You are listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper. Buzzered by Duct Tape. The real duct tape. It fixes everything except that decision. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America. From border to border, coast to coast, and all ships at sea. Here is your host, Keith.
SPEAKER_01Well, this is Keith, and you're listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast for July the 16th, 2026. Everybody knows I'm a retired police officer, but when I was a police officer and especially a detective, I used plenty of surveillance tools on the job. I can see what they can do and how they get used. So when I tell you something about this technology that we're going to talk about that concerns me, that should tell you something.
So today we're talking about the flock safety cameras. You've seen them mounted on light poles, police cruisers, sometimes even on private property. They're all over the place. They scan every vehicle that passes by, logs its license plate, the time, the location, and the direction of travel. A lot of you have asked and sent me a few emails about what I think about the flock cameras. So let's talk about that. So the flock cameras, what are they exactly? They are automated license plate readers, ALPRs. They create a searchable digital record of your vehicle's movements, and they're not rare. Many cities have hundreds, if not thousands, of these cameras set up. It's all over the news, it's all over social media. Most of you out there are probably familiar with them here in the States. So Flock Safety alone reportedly has 40,000 cameras deployed across the country, and every single day they add more. And they don't have them just in high crime areas. They're in suburbs, schools, residential streets, entrance to neighborhoods. Some HOAs even have them installed at the entrance of their subdivisions, meaning that your HOA, if it's on private property, your HOA is now part of this surveillance network and they have access to some of that data.
Now, I will give credit where credit is due. This camera has helped recover stolen vehicles, missing people, murder suspects, kidnapped people, and that side of it works. Perfect. I get it. If your car gets stolen and somebody drives past a flock camera, which they probably will, there's a real good chance that the police will get a hit on that license plate and they'll find out which direction it's heading. If a child goes missing and the suspect's plate is in the system, that's a tool to help bring the child home. I'm not dismissing that. But in anything else, technology needs to be used for good, not evil. These are not just useless toys up on little poles. So the question is not whether they can do good. The question is whether the trade-off is worth it and whether anyone's actually watching the watchers.
When people talk about privacy and the terms of service, a lot of people will say, Well, I don't care if they track my car. I've heard this a million times, and you have too. It's the same thing people say when we found out that Gmail, Google, is scanning and reading our emails. A lot of people will say the same thing when apps like TikTok and a million others vacuum up your location data. Same thing is said about the Patriot Act. And every single time we found out later, the data is used in ways that we were not told nor anticipated. The nothing to hide isn't an argument. It's an assumption that the rules won't change. It assumes that people with access to the data will always be trustworthy and the political environment will always be stable. And no one will ever redefine what suspicious means. History tells us otherwise. So let me put this a different way. You might not have anything to hide from the government under these laws today, but data lasts longer than administration's, and once it exists, the data gets used. The other argument I've heard is well, it's just a license plate, and the Department of Motor Vehicles already knows who owns my car. 100% correct. DMV knows you own your car, but DMV doesn't know that you drove past Forth and Maine at 247 p.m. last Tuesday, turned south past another camera at 2.52 p.m. and arrived at a storage unit six minutes later. That's what these cameras know. There's a difference between a registration database and a movement database. One tells you who owns what, the other tells you where everybody is going, when they're going there, how often they go there, and that sets up a pattern. That's not the same thing, not even close. And here's what a lot of people don't realize these cameras just don't read plates. Also log vehicle type, color, make, model, and even distinguishing features, like if you have a roof rack, bumper stickers, a damaged rear quarter panel. So even if your plate is obscured, either accidentally or on purpose, the system can still narrow things down. Some of you are probably thinking, well, Keith, my phone already tracks me. What's one more thing tracking me? Law enforcement can pull what they call tower dumps with a search warrant. That's a search warrant for a cell tower and all of the phones that were connected to it in a particular time. I've seen the process work. It's legitimate. Cell tower dump search warrants are legit, and I've done dozens of them when I was a police officer. But think about what this means. Your phone is voluntarily surveillance. You carry it by choice, but your plate is required surveillance, I guess you could say. The law says you have to have the license plate displayed on your vehicle. And now a network of cameras exploits this legal requirement, if you will, to track you without your consent or knowledge. So that's a fundamentally different relationship between you and
the system. Let's talk about the UK. So if you want to see where this road ends, look no further than the United Kingdom. They started with a few cameras in city centers decades ago. Seemed reasonable, crime was a concern, people accepted it. Today, the average person that lives in London is captured on camera over 70 times a day. The UK has roughly one surveillance camera for every 11 people. And that just didn't happen overnight. It happened with a reasonable expansion. Each step made sense in isolation. But now zoom out 30 years, and you're living in the most surveilled democracy on the planet. And here's where it gets interesting. Despite all of those cameras, the UK has not eliminated crime. Studies are still mixed on whether CCTV even reduces crime at all or just displaces it, meaning the bad guys go to an area where there's no cameras before they rob somebody or stab somebody. But what it has done is normalize the idea of being watched everywhere you go. In the UK, it's just a part of life. And here in the US, it's starting to become that very quickly. The normalization of this is what concerns me more than the cameras themselves.
