Drug resistance bacteria coming out of data centres

Our Take

Credit to the Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency channel for poking at a topic most outlets won't touch: the physical footprint of the data centers quietly multiplying across the country. We can't verify the specific bacteria/data-center claim in this video — the channel doesn't cite primary sources we can check, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But the underlying instinct is worth taking seriously: every Flock Safety camera, every ALPR hit, every license plate scan gets piped into a server farm somewhere, and those facilities have real environmental and public health externalities that almost never make it into the press releases.

That's the bigger point lurking under this video's headline. Mass surveillance isn't just a privacy abstraction — it's diesel generators, water-hungry cooling systems, and warehouses full of hard drives sitting in someone's backyard, usually in a community with little say in the matter. Flock's pitch to local governments rarely mentions what it takes to store years of plate-read data indefinitely, or who bears the downstream cost of that infrastructure.

We'd rather our readers scrutinize bold claims than swallow them whole, bacteria included. But the instinct to ask 'what does this surveillance system actually cost us, beyond the obvious' is exactly the kind of skepticism this fight needs. If you want to see how much of that infrastructure has already landed near you, check our camera map, and if your town is considering a new Flock contract, our take-action page has the tools to push back before the cameras — and the data centers behind them — go up.