Posted on 08/19/2026 3:33:51 PM PDT by CFW
Big brother is watching your open house.
Homeowners associations across the country are quietly signing up for Flock Safety’s license plate cameras, and the backlash is now strong enough to blow up home sales, kill signed contracts and land cities in court, with New York at the center of the fight.
Nowhere is the backlash more raw than in the Adirondacks, where the fight has already toppled a signed contract and sparked open revolt inside a gated community.
In Saranac Lake, a resident living behind a gate who protested the cameras in his own neighborhood said the issue isn’t security itself. It’s who gets to look.
“The problem I have is not with security cameras. It’s with the Flock system directly. Anyone and their mother can have easy access to this database. The way the data is readily being shared. It is completely unconstitutional,” he told The Post.
That anger boiled over at a packed Saranac Lake village board meeting earlier in the year after officials quietly signed a contract for a dozen license plate readers and security cameras using a state grant.
Residents said they’d learned about the rollout only after cameras started going up on telephone poles around town.
“These cameras are not going to keep us safe,” resident Sandra Kalinowski told the board, drawing applause from the crowd.
Another resident, David Lynch, pushed the board to reverse course entirely.
“First I believe these cameras are currently in violation of Saranac Lake Police Department policy. Secondly, I believe the public has been misled about Flock’s access to our data. My ask of you tonight is to take these cameras down. The village is conducting surveillance in violation of its own policy,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“HOAs typically own their own footage, but once a board opts into data sharing, the same records can become visible to thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide, not just the local department that installed the cameras. Retention windows vary by contract, often 30 days or more, and critics say oversight of who actually searches that data is thin to nonexistent.
That lack of oversight is exactly what set off residents in Saranac Lake, where critics argued access to the system stretched well beyond police.
Placement has become its own flashpoint. Flock markets the cameras as a license plate tool for roads and entrances, but residents have pointed out the cameras keep turning up somewhere else entirely, aimed at swimming pools, parks and courts where no car could ever pass. If the only job is reading plates on moving vehicles, that raises an obvious question about why a lens would be pointed at a pool deck instead of a driveway.”
That is one of the reasons why I think Flock is “Fed Adjacent” (sort of like certain NGOs and shell companies that are really arms of certain unnamed agencies). Note in the article the residents were not apprised of what was being done. That says a lot.
Get a few buddies with #4 buckshot in 12 ga’s with ex president masks. Then say “eat this”. Disable the camera and advance to the next one.
The “privacy” settings on our cell phones are also Fed adjacent.
Flock Apologist Response: “If you don’t want your License Plate being recorded and entered into a national database pretty much accessible to anyone, I suggest you don’t drove.”
“The “privacy” settings on our cell phones are also Fed adjacent.”
Which phone companies voluntarily allow the feds to have UNFETTERED ACCESS to your our phones?
Full article:
“I’m just doing this until you learn to do it for yourselves.”
And that’s fine with me. Anyone who thinks you are entitled to privacy in public is mistaken. As long as you are in plain sight you can be observed and recorded (voice and image) without limitation.
There has never been any objection to being observed by a police officer. Imagine there’s a cop on every street corner and he writes down what he sees. When necessary, his notes are consulted to solve crimes. This has always been true and Flock cameras and the rest are simply modern-day equivalents.
Besides, the people bitching about Flock have no idea how many other cameras are out there and have been for a long time.
East Germany used to do that. Then when the Berlin Wall came down, a lot of burning took place in order to avoid retribution from the populace.
Wrong.
United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012)
Police attached a GPS tracking device to a vehicle and monitored its movements continuously for 28 days. The Court unanimously held this was a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.
The majority opinion (Scalia) focused on the physical trespass of attaching the device to the vehicle (an “effect”).
Concurrences (especially Alito, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan; and Sotomayor) emphasized that long-term continuous monitoring of public movements invades a reasonable expectation of privacy in the “whole of one’s movements,” something that would have been practically impossible with traditional visual surveillance.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259
https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/united-states-v-jones/
Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018)
The government obtained historical cell-site location information (CSLI) records showing a person’s approximate location over 127 days (averaging more than 100 location points per day).
In a 5–4 decision, the Court held that accessing this data for an extended period is a Fourth Amendment search that generally requires a warrant supported by probable cause.
The Court recognized a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of one’s physical movements. Continuous tracking via cellphone location data can reveal intimate details of a person’s life in a way short-term public observation cannot. It declined to apply the third-party doctrine rigidly to this type of data.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402
https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/carpenter-v-united-states-2/
“after officials quietly signed a contract for a dozen license plate readers and security cameras using a state grant.”
They were “free”.
I’ve noticed recently that often when a criminal is caught the media makes sure to mention the help of Flock cameras. I think it is part of FLOCK’s PR campaign.
Exactly. You may not have an expectation of privacy, but a police officer can’t park outside your driveway and then follow you around all day tracking your movements. Doing so is a search and requires a warrant.
There is a difference between being in public with no expectation of privacy and Flock cameras allowing for police to track your entire day to see if you committed a crime.
I have lost count of the times people have told me to never, never, never buy a home which is involved in an HOA.
FTFY
Or track their exes, political opponents, and the new hottie they saw at the bar.
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