Things To Come: Cameras, Cameras Everywhere – 'Orwellian Nightmare'

Cameras, Cameras Everywhere – See Every Move You Make

BP

Have you noticed cameras going up everywhere? These cameras aren’t just crime-fighting tools, they’re the foundation of an American surveillance state, paid for with your tax dollars and owned by private billionaires. Drive past one of those innocuous “Flock” solar-powered poles and it instantly photographs your license plate and logs the make, model, color, bumper stickers, exact time and location – and then uploads everything to Flock’s private cloud. From there, thousands of police agencies nationwide can search your movements without a warrant, without suspicion and without you ever knowing. [1]

Flock Safety’s data can be integrated with “predictive” policing platforms, including Palantir’s software.

Think “Minority Report” – the well-known dystopian movie centered around predicting and preventing crime before it happens. The film’s tagline was even: “The system is perfect until it comes after you.”  Palantir, a company co-founded by Peter Thiel with initial funding from the CIA, is bringing battlefield-level surveillance and predictive policing capabilities straight into everyday local law enforcement. The system is marketed as “Your software is the weapons system.” Military tech being transferred to domestic policing raises major concerns.

Flock isn’t alone. Bosch’s DINION and AUTODOME ALPR and other cameras blanket highways and parking lots. Rekor, Vigilant Solutions (Motorola), PlateSmart, Verkada, red-light cameras, toll readers, Ring doorbells, Tesla dashcams and private security systems, all feed the same growing web. Data from these overlapping networks flows into shared law-enforcement databases and fusion centers, creating a permanent, searchable map of where every vehicle and every American go.

Condor uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide communities with live and recorded video to help deter and solve crime equitably and effectively”. [2]

The company cashing in big time? Flock Safety, a Silicon Valley darling backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund – the same Peter Thiel who co-founded Palantir, the NSA’s favorite data-vacuum. Thiel and Andreessen Horowitz collect the checks while cities lock themselves into endless subscription fees ($2,500–$4,000 per camera per year), turning YOURtaxes into a perpetual revenue stream for a private duopoly (Flock + Axon) that owns your travel history.

Why is Flock Safety named “Flock”?

According to Flock’s own marketing and explanations (e.g., on their site and in interviews), they describe building a “public-private safety network” that unites communities “like a flock” to deter and solve crime. The name draws from the metaphor of a flock of birds (or sheep) that protect each other collectively by staying together and watching out for threats:

• It emphasizes community protection – the idea that cameras work best when deployed in networks (a “flock”) across neighborhoods, sharing data to create a collective safety net. (The modern-day neighborhood watch)
• Flock reinforces watchfulness and vigilance, as birds in a flock are highly alert to danger.
• The company names many products after birds (e.g., Falcon cameras, Condor, Sparrow, Raven gunfire detectors) to tie into this avian theme of overhead observation and awareness.

If Palantir wanted truth in advertising they’d call it “All-Seeing Eye” – but “Flock” sounds so much cuddlier while it herds the sheep. “Flock” is adorable until you realize the birds aren’t watching for hawks.  They’re watching you.

As a reminder, Peter Thiel and his co-founder named their company Palantir after the Lord of the Rings Palantir, which were magical seeing stones originally made for good: to let the forces of light communicate and watch over their lands. In the wrong hands (especially Sauron’s), they became tools of total surveillance and mind-control, letting the Dark Lord spy on everyone and twist what they saw. What was meant to protect the people’s freedom ended up enslaving them.

Larry Ellison, another billionaire tech oligarch working with President Trump on the infrastructure for storing all the surveillance data, stated, “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” [3]

According to the Conservative Daily News article,

“Flock Cameras Are Invading And Coming To A City Near You…Casa Grande, Ariz. in Pinal County, recently approved a 10-year contract with Flock totaling $10 million for 100 ALPRs, 100 pan-tilt-zoom cameras, 10 video cameras, a gunshot detection system, and additional surveillance devices. With 22 ALPRs already operating and 100 more on the way, no one will cruise around Casa Grande without the government’s careful observation. Yet the Casa Grande police chief brushes off privacy concerns, saying: “I know people are worried about Big Brother… But if they’re calling or emailing with these concerns on their phone, that phone is capturing a thousand times more information than Flock will.” In other words, you’re already being tracked, so what’s a little more?”[4] 

It starts with public safety and morphs into an Orwellian Nightmare
This is how China built its modern Communist Gulag: start with “public safety” cameras, quietly centralize the data, then weaponize it. Over 700 million cameras, primarily through its “Skynet” system, feed a social-credit system that already decides who can travel, work or send their kids to good schools.

We don’t have the social scoring (yet), but the infrastructure is identical, except ours is being assembled by profit-hungry venture capitalists instead of the Communist Party. You are being tracked right now, everywhere you drive, whether you’ve done anything wrong or not. And you and your neighbors are paying Peter Thiel’s portfolio companies for the privilege.

These systems don’t make us safer – they normalize life under constant unaccountable surveillance while billionaire investors get rich. If we let this grid finish weaving itself across the country, we’ll wake up in the exact same digital prison China spent a decade constructing – one “safety” camera at a time.

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