What The Flock? Pt II

“The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization… Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible.” Julian Assange

Contrary to popular opinion, the modern surveillance state is not a monolithic entity, but it’s a highly modular, interoperable architecture. For decades, the state relied on clumsy, siloed databases, but today, the paradigm has shifted. The surveillance state is now outsourced to defense-backed tech unicorns that build the infrastructure of totalitarianism and lease it back to local governments. This modern state surveillance has two layers, namely collection and fusion.

Flock Safety is a collection company. Its 75,000-to-100,000-plus automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras generate raw timestamped location data at a volume no human analyst could process unassisted. Flock’s own public position is that it is “purpose-built for local agencies,” with 30-day default retention and locally-controlled access. Whether that architecture holds in practice, as we’ve already documented, is a separate and troubled question but organizationally, Flock is a sensor network; it watches. Flock has built what CEO Garrett Langley calls, a network that could help “eradicate almost all crime”. The company is now valued at over $7 billion and has expanded beyond license plate readers into gunshot detection, drones, and most critically, a new AI data fusion platform called Nova.

The critical danger is Flock’s nationwide data sharing model. Police departments can choose to share their data with no one, all departments in their state, or the entire Flock network nationwide. Flock incentivizes maximum sharing: departments that share nationally can search nationally. Over 7,000 agencies and organizations have access to this network, and officers in Texas, Florida, and thousands of other jurisdictions can track Massachusetts drivers in real-time without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion.

Flock’s expansion into drones (via its 2025 acquisition of Aerodome) adds an aerial dimension. The “Drone as First Responder” program deploys autonomous drones within 90 seconds of a tripped alarm, covering 38 square miles with 45 minutes of flight time . These drones are now being marketed to the private sector, thus creating a parallel private surveillance network that can grant law enforcement access at the click of a button 

Palantir Technologies is a fusion company. It doesn’t run its own sensors; it ingests other people’s data; from the IRS, ICE, Medicaid records, to the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and builds the software that finds patterns, connections, and “targets” across that data. A law enforcement analyst can, in minutes, map out a person’s entire network, see every document that links them to others, and build a comprehensive intelligence report that includes their eye color from their driver’s license, their license plate from traffic tickets, and their financial history from purchased data broker records.

Palantir’s Foundry for AML (Anti-Money Laundering) product is particularly relevant to financial privacy. It integrates data from OFAC sanctions lists, UN consolidated screening lists, transaction monitoring systems, KYC databases, and corporate registries to create what Palantir calls a “golden record” of every customer.The system uses machine learning to score customers across 25 risk indicators in real-time, automating 85% of KYC reviews and reducing onboarding from 10 days to 10 hours. While marketed as compliance, this is functionally financial surveillance infrastructure that banks are legally compelled to deploy and that Palantir operates as a service. 

In other words, you don’t need Flock and Palantir to sign a contract with each other. You need Flock’s data to end up in any federal database that Palantir already touches and the evidence shows, repeatedly, that it does. That said, the most important connection between Palantir and Flock Safety is not a direct corporate partnership, but it’s financial and ideological. Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, invested in Flock’s $275 million fundraising round in March 2025. As you might have already known, Founders Fund is one of Silicon Valley’s most influential VC firms, and Thiel’s investment philosophy is not passive. He invests in companies that align with his worldview; and his worldview is explicitly hostile to the democratic constraints that might limit unwarranted surveillance. 

This convergence between the two organizations is not just about a single contract or API integration, but it’s an example of complementary surveillance infrastructures being funded by the same ideological and financial ecosystem designed to operate together in ways that neither company could achieve alone. Both companies conduct total surveillance that is retroactively queryable by state actors. 

The Surveillance Crown Jewel

While we have largely discussed the Palantir-Flock nexus so far, there is one more insidious layer that needs exploration that completes the surveillance architecture of the digital control grid, and it’s the digital bloodhound known as Falconet. 

FalcoNet is a cell-site simulator that works by impersonating a cell tower, forcing every phone in range to connect to it and intercepts calls, SMS, and internet traffic in real-time while extracting unique device identifiers (IMEI, IMSI) for tracking. It operates via software-defined radio base transceiver stations covering 2G through 5G networks and it does not differentiate between phones owned by suspects and those that aren’t, but it sweeps every device into the same signal. It can be concealed within police vehicles, hidden in a backpack for on-foot missions or attached to a helicopter or plane. 

Texas’s Department of Public Safety spent $4.49 million outfitting four Tahoes with the system in March 2026, justified through an “emergency” procurement request thin on specifics. The technology has already spread to Albuquerque, the New York State Police patrolling the Canadian border, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s anti-migration operations, and even a backpack-mounted unit purchased by the Department of Defense. 

That’s not all. The company behind this wonderful technology to keep us safe is Cognyte, an Israeli surveillance firm spun out of the shadowy remnants of Verint Systems, a company with deep ties to Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the NSA; it exists in the darkest corners of the global surveillance marketplace. Affectionately known as “the Palantir of Israel”, Cognyte is more than just a surveillance software vendor, but it sells tactical SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) solutions; hardware and software packages designed to intercept cellular communications in real-time without the cooperation of telecommunications providers.

While Flock markets its sleek cameras to American homeowner associations under the banner of community safety, Cognyte operates in the murk, selling offensive cyberweapons and mass intercept systems to authoritarian regimes and “democratic governments” alike. Cognyte was recently implicated in a joint investigation by Citizen Lab and Haaretz, which revealed the company sold spyware to the military junta in Myanmar, explicitly knowing it would be used to target pro-democracy activists. After the coup, the junta used this surveillance infrastructure to monitor pro-democracy activists, journalists, and politicians. The military murdered more than 2,700 people and arbitrarily arrested over 17,200, many of whom were identified through digital surveillance This is the moral character of the entity providing the software that helps to keep us safe. 

