A surveillance system "For the People"
The short version: A tongue-in-cheek DIY-ALPR parody from creator JesseGarca pokes fun at Flock Safety's business model while making a serious point about who controls surveillance infrastructure.
Our Take
Parody is doing some heavy lifting here. JesseGarca's send-up of Flock Safety — tipping a hat to Benn Jordan's own camera-hacking experiments — imagines a 'for the people' version of the automated license plate reader network that cities keep paying private companies to run. It's funny because it's close to true: the underlying tech isn't magic, it's commodity hardware and a database, and the only thing proprietary about it is who gets to see your travel history and who profits off it.
That's the joke worth sitting with. Flock's pitch to city councils is that this is public safety infrastructure, but the data, the retention policies, and the access logs belong to a private vendor, not the public. A parody 'DIY' version highlights how little technical mystique is actually involved in building a system that tracks every car that passes a given corner — which is exactly why oversight, not awe, should be the default civic response.
Credit to JesseGarca for the laugh and the sharper point underneath it. If you want to see where these cameras are actually deployed near you, check our map, and if your town is considering a Flock contract, our take-action page has tools for pushing back before the cameras go up.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of JesseGarca, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.