r/CoachellaValley

Palm Springs police aren't stopping there, they want to download your data from every single community in the valley, as described in this closed meeting before the data center opened in December.

So now we not only have to trust individual cities with the data, we have to trust Palm Springs police on top of that, and god knows who else they're sharing it with.

One of the things cities kept trying to assure citizens suspicious of Flock and their data being collected was that they were the only ones with access to it. Did any of them tell you they could just randomly hand it over to other agencies? Did they even tell you they've done it after the fact?

Daniel Hartman speaks at a Fridley, MN City Council Meeting on July 27, 2026. Video clip is by More Perfect Union. Here it is on YouTube: One of the best arguments against Flock you'll watch - More Perfect Union (YouTube)

From the description: Residents of Fridley, MN packed a city council meeting last week where police detailed which law enforcement agencies have access to Flock Safety camera footage. ~:~ Many residents were particularly concerned about news that some of the footage was used for immigration-related searches.

~~~~~~~~~~

I've not been a resident of Fridley for as long as many of you. But like many of you, I came here to build a life, a future with my Family.

It's caused me to think a lot about the future, about the world we will be building for our Children. I want that world to be one where we trust one another. A world where Newcomers to the Community are greeted with open arms and kindness.

Flock is not that. Where we could be spending our money uniting our Community and building it into something for everyone to trust in, we instead send it to unproven Tech Oligarchs to invade and spy on our Communities.

That spying is not without consequence. When the federal Invaders arrived to terrorize our state — in the name of scams, lawlessness, and racism — that very network was used to track and kidnap our Neighbors, as we know.

Our Children will look back on this moment with revulsion. Nauseated by the cowardice that led us to turn our guns inward. Nauseated by the squandering of our natural resources to build the data center and surveillance infrastructure — a monument to fear, voyeurism, and delusion.

We must not forget: This is much bigger than a few cameras spying creepily on Civilians. The surveillance state cannot exist without data centers. Every second these cameras are running, is another second spent sucking the Life out of our Planet.

You keep this up, and we're staring down more than a future without privacy. We are staring down the destruction of our future in entirety.

Does it comfort you to know that when the last drop of water is drained, when the weather gets so hot that your sweat can no longer keep you alive, and when electricity is so expensive that we can no longer afford to cool our homes — there will still be cameras pointing at the People that frighten you?

If my words offend you, remember that I warned you months ago, in this very room. You have had adequate time to change course and be the responsible Adults you were elected to be.

If you cannot see this situation for what it is, then you should not be anywhere near a position of power. We are better than this.

Spend our money on something the Community would actually benefit from. We should be enjoying our parks together and making Friends, not living in fear of one another.

I ask that you disarm these cameras.

- Daniel Hartman speaking at a Fridley, Minnesota City Council Meeting - July 27, 2026

FREE FURNITURE

Moving and have couches I don’t need to take with me. The table is up for grabs too + a DVD player. All FREE - you just have to come and pick it up/remove it from my apartment. I am disabled and can’t assist. Sorry 😞

Thank You!

There are more than 120,000 Flock cameras across the U.S., each one logging the license plate number, make, model, color, and other identifying details of every vehicle that passes. According to the company, its automatic license plate reader (ALPR) systems span over 6,000 communities and record 20 billion plate scans every month -- all without a warrant. Because these scans can be shared nationally, a police department in North Carolina can pull up vehicle information captured thousands of miles away in California.

That expansive kind of power is easily abused. A police chief in Georgia used Flock cameras to harass and stalk his ex-girlfriend. An officer in Wisconsin accessed Flock’s database 179 times to track a woman he was dating and her ex-partner. Another officer in California used Flock to surveil his mistress, someone else she was dating, and his own wife. A police sergeant in Texas resigned in the middle of an internal affairs investigation into his use of Flock cameras to track a female officer.

