Palm Springs California City Counsel Approve Gestapo Style Mass Surveillance As Safety

Our Take

Palm Springs City Council didn't just approve a few more cameras — they signed off on a system that logs where every car goes, then hands police a tool (Flock Nova) to stitch that data together with other databases on demand. Technocracy Dissident's video does a solid job walking through the timeline of the vote and the public pushback, and we appreciate them putting a spotlight on a story that local press tends to bury in a council-meeting recap.

The title is provocative, but the underlying point isn't hyperbole: once a city blankets its intersections with plate readers, it's built a retroactive tracking system for everyone, not just suspects. That's exactly the kind of warrantless movement-logging the Supreme Court flagged in Carpenter v. United States. 'Safety' is the sales pitch every time these contracts get approved, but nobody on these councils is answering the harder questions — how long is the data kept, who can query it, and what stops it from being sold, breached, or handed to agencies with no business in a local crime database.

Palm Springs is now one more dot on a fast-growing map of ALPR deployments across the country. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your block, and if you want to push back on a vote like this one before it happens in your city, our take-action page has the tools to do it.