Massive deep fake crisis coming

Our Take

The channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency lays out a warning that's been building for years: as synthetic video and audio get convincingly cheap to produce, the public's ability to trust any single piece of footage collapses. That's unsettling on its own, but it also changes the stakes for the automated surveillance infrastructure we track every day. When courts, cops, and the public can no longer take raw video at face value, the pressure to lean harder on "verified" data streams — license plate scans, facial recognition hits, geolocation logs — only grows. Flock Safety and similar vendors are positioning themselves as the trusted ground truth in a world where cameras can lie, and that's exactly the kind of mission creep that should worry anyone who cares about due process.

We don't take a position on every claim this channel makes about digital ID or CBDCs, but the throughline is relevant to our beat: a deepfake panic is a convenient pretext for expanding networks like Flock's ALPR cameras under the banner of "authenticated" evidence, even though plate-reader data is itself unverified, error-prone, and rarely audited with the rigor people assume. A crisis of trust in media shouldn't be answered by handing more blind trust to black-box surveillance systems.

If you want to see how much of this infrastructure is already sitting on your street, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just watch the trend lines, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back locally.