Darth Vader crashes San Diego City Council meeting praising Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit where it's due: whoever put on the Vader costume and marched up to the San Diego City Council mic understood the assignment better than most public commenters do. It's the kind of stunt that gets clipped, shared, and laughed at — and that's exactly the problem. When the debate over a city-wide network of license plate cameras gets reduced to a costume gag, it's easy to forget that real questions about who accesses this data, how long it's stored, and which agencies get to query it never actually got answered in that room. Credit to California Post for capturing the moment, but the laugh track shouldn't drown out the substance.

San Diego isn't unique. City councils across the country are approving Flock Safety contracts in meetings that last minutes, often with little scrutiny of audit logs, retention policies, or the growing list of outside agencies — including federal ones — that can tap into local ALPR networks. A guy in a cape breathing heavily into a microphone is a distraction from that reality, whether he meant it as satire or genuine defense. Either way, the cameras keep recording every plate that passes, Sith Lord or not.

If you want to know whether your own neighborhood has one of these cameras watching your daily movements, check our map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just laugh at council footage, see what you can do on our action page.