**Deflock or Die Kneeling: A Field Manual for the Watched **

There is still a great deal more to say about Flock, Palantir, FalcoNet, and the growing family of vendors selling the state a leash for every citizen it claims to serve. We have dissected the Flock-Palantir-Falconet nexus and we have mapped out the architecture of the digital prison, but cataloguing the machine is the easy part. The question that actually matters is far more personal; what does this mean for me?

As the dragnet widens by the week, do you, as an individual, actually stand a chance at preserving anything resembling privacy from a state that was, on paper, supposed to be protecting that right rather than strip-mining it?  Let’s be brutally clear about one thing, the state does not exist to protect your rights; it exists to manage your compliance. Evil prevails when good men do nothing, and right now, doing nothing is a fast track to digital enslavement. The only thing more dangerous than a surveillance state is a surveillance state populated by people who know better and do nothing. 

If you’re serious about clawing back autonomy, start with the layer the state can hurt you through fastest, your money. This begins by self custodying your Bitcoin. Now before you roll your eyes and accuse me of peddling the “Bitcoin fixes everything” gospel, pay attention. Self-custody is not a passive investment strategy but it’s an aggressive, active act of secession. It is you reclaiming the fruits of your labour from the fiat debasement machine.

This isn’t about “number go up” but it’s seizing the means of financial survival from a system that is actively constructing the infrastructure to starve you on command. The CBDCs are coming, the financial social credit system is already here in beta, and Palantir’s AI is scoring your risk profile in real-time while Flock’s cameras confirm whether you’re where the algorithm expects you to be. When you hold your own keys, you ensure that your economic energy can freely move outside the state’s surveillance apparatus. 

A custodial account, a bank balance, a KYC’d exchange wallet, these are not yours in any meaningful sense. They are entries in someone else’s ledger, held at that institution’s pleasure, accessible to whichever agency shows up with the right piece of paper, or increasingly, without one. Self-custody is the one financial act available to an ordinary person that converts “my money, allegedly” into “my money, actually.” 

If the Eye of Sauron decides you are a dissident, and freezes your bank account, it won’t matter. You cannot be unbanked because you would have migrated away from their diabolical financial system ahead of time. You do not want the ghouls in charge to hold the power to starve you into submission. Self-custody is your financial Bill of Rights. Opt out now. 

The Amish understood something that the rest of us have forgotten: geography matters. They didn’t try to reform Babylon. They left and built their own communities with their own infrastructure, their own way of life, and they told the outside world to keep its “progress.” We mocked them for decades, but now they’re looking increasingly like the smartest people in the room. I’m not saying you need to grow a beard and start churning butter (unless that’s your thing). I’m saying that location is a privacy strategy, and some of you are living in the worst possible places. In other words, get the heck out of jurisdictions that are racing to install Flock cameras and where the local politicos are obsessed with eroding your right to privacy. Better yet, form networks of like-minded sovereign individuals, pool your capital, buy land, and build self-sustaining, privacy-respecting “sovereign communities” that reject Big Brother by default. 

This isn’t escapism, but it’s strategic retreat with the intention to rebuild. Yes, this drastically shrinks the map of where you can live, however, a world without privacy is a world where you can be accused of anything, anytime, without due process. It is a world stripped of human dignity. Staying out of misplaced loyalty to a hometown that has already chosen the cage over you is not virtue. It’s suicide.

While I’m not a fan of political solutions, as the political system is largely captured by the same interests building the surveillance infrastructure, show up to your local city council and HOA meetings and aggressively challenge the rollout of the surveillance infrastructure. The Flock rollout has been stopped or slowed in exactly the places where residents actually showed up and made the vote politically expensive. Support DeFlock and groups like it, doing the unsexy but essential work of mapping every camera in real time and dragging this infrastructure out of the shadows and into public awareness, where it has to justify itself instead of expanding quietly. The surveillance state depends on apathy. It depends on you being too busy, too tired, too distracted to show up and ask questions. 

The legal system can be weaponized to buy time and stall the deployment of these nodes. Make no mistake about it, this is a delaying tactic, not an impenetrable shield. The moment a false flag event or manufactured crisis occurs, the state will trigger the Patriot Act or similar emergency powers, and national security will instantly override civil liberties. We saw this theater after 9/11, and we saw it again during the plandemic. Use the courts to stall, but do not mistake the stall for victory.

Finally, my favorite strategy, vote with your wallet and starve the beast. Stop financing your own subjugation. You cannot keep handing your hard-earned money to corporations and institutions that are in bed with the entities building this digital prison. It requires an investment of time to audit your supply chains (as these relationships are rarely advertised) and identify which businesses are complicit with the surveillance state. Financially boycotting the architects and cheerleaders of your enslavement is one of the most effective, peaceful ways to apply breaking pressure. An economic boycott, executed with enough people and enough discipline, moves faster than litigation ever will, because a company facing a lawsuit can wait you out for years but a company watching its revenue evaporate cannot. 

This list is not exhaustive, but it is the baseline of what can be done today. It is entirely pointless to whine about the surveillance state if you are not actively dismantling it. Without immediate, aggressive pushback, this machine will lock down humanity. If it fully consolidates, the problem will be exponentially harder and perhaps lethally harder to solve. The time to reclaim our privacy, secede from their systems, and deflock our world is right now. Stand up, opt out, or get in line for the slaughter.