Getting Flocked

Flock cameras are just one visible manifestation of a far worse agenda.

Witnessing climate change envelop the globe is a surreal experience. I am fortunate to be directly unaffected so far, but I am also aware that could change any day. Being a critic of the Trump administration and the billionaires he empowers and enriches brings different dangers. However, in the face of fascism and potential extinction, we must inform and fight. Perhaps most frustrating is the unawareness or denial I find in my own community. That blindness extends far beyond Buffalo. A friend visiting from Las Vegas, one of the canaries in the coal mines, feels it’s similar in her town, where Flock cameras proliferate as Lake Mead quickly approaches dead pool status. Whistling past the graveyard under the eyes of Big Brother isn’t going to save us. Inform, protest, boycott, strike. It’s fight time. ICE will come for the thinkers, writers, and journalists next.

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The Western U.S. and Europe are being incinerated. Canada’s boreal forests burn again. People in Pakistan and India are succumbing to wet-bulb temperature. Rivers from the American Colorado to the Rhine in Germany are drying up in the grip of growing climate change-fueled drought. At the same time, floods from over a dozen successive typhoons, including super typhoons Sinlaku, Bavi, and Dolphin, wash over Pacific Asian countries with Category 5 fury—sustained wind speeds of 157 mph or higher. Dolphin forced the evacuation of one million Chinese alone as it dropped a third of its annual rainfall on the central province of Hubei in just 24 hours. In stark contrast, Africa is so withered by heat and drought that even camels are succumbing. In just Kenya, drought imperils over two million to health and nutrition crises. Oh yeah, it’s burning, too, just like everything else on this psycho run planet.

Live interactive map available at Sub-Saharan Africa Wildfires Map.

As these tragedies unfold, a plot is being carried out to make us mute. The billionaires and war machine are making hundreds of billions on genocide, an Iran War enabling windfall oil profits, and, as usual, unabated environmental destruction. They don’t want pushback. They want confusion. They want ignorance. They want compliance. That’s why we have mind-numbing entertainment culture and book bans.

That’s why from Los Angeles to New York, Flock cameras are proliferating.

Meet Mr. Flock

Garrett Langley is Mr. Flock, CEO of the Atlanta-based AI-empowered cameras, who claims he can eliminate all crime in America. Don’t worry, Donny and Elon. I’m pretty sure Mr. Flock doesn’t mean you. He means this guy whose name is also Garrett.

Garrett Morris, Saturday Night Live 1976, sings Gonna Get Me a Shotgun. “I’m gonna get me a shotgun and kill all the whities I see. When I kill all the whities I see, then whitey won't bother me.” These lyrics would likely not be ICE, Flock, or Stephen Miller approved. Also, Black people were never hung, whipped, raped, or kept as property because America is great again.

Founded in 2017, Flock is valued at $8.4 billion. As of 2025, Flock operates in over 5,000 communities across forty-nine states. Flock’s product is surveillance hardware and software, including automated license plate recognition. Flock scans 20 billion vehicles every month, whether you’re running a red light or not. Its mass video surveillance system integrates data gathered by its cameras with image recognition and machine learning software. On the FlockSafety website, it’s claimed their services don’t use facial recognition, augment predictive policing, or analyze demographics.

Could these claimed safeguards change? Ask George Orwell.

Flock claims, “Better tools for safer communities.” It claims, “technology that helps communities deter crime, respond to emergencies, and investigate safety incidents.” Flock claims, “We believe communities shouldn't have to choose between public safety and privacy.”

Sounds good, right? Who doesn’t want to feel safer? However, the real question is, who determines what safer is? Who determines what is dangerous? Who determines what is truth and what is subversive?

Flock markets their services to law enforcement, homeowner associations, and community organizations as tools for crime prevention and investigations and claims it does not work with ICE. However, in their disavowal on their own website, it’s stated (my bold):

Flock does have established federal customers, including National Parks, Veterans Affairs hospitals, and military bases. These organizations can establish 1:1 sharing relationships with any other legal law enforcement agency on the Flock Safety platform, where applicable laws allow it, and only when communities explicitly allow federal data access.

