San Diego man dressed as Darth Vader 'supports' Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit where it's due: a guy in a Darth Vader costume testifying that "the Emperor is a fan of" Flock Safety cameras is the kind of theater that gets a city council meeting clipped and shared. KSDK News caught the moment, and honestly, the bit writes itself. When your surveillance vendor's pitch sounds just as plausible coming from a Star Wars villain as it does from a sales rep, that tells you something about how these contracts get sold to local governments — with fear, flattery, and promises of "safety" that rarely come with hard answers about data retention, access logs, or who else gets to peek into the network.

The joke lands because it's not far from the truth. Flock's ALPR systems scoop up plate scans, location, time, and vehicle details on every driver who passes a camera, regardless of suspicion, and that data doesn't just sit in a vault — it gets shared across jurisdictions, sometimes with federal agencies, sometimes with little public oversight. San Diego residents pushing back on that expansion, costume or no costume, are doing the work that keeps these systems from metastasizing unchecked.

If you want to know whether your own neighborhood has already been wired up, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for your city council meeting to get its own viral Sith moment, head to take action for ways to push back before the vote happens.