https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/2096265888945086640




Remember when I started posting about this mass surveillance systems a couple years ago and people in the comments said "they don't retain the data," "you're just anti police," or "they're just tracking licensce plates?" I remember.

Flock reportedly attempted to sell 5 years (I thought it was only 30 days? Or the latest lie - 7 days?) of data to the city of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Hard to sell that data if you don't have it

But this is just chinese propaganda trying to influence the American populace that it is evil. Its actually ok and harmless. Just like all these data centers

It's AI in general, and it happens all of the time. Combine that with humans that possess zero common sense.

Take this case as an example:

https://cdllife.com/2025/truck...ng-suit-with-casino/

quote:

A trucker wrongly detained by police after a casino’s AI identification software incorrectly flagged him is pursuing a lawsuit against the police officer after settling an initial suit against the casino.

Jason Killinger, a truck driver for UPS, went into the Peppermill Casino in Reno, Nevada on September 17th, 2023 after completing a trip for his trucking job. As he entered the Peppermill, the casino’s AI identification software identified him as a 99.9% match to someone previously trespassed at the location – Michael Ellis.

The AI considered Killinger a 99.9% match based on their faces alone, despite discrepancies such as considerable height and weight differences, and eye color, reported ThisisReno News.

The Casino then contacted police, who detained Killinger, believing he was Ellis and was lying about his identity using fake identification. Killinger presented a Nevada Real ID, a Nevada CDL, his Peppermill player’s card, and even offered to present pay stubs, his vehicle registration, bank cards, and his union card, but officer Richard Jager still believed Killinger was lying. Jager even accused Killinger of having a connection at the DMV, allowing him to obtain fraudulent IDs.

“In Jager’s experience as a police officer, he has encountered situations where Real IDs were fake or obtained by fraudulent means,” city attorney Alice Herbolsheimer wrote in a court file. “A person who has obtained a fake ID will often have other documents or additional forms of identification that match the fake ID.. Accordingly, the fact that a person may have multiple forms of ID bearing the same name does not necessarily mean that the IDs are legitimate. Officer Jager deals with criminal elements and people who lie to him on a daily basis,” she added. “Therefore, he has been trained to carefully scrutinize information that is presented to him by a suspect.”

Killinger was held for 11 hours before he was finally released. Now, Killinger says that he was wrongfully arrested, and had his constitutional rights violated. The suit against the officer also claims that Jager lied during the investigation, and Deputy Reno City Attorney Jill Drake “continued to look for ways to prosecute Killinger” even after the case was dismissed.

“Killinger offers direct evidence of fabrication. Killinger contends his Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated when Jager fabricated, omitted and mischaracterized statements he made in his arrest documents to make it falsely appear that Killinger had no way to prove his identity, presented no credible evidence of his identity and offered conflicting pieces of identification,”his attorney wrote. “Jager knew the statements he made in his arrest documents were false.”

Killinger has already settled a suit against the Peppermill casino for an undisclosed amount. A body cam video of his arrest can be seen here.

An officer who just wants to flex his power and dominance. He simply will not admit to being wrong. Stacks of proof that he disregards and omits from his report. Not enough bad can be said about this kind of officer who lets their butt hurt cause harm like to this to good people.

Innocent woman says police use of Flock camera led to 13 days in jail

Lindsey Isaacs spent 13 days behind bars after investigators focused on a license plate reader hit

quote:

Lindsey Brooke Isaacs was asleep at home when police arrived and told the 23-year-old that her car had been involved in a crash that killed three people. She knew they had the wrong person. Her black Dodge Durango showed no obvious collision damage, and she had a receipt showing where she had been.

Still, the investigation eventually led to her being arrested and 13 days in jail. "My heart was in my stomach," Lindsey told me on The CyberGuy Report Podcast at Cyberguy.com/podcast/. "I didn't know what was going on."

Months later, prosecutors dropped all eight felony charges against her and investigators arrested another woman in connection with the crash. Her case now raises a bigger question about how much weight investigators should give license plate camera data when a person's freedom is on the line.

The deadly crash happened on Oct. 4, 2025, along eastbound Interstate 4 near DeBary, Florida. Motorcyclist Joaquin Deno died. Flagler County Deputy Administrator Jorge Salinas and his wife, Nancy Salinas, also died. Witnesses reported that a Dodge Durango was involved.

Investigators found Lindsey's black Dodge Durango through a Flock automated license plate reader. The camera recorded her vehicle traveling eastbound near the Seminole and Volusia county line at 9:51 p.m. That camera was about three miles west of the crash scene. The crash happened around 9:53 p.m. That timing became especially important later.

Lindsey's attorney, Patrick McGeehan, said his team performed a time-distance analysis and concluded Lindsey was already beyond the crash location when the collision occurred. So the camera really did capture Lindsey's vehicle. The problem came from what investigators concluded from that sighting. Lindsey put it more bluntly during our conversation. "They just picked up my car off a camera and called it the end of the day. We got her."