In other words, what the end user of the product does afterward is their business. That’s a pretty big out clause, wouldn’t you say? Flock exerts no control over the buyers of their products when they could easily could, in licensing.

Of course, money is no object.

Mr. Flock’s net worth is estimated at $500 million. He has called non-violent activists terrorists and “apologized,” LMAO. Garrett has even admitted there is a police abuse problem. Gee, do you think?

I reasonably suspect Silicon Valley product Garrett well knows on which side his bread is buttered.

We live in a country increasingly threatened by, if not already under the jackboot of totalitarianism. Book bans, an ever-present hazard, came back into vogue in recent years with the far right’s desire to rewrite history. Genocide of Native Americans was no big deal. Enslavement of Blacks was no big deal. The basic tenets of democracy—diversity, freedom of thought, and speech—are under attack by political advisor and co-author of the Project 2025 ultra-conservative Russell Vought and unapologetic white nationalist Stephen Miller. Vought, who has also weakened the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as acting director, is the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and wields prodigious, under-the-radar power, reviewing all significant regulations proposed by individual government agencies. The OMB vets executive orders before the president signs them. Vought has used his power to gut entire agencies and turn Trump’s demands and personal grievances into action.

Donald, by any reasonable measure, is a lifetime mobster, an easily bought, putrid dolt conduit, empowered by far smarter but equally devious people. He promised Big Oil windfall profits when he was campaigning with $1 billion in donations to his war chest, and now with the Iran War he is delivering.

When even the essential classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which powerfully deals with racism, is banned, there is a profound problem. When profiling brown people, is done with a federal “police force,” can you say Gestapo? When concentration camps are built on American soil, is that not another profound problem?

Gregory Peck and Mary Badham in the 1962 film adaptation of the Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Many feel Flock’s intrusive technology is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Looks like a no-brainer to me. The amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I’m certain our Not So Supreme Court will be right on this.

The failing inhabitability of our Earth and how Flock applies.

Little doubt, I don’t have to spell out how Flock applies to environmentalists calling out the destruction of an inhabitable Earth. Under Trump’s NSPM-7 directive titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, our right to assemble and protest for a liveable planet can be prosecuted as terrorism, and Flock’s cameras can provide the evidence of your presence. Don’t assume they won’t be used this way.

Flock markets itself as making us safer, the promise of yet another Silicon Valley club member. Silicon Valley alumni are also either with malevolence or ignorance building water-guzzling behemoth hyperscale data centers in drought-stricken regions that compete for our drinking water, farmland, and agricultural irrigation as aquifers that took thousands of years to fill dry up. As farms go bankrupt from climate change—a 46 percent increase from 2024 to 2025—and fertilizer inflation is needlessly driven by the Iraq War, opportunities for disaster capitalists to purchase land on the cheap rise.

And never mind that AI driving these monsters has been built on stolen intellectual property, demands electricity to the point of requiring hundreds or thousands of unregulated, high-pollution gas turbines being used to supplement its mind-blowing energy demands, and reflects the bias of its particular owners. AI isn’t truth. It’s another brick in the wall. Grok or Meta AI kid porn, anyone?

CO₂ emissions continue to rise unabated, and oceans have never been hotter in human existence. Meanwhile, fire seasons lengthen, and hundreds of thousands lose their communities to floods and fires. But at least Flock will see if you broke your HOA agreement by hanging laundry on a line. Here’s some science reality in graphics.

Global Absorbed Solar Radiation Anomaly

As measured in watts per meter squared (W/m²)

Super El Niño is with us, but nowhere near peaked. That 2.1°C is likely to go over 3°C, giving us an unwelcome glimpse of what could be permanent—- by 2050.

Daily CO₂ levels

Daily updates can be found here.

This site provides daily updated data for CH₄ and N₂O levels as well.

Daily sea surface temperature

Graphic from Climate Change Institute, University of Maine.

When there is everything to lose, there is nothing to lose. The descent into Hell is hitting a new velocity. With a failed political system enabling these psychopaths, no one is coming to save us. Have you heard even the most “progressive” mention climate change or overshoot? Nah, it’s too career-endangering to tell the truth. And that’s why we’re flocked.