In other instances, law enforcement agencies have used Flock to target vulnerable populations and advance a political agenda:

• The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched Flock’s database for the license plate of a woman suspected of taking an abortion pill. Some of the cameras that were accessed were located in Illinois and Washington state, both states that protect abortion access. (As a side note, the sheriff in that case, Adam King, was later indicted on unrelated charges of sexual harassment, witness retaliation, and tampering with evidence).

• Border Patrol accessed Flock data collected by Washington police departments to locate, arrest, and deport immigrants. Some law enforcement agencies enabled direct sharing with immigration authorities, in violation of state law. In other cases, Border Patrol was able to gain “back door” access to Flock data in Washington despite direct sharing not being explicitly enabled. Additionally, at least one law enforcement agency -- the Yakima County Sheriff's Office -- accessed Flock databases on behalf of federal immigration agencies.

• Similarly, an investigation by 404 Media found that police departments across the country were searching Flock databases on behalf of ICE. Flock Safety has since implemented a so-called “safeguard” that is meant to prevent officers from searching the database for immigration enforcement purposes in states like Illinois, which prohibit such data sharing. However, the safeguard can easily be subverted by entering an alternate, false reason for the search.

Next week is DeFlock’s National Week of Action Against ALPRs, with rallies in 390 cities across the country to raise awareness about ALPRS and demand the cancellation of existing contracts. Visit NoALPRS.com for more information.

##People tracking

Despite Flock’s claims that its products only track vehicles, some of their cameras can, in fact, track people. Flock’s AI-enabled Condor cameras are equipped with "people detection alerts" and "Guardian mode" to automatically zoom in on people and catalog their appearance. Contracting parties (like police departments) can then search Flock’s nationwide database for distinguishing features of people caught on Condor cameras. A review of these searches conducted by 404 Media found police departments across the country using Flock’s “FreeForm” search feature to find people based on race, gender, weight, clothing, and tattoos.

>Milford CT PD looking for “male with tattoos,” “male with brown hair,” and “woman blue shirt,” across more than a hundred cameras […]

>The California Highway Patrol looking for someone wearing a “gray shirt” across 274 cameras […]

>Chamblee GA PD searching 85 camera networks for “white woman wearing grey shirt, blonde hair, black shorts with blue and white shoes.” [...]

>The California Highway Patrol was “Looking for a white male about 6ft 1in tall, longer brown hair almost to his shoulders, slender build, will have been wearing blue jeans, boots with white paint stains on the toes and possibly carrying a black helmet.”

Flock intends its Condor cameras to be integrated with the company’s more commonplace ALRP cameras, connecting individual people to specific vehicles and tracking them across neighborhoods, cities, and states.

>Kevin Cox, a Flock consultant who used to work for the Grand Prairie, Texas Police Department, said in the webinar that he built an “intel center” with a high “density” of Flock cameras in that city. “I am passionate about this because I’ve lived it. The background behind video [Condor] with LPR is rich with arrests,” he said. “That rich experience of seeing what happened kind of brings it alive to [judges]. So video combined with the LPR evidence of placing a vehicle at the scene or nearby is an incredibly game changing experience into the prosecutorial chain of events.”

>“You can look down a tremendous distance with our cameras, to the next intersection and the next intersection,” he said. “The camera will identify people, what they’re wearing, and cars up to a half a mile away. It’s that good.”

In December of last year, journalists discovered that Flock left at least 60 of its Condor cameras exposed on the open internet, revealing the AI-powered people trackers are located in parks, playgrounds, parking lots, and suburban streets from Atlanta to Bakersfield.

>We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone. [...]

>After finding links to the feed, “immediately, we were just without any username, without any password, we were just seeing everything from playgrounds to parking lots with people, Christmas shopping and unloading their stuff into cars,” Jordan told me in an interview. “I think it was like the first time that I actually got like immediately scared … I think the one that affected me most was as playground. You could see unattended kids, and that’s something I want people to know about so they can understand how dangerous this is.”

---

##WHAT’S NEXT

