Ex-FBI Agent Mike German is Our Hero of the Week. Here's Why.

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN's Hide & Speak series for digging up Mike German's story. A guy spends sixteen years undercover infiltrating actual domestic terror groups, then gets run out of the Bureau not for failing at his job but for reporting colleagues who ran an illegal wiretap and doctored records. The DOJ later confirmed he was right. That's not a bug in the system, that's the system working exactly as designed when accountability gets in the way of convenience.

We bring this up because it's the same dynamic we track every day with ALPR networks. Flock Safety and similar vendors keep telling cities and police departments 'trust us, there's oversight, there's audit logs, there's policy.' Mike German's career is a case study in what those assurances are worth when nobody with power actually wants to look. An internal wiretap violation in a counterterrorism case sat buried until one agent refused to let it go, and even then the institution tried to bury him instead of the problem. Camera networks scanning every plate on every street have far less friction built into their oversight than a wiretap ever did.

If a trained federal agent couldn't get his own agency to self-correct without going to Congress, why would we expect a local police department running a few hundred Flock cameras to police itself? Check our camera map to see what's already watching your neighborhood, and hit our take-action page if you want to push back before the next 'trust us' becomes the next buried scandal.