Script for City Council Comment on Flock Cameras

I came upon a video of a Corona City Council meeting where a resident with an IT and cloud infrastructure background commented on Flock cameras. It was very insightful so I transcribed it, did some fact checking, and adapted it so that people can take the script for any city they live in. (For reference, the original transcript is here, and original video is here.)

Script:

Hi. My name is {Name}, and I'm a resident of {City}.

I’m here to speak about Flock Safety cameras and the broader implications for privacy and public oversight.

Flock advertises these as simple license plate readers. But in practice, they function as a much broader data collection and surveillance system — capturing detailed images of vehicles and their surroundings, along with time and location data, and then storing that information in a searchable database hosted on corporate cloud infrastructure.

While local agencies technically control their data, the system is designed for sharing across jurisdictions. That means data collected here can be accessed by other agencies, sometimes far beyond the local level, raising real privacy concerns.

There have already been documented cases in other cities where federal agencies accessed local camera data without clear public awareness. That raises serious questions about transparency and oversight.

It's also important to note that Flock Safety is backed by none other than Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir, the data fusion platform utilized across federal agencies including ICE. He is billionaire famous for stating he does not believe in democracy or that women should have ever gotten the right to vote.

But this isn’t just about one company or one person. It’s about patterns in the kind of infrastructure we are building and who is allowed to control them. When mass data on ordinary residents is collected and stored in systems like this, it creates a permanent record of people’s movements — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. That has real implications for civil liberties and privacy violations. 

So the questions we should be asking:

• Who has access to this data?
• How is it being used?
• And what safeguards are in place to prevent misuse?

Given this information, I am asking the City Council

• Conduct a full audit of how Flock data is being accessed and shared
• Disclose any agreements with outside agencies
• And reconsider whether this system aligns with our community’s values and expectations around privacy, and consider taking a vote to cancel the Flock safety contract.

Lastly, I want to emphasize this is not about being anti-security or anti-police. Public safety obviously matters. But mass surveillance of entire populations by companies with stated political agendas is a different question.

Thank you.