The Eastland County Tea Party Patriots welcome back Jeremy Kitchens, President of Texas Policy Research. Jeremy spoke at our September 2025 meeting. He is a Texas Tech graduate and a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst. Jeremy is a husband, father and a concerned taxpayer. He will be speaking on technology and the 4th amendment in light of the government use of cell data, remote kill switch mandated for vehicles and the spread of Flock camera surveillance.
Cameras are named Flock Safety Cameras launched in 2017 out of Atlanta, and were pitched as small police departments wanted surveillance cameras but could not afford sophisticated infrastructure. Flock provides cameras cheap (sometimes free upfront) in exchange for a subscription contract and data rights. It still has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 6,000+ communities across 49 states. Flock cameras scan over 20 billion license plates per month. It is the largest private vehicle location database in American history. It is NOT about the cameras but the DATA. Every Flock camera logs every license plate that passes it. Timestamp, GPS coordinates, direction of travel, and vehicle description which goes into Flock's proprietary system, called Safety Network, which has a checkbox called "Enable National :ookup." So the agency's camera data can be shared with every other agency in Flock's National Lookup.
Flock's official position is that cities control their own data sharing settings. They do not have to share with federal agencies;however, the default settings favor maximum sharing, and the oversight mechanisms to verify what was actually happening were nonexistent at the city level.
