Darth Vader "supports" flock cameras

Our Take

Credit where it's due: 13 On Your Side got a genuinely great clip out of a San Diego City Council meeting, and whoever walked in dressed as Darth Vader understood the assignment. Comparing a network of automated license plate readers to an empire's surveillance apparatus isn't a stretch — it's basically the pitch. Flock Safety markets these cameras as neighborhood watch tools, but the architecture is the same one every fictional and real authoritarian system has wanted: log everyone's movements, store it, make it searchable.

The costume is funny because it's true. Flock's camera network doesn't ask whether you're a suspect before it photographs your plate, your car, your bumper stickers, and runs it all through a database that can be queried by agencies well outside the city that installed the camera. That's not a dystopian hypothetical, it's the current setup in thousands of towns across the country. A guy in a cape pointing that out to a city council is doing more honest messaging than most of the glossy sales decks these companies hand out to local governments.

If you want to know whether your own neighborhood has already signed up for the empire's preferred surveillance tool, check our camera map to see what's nearby, and visit take-action for ways to push back before your city council needs its own Vader cameo.