‘Darth Vader’ speaks out in support of Flock cameras at government meeting
The short version: A man in a Darth Vader costume publicly backed Flock's 500+ San Diego cameras, unintentionally proving critics' point that ALPR networks resemble Empire-style surveillance.
Our Take
Atlanta News First caught a genuinely surreal moment: someone in a full Darth Vader costume stepped up to a San Diego city council podium to praise Flock Safety's license plate readers. You can't script better irony than a guy dressed as fiction's most infamous surveillance-state enforcer cheerleading for a network of over 500 always-on cameras logging every vehicle that passes.
Costume aside, the substance matters more than the spectacle. San Diego's Flock deployment is one of the largest in the country, and public comment periods like this one are often the only real check citizens have before these systems expand further. Whether the speaker meant it as satire or sincere support, the optics underscore what we keep saying: mass ALPR surveillance doesn't need a costume to feel like something out of a dystopia — it's already tracking ordinary people's movements at scale, with little transparency about who accesses that data or why.
If you want to know how many Flock cameras are watching your own commute, check our camera map, and if San Diego's 500-plus cameras make you uneasy, see what you can do about the ones near you at take action.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Atlanta News First, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.