So let's tie this into prepping. Think about last month. You went to the gun store, you went to the range, you went to Costco or another bulk food warehouse, you went to a hardware store. That property out in the country that you've been setting up, a friend's place where maybe you dropped off some supplies. Maybe you went to a prepper meetup, a fuel run with extra cans. Now imagine someone pulls up your plate history and maps all of that out. They don't need to know what you purchased. The pattern alone tells a story that this person, you, is stockpiling, staging, and preparing. Your bug-out location may not be secret anymore. Your supply chain is no longer invisible. Your network of like-minded friends shows up as repeated co-locations. A bunch of preppers or a bunch of people in preparedness meet at John Smith's house every other month. Now we have a pattern. So operational security or OPSEC isn't just what we do online or what we do about our homes. Now it is about what movements reveal, what patterns our movements show. And right now these movements are being recorded, whether you like it
or not. So as far as who has access to this data, because it's not just the local police. Flock cameras create a network. They are all tied together. When a police department joins the flock system, they can share data with other departments. So your plate gets scanned in your small town, and that record might be searchable by agents in other cities, counties, or even states. There's also what they call fusion centers, joint operations where federal, state, and local agencies share intelligence. The license plate reader data flows into these systems as well. We're not talking about a single camera watched by your local sheriff. We're talking about a web of interconnected databases that can literally reconstruct your travel across jurisdictions, across state lines, county lines, city to city. Just think about it. If you're caught on enough cameras without even knowing who you are, they can tell, whoever's driving the car, they can tell where you work. You leave your house and it goes by the first camera 7.15 every morning, every weekday morning. Then it hits another camera on the highway at like 7.22. You get off on an exit, it grabs you, getting off on the exit, heading west on a particular road. And then as you pull into the office park or what have you, it grabs you one more time. So someone looking at all of those times and mapping it out should say, hey, this person probably works at this doctor's office in this office park because they go to work the same way about the same time, Monday through Friday. So in some cases, private entities or HOAs, businesses, property management companies own the cameras and share that data with law enforcement voluntarily. No warrant is needed. They own the camera and they can share what it captures. That's a bit scary. The question you should ask your local city council or whatever governing body your city or town has is Are we just getting flocked cameras? Or who has access to this camera? How long is the data retained? And is there some sort of audit process that happens to make sure that the data is being deleted after the prescribed time? And here is where the nothing to hide crowd needs to reckon with reality. We've already seen officers fired for running plates on ex-girlfriends. We've seen people wrongly flagged and pulled over at gunpoint because the camera misread a plate or there is a database error. They weren't in the stolen car, but the officers are acting on the information they were provided, and they're doing a felony stop on little Susie and Johnny, who's on their way to a movie, because the license plate database had one digit or one letter wrong. This is not a hyperbole. This is documented. This stuff is happening. So most flock contracts, the data is retained for 30 days. Now that sounds like a limited time until you realize there's minimal oversight on whether it's actually deleted. Agencies share this data across jurisdictions. Retention policies can be extended with a vote that you'll never hear about. And even if the raw images are deleted, the metadata, plate, time, location may still persist in other systems. So here's an example. I have a white Jeep Wrangler. And I looked on a website, I think it's deflock.com or something like that. It's a third-party website that somebody put together that maps out all of the flock cameras that are currently online. I went ahead and looked on the map from my house to work, and I am captured by six different cameras. So I'm captured by those cameras. Now, after 30 days, that data is supposed to be deleted. So whatever was captured, maybe it didn't get the license plate every time, but all of that data should be deleted. But what if there was a crime reported and the suspect was driving a white Jeep Wrangler? Because there's plenty of them out there. So local law enforcement does a