Flock Safety weasel-worded with the following statement:

quote:

"Flock cameras provide investigative leads; they do not identify perpetrators, determine guilt, or make arrest decisions. In fact, the complaint itself calls the Flock evidence 'exculpatory, not inculpatory,' meaning the evidence pointed away from Ms. Isaacs rather than implicating her: it accurately placed her vehicle three miles from the crash scene just two minutes before the crash. Characterizing her arrest as the result of Flock technology fundamentally misrepresents both the allegations and the role our technology played in this case."

Story continues at FoxNews.


CRITICAL TRUTH:

quote:

Technology can surface a lead. People still have to prove what that lead actually means.

That’s really disturbing. Several people need to out of a job. And sued.

A local police executive shared that the young officers who are very accustomed to the use of apps and newer technology are now using the camera feeds in real time to catch true bad guys. The example given was of a robbery in location A, with known getaway vehicle license. In a few minutes, that vehicle was shown to be at location B, several miles away. And, those nearby officers effected an arrest.

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
Innocent woman says police use of Flock camera led to 13 days in jail

Lindsey Isaacs spent 13 days behind bars after investigators focused on a license plate reader hit

quote:

Lindsey Brooke Isaacs was asleep at home when police arrived and told the 23-year-old that her car had been involved in a crash that killed three people. She knew they had the wrong person. Her black Dodge Durango showed no obvious collision damage, and she had a receipt showing where she had been.

Still, the investigation eventually led to her being arrested and 13 days in jail. "My heart was in my stomach," Lindsey told me on The CyberGuy Report Podcast at Cyberguy.com/podcast/. "I didn't know what was going on."

Months later, prosecutors dropped all eight felony charges against her and investigators arrested another woman in connection with the crash. Her case now raises a bigger question about how much weight investigators should give license plate camera data when a person's freedom is on the line.

The deadly crash happened on Oct. 4, 2025, along eastbound Interstate 4 near DeBary, Florida. Motorcyclist Joaquin Deno died. Flagler County Deputy Administrator Jorge Salinas and his wife, Nancy Salinas, also died. Witnesses reported that a Dodge Durango was involved.

Investigators found Lindsey's black Dodge Durango through a Flock automated license plate reader. The camera recorded her vehicle traveling eastbound near the Seminole and Volusia county line at 9:51 p.m. That camera was about three miles west of the crash scene. The crash happened around 9:53 p.m. That timing became especially important later.

Lindsey's attorney, Patrick McGeehan, said his team performed a time-distance analysis and concluded Lindsey was already beyond the crash location when the collision occurred. So the camera really did capture Lindsey's vehicle. The problem came from what investigators concluded from that sighting. Lindsey put it more bluntly during our conversation. "They just picked up my car off a camera and called it the end of the day. We got her."

[QUOTE]Technology can surface a lead. People still have to prove what that lead actually means.

So should the officer(s) that were given the responsibility to investigate this FATAL HIT AND RUN COLLISION, not have been entrusted with tools to investigate this case? From the same news article:

Lindsey blames how investigators used the Flock data

One of the most interesting moments in my conversation with Lindsey came when I asked whether she blamed the Flock technology or the way police interpreted its data. Her answer was clear. "I 100% think the second one you said, how police interpret the camera footage," she told me. That gets to the heart of this story. The Flock camera captured Lindsey's vehicle traveling on I-4. The machine did what it was designed to do. Human judgment came next. Investigators had to decide what that sighting meant. They also had to weigh it against witness accounts, physical evidence and the condition of Lindsey's car. According to Lindsey's federal complaint, the Flock hit three miles from the crash two minutes beforehand, ultimately helped her legal team argue that she was already beyond the crash location when the collision occurred. Technology can surface a lead. People still have to prove what that lead actually means.


About ten years ago (as a subject matter expert for defense attorneys), I did a presentation on how license plate readers (LPR's) could be an extremely useful asset to factually innocent defendants that were wrongly accused. It's as true or even more true today, that LPRs can provide alibi evidence if the defense uses it's right to discovery evidence (per "Brady") and the tools (equipment) are available.

It isn't just Flock technology that can be misused or abused, everything from the pen in the officer's pocket, to the word processing feature on the department's computer system, to the access police employees have of computerized records (that are restricted on a need to know/right to know basis), have the potential for abuse.

Of course, simply being lazy and unwilling to make a good faith effort to investigate matters using "Best Practices" is also of significance. So are we just going to "defund" the police because some don't live up to the standards we realistically establish, or enact reasonable safeguards and give them the tools that can lead to conclusions we all want?

And just like that, they're gone. At least locally.

A bipartisan group of like 200-300 people showed up to our last county council meeting to argue against Flock. There were so many people they had to move many to an overflow location, and even then some were stuck outside. Local Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian leaders all spoke out against them, and the council voted to defund it and require line-item approval for any future implementation of surveillance technologies. That was less than a week ago, and they've already pulled them all down county-wide.

I think I said earlier in this thread that we've used them to solve a number of crimes, but there have also been some problems, and I'm very concerned about the potential for misuse. For the sake of the victims of crime getting a resolution and the missing persons that they can help recover, I wish we could have our cake and eat it too with these, but I don't see how that's possible . I'd rather see us err on the side of privacy and take a step away from becoming surveillance state.

