. So more ai cameras but under a different name is pretty understandable.
I mean yes, voters are stupid, but they’re also showing up and causing these Flock contracts to be canceled. And if you just change vendors, they’re gonna keep showing up, right? So they haven’t even solved anything in the “placating angry voters” sense.
They’re banking on people being told “but it’s not flock” and hoping that the technicality is what matters. Problem is I suspect that flock is already getting the tupperware treatment wherein it’s originally a company name being applied to all products in the same category. So it’s probably only a matter of time till all of these spyware corpos get labeled as flock.
Also fun fact I have never seen tupperware written down and around where I am it’s pronounced tubbaware, so I had to look that up.
I think many voters are disengaged enough to vaguely know that it’s cool to be against flock, but not really know why.
The only reason many people are noticing is because they can see the cameras. We need more fundamental laws on if and when these sorts of surveillance networks can be installed and used.
I’m looking forward to seeing a tear down of an Axon camera.
I wonder what salvageable components will be inside…
I hear they use a different technology than flock, so no gold or copper. I understand they use platinum extensively, so they can be scrapped like a catalytic converter.
It’s kinda like a loot box but free.