search and they find 32 white jeep wranglers in the area, roughly, on where somebody was robbed or somebody was assaulted. So they find my Jeep, they read the license plate, and they're like, oh, that's not it. But somewhere in a report, somewhere, the police report will say we found 37 matching vehicles or 37 vehicles that match the description of the suspect vehicle. Here are the ones that we saw. White Jeep Wrangler belongs to Keith. This is his address. It ends up that he's not the suspect. So my license plate, my name, the description of my vehicle is now in a police report that is digitized. Police reports are online now. They don't do paper reports anymore. So that is searchable. Even though it's deleted, that data still sits in a different database. And I know 30 days doesn't sound like much, but 30 days of data on thousands of cameras in millions of data points. Run that for a year, and you have a comprehensive movement history of an entire city, if not larger. The retention window, in my opinion, is almost irrelevant when the density of the cameras is high enough. So the real question isn't, are you going to do something wrong today? The real question is, do you want every trip you've ever taken logged into a system that's growing faster than the rules can govern it? Much like AI. So what can you actually do? And I'm
going to be very practical here. First, awareness. Know where the cameras are. Citizens have filed public record requests and mapped flock camera locations. Some of this information is publicly available, some of it is not. So knowing where your local camera setups are is step one. Number two, vary your routes. I've said this a million times. Know at least three different ways to get anywhere. If you're making sensitive trips, supply runs, visits to your bug-out location, your cabin in the woods, meetings with other groups. Don't take the same route every single time. Pattern of life analysis depends on patterns. So break that pattern. Pattern of life analysis is a true discipline in and amongst itself. We can talk about that another time. Third, get involved locally. Attend city council meetings when license plate reader contracts come up for a vote or come up for renewal. Ask questions about data retention, access policies, and the audits. These decisions are often made quietly or with very little public input. Your presence at these meetings matter. Your questions that you ask matter. Fourth, understand your rights. In many jurisdictions, license plate readers collect public data in spaces not considered protected by the Fourth Amendment because license plates are displayed in public. So that's a legal framework that may change in the future. There's active court cases going on about this, but for now, just know the landscape. And number five, support organizations that work on this issue. Groups like the Electric Frontier Foundation and dare I say it, the ACLU have done significant work tracking lysomplate reader expansions and pushing for transparency and regulation. So here's my disclaimer. Now I know some of you are already thinking about countermeasures. You've seen them online. There's videos about certain products used to blind the cameras. People are cutting them down with electric saws, I think, all sorts of things. I'm not going there. I'm not suggesting, recommending, or encouraging anything illegal. No vandalism, no destruction of property, no tampering with plates, none of that. I want to make that perfectly clear. That's not what this podcast episode is about. This is about awareness, knowing who's watching, what they're looking for, and understanding what it means, and being able to make an informed decision about your own operational security and staying within the boundaries of the law. Now, I'm not anti-law enforcement. I was a cop for 26 years. I believe in public safety, but I also believe that a free society requires limits on surveillance. And right now, those limits are not keeping pace with technology. In my opinion, we're building an infrastructure of total movement tracking and hoping that no one ever misuses it. That's not security, that's faith, that's hope. And hope is never a plan. And faith in systems without accountability is how folks lose their rights, one convenience or one right at a time. Pay attention, ask questions, and don't let anybody tell you that wanting your privacy means you have something to hide.
That's a bunch of crap. All right, folks, if you want to reach out, practicalprep podcast at gmail.com. I'm on the Twitters, prep underscore podcast. If anybody has any questions about the flock cameras, they have stories they want to share, please email me. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I really would. All right, folks, as always, please be careful out there. Take care of one another, watch out for the cameras, and until next time.
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