Alpha drones: Flock goes airborne with its mass surveillance system
No longer content with the thousands of automated license plate readers already spread throughout American communities, Flock (the private surveillance technology company behind the digital police state) is going airborne with Flock Alpha — an addition to their mass surveillance system that will use drones capable of traveling 60 MPH while taking pictures from 2000 feet away.
If you thought Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) were deeply invasive when they were just mounted to neighborhood stop signs and hidden inside speed trailers, you might want to look up (via Technocracy News):
The company that built a massive, interconnected surveillance net across American roadways has officially taken its technology airborne. As highlighted in a viral X post by Josh Walkos, Flock is rolling out “Flock Alpha”—a highly advanced, autonomous police drone designed to track vehicles and suspects from the sky.
Flock isn’t just selling a standard quadcopter; they are aggressively pushing a concept known as “Drone as First Responder” (DFR). Following a strategic partnership with aviation software company Aerodome, Flock integrated its existing street-level surveillance web directly into an autonomous aerial platform.
The specs on the Flock Alpha are undeniably impressive—and for privacy advocates, entirely terrifying.
When a 911 call, a gunshot audio sensor, or a street-level ALPR camera triggers an alert, an officer can deploy the Alpha drone directly from their smartphone. The drone launches itself from a weatherproof docking station and can reach the scene at speeds up to 60 MPH. According to Flock’s promotional materials, the drone arrives first on the scene 78% of the time, long before patrol cars can navigate traffic.
Once in the air, the drone streams thermal and high-definition video directly to dispatchers. More concerning for everyday drivers is the camera payload: the Alpha is equipped with an optical zoom so powerful it can read your vehicle’s license plate from 2,000 feet away—roughly half a mile.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have repeatedly warned that Flock is building a privatized, nationwide mass-surveillance dragnet with incredibly weak oversight. Because Flock’s systems log the movements of every single vehicle they see—not just the cars of suspected criminals—adding an autonomous, thermal-equipped drone to the mix essentially gives local police departments military-grade aerial tracking capabilities. (Emphasis mine)
As Strident Conservative contributor John Whitehead recently wrote, Americans have allowed the political circus in Washington to distract them from the steady march forward of the digital police state being led by Flock Safety.
Flock cameras do much more than photograph license plates, they represent the next evolution of the digital police state and government’s public-private surveillance partnership. Flock cameras document the time and location of every passing vehicle and record identifying characteristics such as its make, model, color, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other distinctive features. And in the case of Flock Alpha drones, they also provide thermal images of the occupants in the car. That information is then stored in a searchable database and used to retrace a vehicle’s movements over time.
But that’s not the real danger — the real danger comes from artificial intelligence. After a Flock camera photographs a car, its AI-powered platform can identify and categorize a vehicle, compare an observation with stored records, generate alerts, identify connections and reconstruct where that vehicle has been. AI a photograph into the building blocks for a suspect society. With AI, every driver becomes a data point. Every data point becomes a pattern. And every pattern becomes a suspicion.
Imagine changing your normal routine by driving an alternate route to get to work when you are suddenly pulled over by the police and interrogated because you’re displaying “suspicious” activity. Well, imagine no longer because Flock Safety — and now Flock Alpha — can conduct mass surveillance on millions of drivers across America, and then sell that data to local police departments. And they can do so without a warrant.
“They are collecting mass amounts of information about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know … engaging in dragnet surveillance of Americans on the streets, on the highways, in their cities, in their communities,” said Nicole Ozer, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, about a nationwide driver surveillance system used by the Border Patrol.
This is no longer surveillance conducted by officers following particular leads. It is surveillance conducted at machine speed, across entire populations, with algorithms deciding whose movements merit further scrutiny. Consider the scale of what is taking place. Flock cameras now log approximately 20 billion vehicle scans every month. That’s not targeted policing. That’s mass surveillance and collection.
As I make clear in Chapter 12 of my book, The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, Democrats work hand-in-hand with Republicans to build mass surveillance technologies that equip government with tools to build a society where liberty has been destroyed and our every move tracked at the push of a button. Although, the great big, ugly surveillance state really took off once Trump arrived on the scene.
Government is watching. It watches where you go, whom you meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit, what political rallies you attend, what protests you join, what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes you support. It watches through your phone, your car, your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads you travel every day.
Flock Alpha going airborne is just one more way that freedom dies in the digital police state. Sure, we have dramatic declarations of martial law and soldiers stationed on every street corner to worry about, but it’s the gradual construction of a technological dragnet like the one being built by the Flock/federal government partnership that makes privacy impossible and anonymity suspicious.
As we’ve learned all-too-well since 9/11, constitutional protections have rarely kept pace with government’s appetite for mass surveillance. First, they create an emergency. Then they write so-called crime-fighting laws to deal with the emergency. This inevitably leads to an expansion of the law to include lesser crimes. Then the law is used to allow administrative enforcement, political monitoring, and use for personal purposes. Eventually, the laws become part of the background machinery of government and a permanent feature of daily life.
Flock Safety is a textbook example of how mission creep works. It begins with cameras mounted on roadways to scan license plates in the name of public safety, and it ends with Flock Alpha drones launched to conduct mass surveillance from the sky that no longer attract attention because everyone has become accustomed to being spied on.
We can’t afford to become so distracted by the Republican/Democrat political machine that we fail to notice the tyranny being constructed around us. Flock and the surveillance state don’t care which party you support, nor does it care whom you voted for or whether or not you believe you have nothing to hide.
Flock Alpha is watching. The databases are growing. The networks are connecting. Liberty is dying.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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