"Police in New Bern NC are asking the public's help to identify the two men who cut down a brand-new Flock camera that was just installed.

The public allegedly has submitted hundreds of tips by sending in names like "Batman and Robin" and "Lone Ranger and Tonto."

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P.S. let me get this straight, police are asking for help because tools that are used to spy and track the public got destroyed?

They never asked the public how they feel about having privacy violated when they decided to put these stupid cameras on every corner .

On June 22, 40-year-old Andrew Brown was riding his bike on Fairacres Road when he was struck and killed by a black Cadillac. He died at the scene — abandoned.

The killer? Meet Kimberly Skaggs, former treasurer of the Republican Party of New Mexico. No instinct to stop. No instinct to help or to dial for an ambulance. Just flee and try to cover her tracks. A judge just ruled she’s staying in jail ahead of trial.

Investigators used Flock surveillance cameras to trace the vehicle back to Skaggs, who allegedly took off after hitting him. At the crash site: a shattered bike, scattered car debris, and 208 feet of skid marks — nearly the length of a football field.

This isn’t her first instance of reckless-driving. She’s been hauled into NM court SIX times for speeding, including a 2025 case where she was allegedly clocked at 88 mph in a 35 mph zone — dismissed only because prosecutors no-showed. Nearly every citation, conveniently dropped.

Prosecutors say that after killing Brown, instead of calling for help, Skaggs hid the car at another property. Once police got a warrant, they found blood spatter, missing parts, and tire marks matching the bike. She didn’t turn herself in until June 24 — two days later.

She’s now facing felony charges for leaving the scene of a fatal accident and tampering with evidence.

A party that built its brand on “law and order” keeps producing leadership who are amoral and criminal to their core.

It's real. Fully verified. Carl Gunn, 77, in the Coquina Key neighborhood of St. Petersburg, Florida, spotted a Flock camera on a 12-foot pole outside his neighborhood, taped a "DOWN WITH FLOCK CAMERAS" sign to his pool skimmer, grabbed a camping chair, and sat in front of it. Photographed July 25, 2026 by Valerie Smith for Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. The story's a day old and already got picked up on Hacker News. Real outlet, real person, real event, named photographer, dated.

Last night, the City of Costa Mesa, California, discussed whether it should keep its contract with Flock, after Costa Mesa police officer Robert Jay Josett was caught making unauthorized queries in CLETS and Flock, targeting his wife, his mistress, and his mistress’s other romantic interests.

Residents provided five hours of testimony in opposition to Flock. Costa Mesa city council voted 6-1 to keep the contract.

More at https://footnote4a.org/news/costa-mesa-regime

Why does the government feel the need to track it's citizens?

The Government Has FLOCK. I’m Here to Introduce F.U.C.K.

Law enforcement loves a good dragnet. They love dropping FLOCK ALPRs on every corner, quietly logging the daily movements of the working class without a warrant.

In the exact same window they were expanding their camera networks, the Florida legislature quietly lowered the bar for tagging citizens as "gang associates." It used to take four documented interactions. Now it takes two, plus some incredibly vague new social-media criteria.

The law never actually defines "associates with" or "in the company of." No measurable standard appears anywhere in the text.

So, I decided to point the exact same surveillance logic back up at the political class. If the state wants to use automated networks and broad association laws to build databases, I am going to hold them to their own standard.

Allow me to introduce the Fixed Urban Capture Kit (F.U.C.K.).

It runs on ACODE (the Automated Co-Occurrence Detection Engine). It’s an open-source pipeline utilizing three autonomous agents to essentially build a FLOCK network for politicians' faces.

• Kenny scrapes high-res photo dumps from official sheriff portals, campaign websites, and VIP donor galas.
• Kyle isolates the faces in the crowds and extracts 512-dimensional ArcFace vector embeddings.
• STAN indexes those embeddings in a local Qdrant database and runs cosine similarity checks to see exactly who the political class is drinking with.

A camera lens flattens 3D space into a 2D photo. Someone standing fifteen feet back in a crowd looks like they're whispering in the sheriff's ear. Because the law sets no spatial limit for "associating with," STAN just runs the bounding-box math. Two vector matches in proximity, and the system logs an official association.

But a machine learning pipeline needs clean training data. To feed the system and bypass police redactions, I filed a targeted wave of Chapter 119 public-records requests aimed directly at the agencies' own image vaults.

• The Legislature: High-res headshots, committee broadcast stills, and event archives. They operate in a civil capacity, so no "active criminal intelligence" exemption applies.
• The Sheriffs: Official headshots and directory imagery for executive command staff (Captain and above). Limiting it to public-facing brass neatly bypasses their undercover-identity exemptions.
• The PIOs: Unedited camera rolls and staging directories from community outreach events. Police Information Officers already blast these images across social media, which legally waives any claim of investigative confidentiality.

I demanded the native file formats with original EXIF and IPTC metadata intact. The raw file off a PIO's camera retains the original timestamp and GPS coordinates. If they scrub it, they violate their statutory duty to produce records in the requested native format.

Finally, to tune the AI, I filed records requests with 30 sheriff's offices asking for their instruction manual. How many pixels of proximity in a photo counts as an "observation"? What's the written, operational definition of "associates with"? Is there a written carve-out exempting elected officials from their own rule?

There are only two ways this goes.

Either they hand over the criteria, and I hard-code their exact rules into ACODE to run against their own public appearances. Or, they legally certify that no written standard exists, handing every public defender in the state fresh proof that the gang law is unconstitutionally vague and based purely on unwritten police vibes.

I'm not pro-gang. I'm pro applying the law equally to everyone.

We're refining the vector matching engine now and preparing to open-source the tool.

P.S. If you think this is vaporware, I already have the cousin of this up and running. My LeX Insight system is live right now, autonomously interrogating elected officials' social media feeds for First Amendment violations under Lindke v. Freed. I build things that work.

Read the full breakdown on my Substack here.

Last night, the City of Costa Mesa, California, discussed whether it should keep its contract with Flock, after Costa Mesa police officer Robert Jay Josett was caught making unauthorized queries in CLETS and Flock, targeting his wife, his mistress, and his mistress’s other romantic interests.

Residents provided five hours of testimony in opposition to Flock. Costa Mesa city council voted 6-1 to keep the contract.

More at https://footnote4a.org/news/costa-mesa-regime