###Uber Flocks

According to a recent report by 404 Media, Flock has been pitching a plan to turn Nexar dashcams used by Uber and Lyft into ALPRs to expand Flock’s database of license plate scans.

>Flock planned to use dashcams installed in hundreds of thousands Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers’ vehicles to scan license plates those drivers travelled passed, essentially turning Uber and Lyft drivers into roaming surveillance vehicles, according to a Flock presentation shared with 404 Media. [...]

>Flock told 404 Media in an email it never executed the partnership with Nexar. But the presentation still shows Flock’s ambitious plan to conscript rideshare and delivery drivers to collect license plate data for its network. It is not clear whether Uber or Lyft, or drivers working for those apps, would have been aware of the data collection.

Flock’s planned army of surveillance Ubers comes as a different company, called BusPatrol, reportedly plans to turn school bus cameras into ALPRs and sell the data to law enforcement.

>BusPatrol, a company that claims to be the nation's leading provider of school bus stop-arm cameras, currently has over 40,000 AI-powered stop-arm cameras across 24 states. These cameras, which are permitted in at least 30 states, are mounted on school buses and are designed to capture images of vehicles illegally passing when the bus is stopped. [...] Now the company has plans to expand its revenue, data collection, and partnership with local law enforcement by turning its stop-arm cameras into ALPR cameras, according to the leaked BusPatrol documents.

###Electronic signal tracking

Italian aerospace and defense company Leonardo S.p.A. already makes and sells ALPRs in the U.S. under its subsidiary, Leonardo DRS. Now, the company is marketing a new technology that allows ALPRs to capture mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in passing cars.

According to Leonardo’s website, the technology, called ELSAG SignalTrace, “bridges license plate recognition data with sensor-captured device identifiers – such as those from mobile phones, Bluetooth wearables, and vehicle systems – to create a unique, trackable ‘electronic fingerprintʼ for investigative use.”

>As the devices emit signals, SignalTrace sites capture and correlate them together, along with LPR data if present. The data collected shows what group of devices are travelling together. Algorithms can determine which specific mix of devices are predictably moving together. That specific mix of devices—linked by common time stamps and locations—are described as an electronic fingerprint and can help develop leads that aid investigations.

>For example: while 70 cars in 100 may contain iPhones, only one will have an iPhone 13rev2, an Audi radio, a pair of Bose headphones, a Garmin sports watch, a key finder, and the license plate ABC-1234. The collection of data represented by these specific things is an electronic signature.

Essentially, Leonardo plans to turn its car tracking cameras into people tracking cameras by collecting the identifiers of all devices that pass by, tying it to specific license plates, and storing that data in its databases “for future queries and analysis.” Furthermore, SignalTrace can be used to identify you -- via your unique mix of devices -- even if you use an alternative method of transportation, like an Uber or a friend’s car.

I haven’t seen it mentioned yet, but guys I’m really sad about Jackie our beloved bald eagle. I’ve seriously been crying and I can’t believe I have gotten so invested in a wild animal from a camera. Anyone else having a rough day because of this? Photo from the live stream back in December.

Okay, I know some of you here may remember strolling through the back alley behind the Indio Fashion Mall. Because I sure as hell certainly do, and I've done just that many, many times. I just had another dream about this area last night, too. ✨

Growing up at the very nearby Mountain View Cottages (JLJ's) in the 2010's, this exact path was my shortcut to and from Indio High School and other places such as Dollar Tree (which has since been replaced by St. John's Community Health), In-N-Out Burger, GameStop, Carl's Jr., Indio Teen Center, and K-Mart (now El Super). And yes, I visited the Indio Fashion Mall many times, as well. Believe it or not, I even walked through the back way during the dark and starry nights. Nobody ever bothered me strolling through there at night, not even once. Sketchy, I know. 😅

I also vividly remember seeing the now extinct Kyriakos Christian Center church that sat in the neighboring vacant lot – facing John Nobles Avenue – for years. Does anyone seem to know what the future may hold for this vacant lot now?

I gladly admit that I do receive recurring dreams of both my old neighborhood of the JLJ's and this surrounding area of Indio in general. The nostalgia is very, very real. ☀️🌌🌴🌳🏜️✨💕