Transcript from Corona City Council Meetings re: Flock Cameras and Palantir

This is the transcript of a resident of Corona, who spoke to his City Council about Flock cameras. I will be creating a more generic template that we can apply to any city, but wanted to share the transcript now in case people want to get started.

The original video is here.

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Transcript:

My name is Brett, and I've been a Corona resident in District 4 for 15 years.

I'm here to introduce Deflock Corona, a community coalition asking this council to cancel the city's contract with Flock Safety and remove the cameras that have been deployed throughout our city.  Our website is deflock-corona.org.

I'm here because new Flock cameras were recently installed between my home and my daughter's school. So now every time I make that drive, my family is being photographed and logged into a giant corporate database.

I want to be clear what these cameras actually are, and I say that as somebody with 20 years of experience in IT. I've served as the chief network architect for Fortune 500 companies. I've designed data centers, and today I work on cloud infrastructure for one of the largest loan origination companies in the country. I'm not speculating on how this technology works. I've read their patents, and I know how it works.

Flock advertises these cameras as simple license plate readers. Their own patents tell a different story.

• They're AI-powered surveillance machines that capture every passing vehicle and person and transmit that data to a private corporate cloud, making it queriable by a multitude of state and federal agencies.
• The city of Corona does not control that database, and Corona residents have no public record rights against the private company's servers.
• Our daily movements are being harvested by a $7.5 billion corporation that only answers to venture capital investors, not to us.
• Flock did not reach that valuation on their per-camera subscription fees. That math doesn't add up.

The city council should also understand who they're doing business with. 
Flock's CEO was asked whether the company had any federal contracts. He said no. That was a lie. Public records reveal that Flock had been secretly running a pilot program giving the U.S. Border Patrol access to local police camera data without the knowledge of the cities that paid for the cameras.

Now consider who's behind the company and where your data flows. 
Flock integrates directly with Palantir, a data fusion platform with a $30 million contract with ICE. Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, is also one of Flock's primary investors.  These are not separate companies with separate agendas. They are connected actors that are building a connected infrastructure.

Palantir's own CEO stated publicly just this month that his technology is being used as a political instrument designed to reduce the political power of certain voters.  And that's the ecosystem that our Corona cameras are feeding into.

We're not anti-police at all. We're against mass surveillance of innocent residents by a company with a documented record of deception built by investors with a stated political agenda.

We're asking the city council: 

1. to start auditing the queries made against Flock's database to disclose any data sharing agreements and
2. to take a vote to cancel the Flock safety contract.

The Deflock Corona org will be at future meetings and we'll be filing public records requests.

And I'll close by saying Benjamin Franklin warned us that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Video of live speech