It was also really encouraging to actually see the democratic process work. Everyone come together (including some public figures who have been outright hostile to each other in the past), voiced their concerns in a united front, and government responded.

We'd had some vandalism of the cameras in recent months, and all that did was open people up to criminal charges, cost more tax dollars, and the cameras were back up in a matter of days. Going about it the right way actually got a much more effective result.

Hackers reveal how Flock cameras really track cars and people

One hacked camera captured 1.6 million images and could detect people as well as cars.

quote:

Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people. The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to obtain the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them.

The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption. The hackers were able to copy the camera’s storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections. The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation.

While much of the automatic license plate reader’s most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag.

Story continues at ArsTechnica link.

Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee

https://www.wired.com/story/fl...uyouts-to-employees/

quote:

Originally posted by Jupiter:
Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee

https://www.wired.com/story/fl...uyouts-to-employees/

Can you post the text of the article? I don't read Wired, but it seems I've already read my last free article.

quote:

Originally posted by Jupiter:
Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee

https://www.wired.com/story/fl...uyouts-to-employees/

Paywall

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

quote:

Originally posted by Jupiter:
Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee

https://www.wired.com/story/fl...uyouts-to-employees/

Paywall

Huh, didn't paywall me, so here's the scoop!

Flock Buyouts as Customers Flee

As dozens of cities end contracts for its controversial license plate readers, Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program, WIRED has learned.


Flock Safety announced a voluntary employee separation program on Friday, offering a “generous” severance package to those who want to leave amid growing backlash against the surveillance technology company, according to an internal email shared with WIRED.

Applications for Flock’s voluntary severance program opened Friday, and employees have until October 2 to decide whether to leave the company. Flock expects to grant buyouts to the majority of workers who apply, according to the email. People familiar with the program but not authorized to discuss it publicly say they believe that a significant number of the startup’s roughly 1,500 employees may try to depart.

Flock is making the severance offers as it continues to lose customers amid growing frustration across the US about its sprawling network of license plate readers, which have raised concerns about privacy and misuse. In the last month, WIRED has documented officers allegedly abusing Flock to track former romantic partners and colleagues, exposed how widely some agencies share access to the system, shown how little is known about the manufacturing of the devices, and revealed in new detail how much information Flock’s cameras collect based on data from a dismantled Flock device.

Founded in 2017, Flock raised money at a valuation of more than $8 billion in a funding round that closed in April. The company has had many of its contracts either not extended or dropped this year, which could leave it short of revenue goals, according to two of the people. A wave of vandalism targeting its cameras has unexpectedly increased expenses. Without buyouts, Flock almost certainly would have to lay off some staff, one of the people believes.

In an internal announcement, Flock said the separation program provides “greater agency” for its workers and “treats employees with transparency, respect, and choice.” It also described the package as the “most generous” ever offered by the company, roughly double its previous severance offers.

Flock did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Some Flock employees have said they have received buyout offers in the range of tens of thousands of dollars, one of the people said. The package also gives employees several months of health care coverage and the ability to exercise stock options within two years after separation, a longer period than the company typically offers resigning employees, according to the email and people familiar with the offer.

Flock employees are expected to learn whether their applications were accepted on October 9, according to the email. Most accepted employees would leave the company by October 29, though in some cases Flock may ask employees to remain for another one to three months.

People familiar with Flock’s severance plan tell WIRED that some employees may take the offer amid speculation that the company, which has raised about $1.2 billion in venture capital, might resort to selling off parts or all of its business to stay afloat. “When you see enough of the vandalism” targeting Flock cameras this year, one of the people says, “you know the writing is the wall” that something has to change.

Flock CEO Garrett Langley said on the All-In podcast last month that “the biggest damage” caused by the backlash against the company had been “internal morale.”

“Because you go on to X or you go on to Reddit and you go, why are people so mad at us when we've been doing the same thing for nine years?” Langley said. “And why are they so mad at us for things we don't do? And we just want people to be safe.”

One advocacy group identified 93 city and county governments that cut ties with Flock in August alone. Overall in 2026, roughly three times as many local governments have dropped Flock compared to the previous five years.

Flock has recently been building products that extend the company beyond its core license plate reader offering. WIRED reported last month that the company has developed AI-powered investigative software to identify drivers, find potential associates based on patterns of movement, and search across police records and other data.

A separate WIRED analysis of Flock’s software found tools designed to continuously search camera feeds for people matching written descriptions. WIRED’s analysis of Flock’s code also found potential integrations with drones and other surveillance systems.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

quote:

Originally posted by Jupiter:
Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee

https://www.wired.com/story/fl...uyouts-to-employees/

Paywall

Huh, didn't paywall me, so here's the scoop!

Thanks for posting the article. I hit the paywall when I revisited the website.

couldn't have happened to a nicer company

the CEO doesn't understand why we're angry about being surveilled and having information on us sold to unknown customers...

duh - you deserve to fail you fukking moron

what's the status of the vc investments? did they get a return or are they gonna be pissed? if they lost muchos dineros, are they gonna have any legal recourse to get some of it back?