Weekly Member Update - April 13, 2026
Earthset from the Dark Side of the Moon - NASA
We’re happy to take the opportunity to start this week’s Member Update with that scarcest of commodities over the past 15 months, some good news. Amidst the systematic destruction of our Country by the Trump Regime, NASA’s Artemis II mission managed to capture the world’s attention and remind us all of what our species is capable of when we embrace science and work collectively toward a common goal. There was much to celebrate about Artemis II; our return to the moon for the first time in half a century, the four-person crew comprised of a Canadian and three Americans — including a woman mission specialist and a Black man as pilot — traveling farther away from Earth than any humans before them, the promise of a future permanent and sustainable lunar base and our first view of the Moon’s far side. But what buoyed us more than anything was that this was a good-old NASA mission, not some billionaire vanity project by Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or B-list celebrities experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness. Don’t get us wrong, we’d prefer that our taxes were spent on human rights like health care and housing, but the advancement of humankind through space exploration has its place too, particularly if we finally start to tax the rich and stop wasting billions on ill-fated military escapades and ICE.
Meanwhile, back here on Earth, we continue to keep our focus on another billionaire vanity project, that being the establishment of a vast surveillance state, with Flock surveillance systems at the vanguard. Last week, we got you up-to-date on the situation in Troy and, this coming Tuesday, we’re taking our ongoing What the Flock? public education campaign to the Collar City. We’ll be joined by our friends from Troy Indivisible and DeFlock Troy in what should a particularly interesting session given what has transpired in Troy over the past month-plus. In addition to our usual curriculum informing the public about what Flock surveillance is doing in our communities with the help of local law enforcement, we’re also going to be able to impart what we’ve learned from the Trojan experience about Flock’s contracts with local municipalities and how to beat them. If you can’t join us for our What the Flock Forum on Tuesday, we’ll also be joining with our friends in Troy for De-Flock Troy Social Hours at Helderberg Meadworks on Thursday, April 16 and at Bard and Baker on April 21 to help continue to build community awareness and opposition to the Flock surveillance scourge. And, tonight, at our Monthly Member Meeting, we’ll be doing some Flock-adjacent programming with our presentation on How to Foil Fascists with FOIL: An Introduction to Public Records Requests. We also are in talks with a number of local communities to present our What the Flock forum in those neighborhoods, and we will also be doing a statewide presentation to a collective of New York Indivisible groups in early May.
This past Thursday, the incomparable Bitchin’ Donuts offered its own contribution to the Get the Flock Out movement, including designs by Atypical_Tuesday.
Since January of last year, 50 American communities have cancelled their contracts with Flock surveillance or had their cameras deactivated in the face of public outcry. But Flock is as persistent as it is pervasive, and sometimes Flock will leave their cameras in place even after the People and their elected representatives say get the Flock out. Flock’s willingness to keep their cameras running even after a municipality stops paying for the subscription service says a whole lot about their business model, in our view, and kinda proves our point; Flock surveillance is not about keeping communities safe and is instead best viewed as a data harvesting operation that just so happens to give police an end-around the Fourth Amendment. As has been well documented by the journalist Christophe Haubursin, what matters to Flock more than the thousands it receives from taxpayers is the expansion and maintenance of its integrated surveillance network. In the name of maintaining that precious network, Flock demonizes its opponents and provides local police with copaganda that finds its way into the compliant mouths of politicians like Carmela Mantello. Think we’re being hyperbolic? Well, when Mayor Mantello speaks nonsensically about community efforts to get rid of Flock as “defunding the police,” we know that bullshit comes directly from Flock because Flock CEO Garrett Langley has said the exact same thing in a December 2025 email to police in Virginia. And, as Troy City Council President Sue Steele recently pointed out in a radio interview, there is reason to believe that Mayor Mantello’s illegal recent “emergency declaration” was a strategy fed to her by Flock itself. It’s lawlessness in the name of “public safety” by local electeds, all to keep feeding the beast of Flock’s data collection and surveillance network.
One of Flock’s favorite bits of copaganda that we’ve heard time and again is that local police “own” all the data generated by Flock cameras in their neighborhoods, never mind that section 4.1 of Flock’s own Terms and Conditions explicitly grants Flock a “non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to use and disclose Customer Data.” This bit of Orwellian wordplay is intended to reassure the public and local police alike that their data is safe and is only available to trusted local cops. But we know that’s all nonsense; when data is automatically fed into a nationwide ALPR network, any claim that the data is somehow “locally owned” is illusory at best. One need only look at the audits that Flock explicitly offers to its customers to see just how widely the data is shared. To that end, in the immediate wake of our recent What the Flock forum in Saratoga, the Saratoga Springs City Police commendably released its own recent Flock audit results. And they are a horror show. Over the 30-day audit period, the 14 Flock cameras in Saratoga Springs documented more than 249,000 unique vehicles, 95% of which had no relationship to a law enforcement purpose. Even worse, we can see which data from network partners the Saratoga Police have accessed — Albany PD, the Albany County Sheriff, Guilderland PD, Green Island PD and Troy PD among them — and, worse still, we can see what entities have accessed the Saratoga data. With a hat tip to an analysis of the audit conducted by our friends at De-Flock Troy, you can see that more than 1,000 different entities have accessed Saratoga’s Flock data and, stunningly, only 15 of the entities could be considered part of the greater Capital Region. In fact, 83% of the Saratoga data queries came from out-of-state, from entities as diverse as the Indiana State Police, the County Attorney’s Task Force from Kleburg, Texas, Fairmont State University in West Virginia, the Alabama Department of Corrections and Ponch and Jon at the California Highway Patrol. Disturbingly, the notorious ICE collaborator known as the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has accessed the Saratoga camera data. So, while Saratoga police themselves claim that they do not cooperate with ICE, there are clearly entities that are accessing Saratoga data who gleefully do ICE’s bidding. And it is not just out-of-state ICE collaborators that are accessing Saratoga data, as the proud ICE partners in the Rensselaer County Sheriff’s office have done so as well. Moreover, while Flock makes much of the fact that all searches of its data must relate to a specific law investigation, more than half of the searches conducted of Saratoga’s data between March 8 and April 5 listed no reason at all for the query in question. The Saratoga Springs data audit is tremendously revealing, and quite damning. We have included a request for this kind of audit data in every one of the FOIL requests that we have submitted to local municipalities but, thus far, no responding municipality, including Troy, has had any audit data to share. What this means is that the municipalities in question are not availing themselves of the audits that Flock will willingly provide; either they don’t know that Flock will provide them with that audit, or they are afraid to see what the audit will show. Regardless, the People should be demanding that their cities and towns request Flock audits on a regular basis and then follow Saratoga’s lead and provide those audit results to the general public. If you are going to surveil us every time we leave our houses, the least you can do is tell us who is watching.
Budapest, Hungary, Election Eve
Odds & Ends:
Congratulations to the People of Hungary, who voted dictator Viktor Orbán out of office in decisive fashion over the weekend. Even better, Péter Magyar’s centre-right opposition Tisza party appears to have secured a supermajority in the Hungarian Parliament, setting the stage for stronger Hungarian relations with the European Union and the likelihood that Orbán’s illiberal “reforms” of the past two decades — including reduced judicial independence and restrictions on press freedom — may now be reversed. Best of all, as Timothy Snyder has observed, Orbán’s obliteration is terrible news for Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, the last of whom inexplicably campaigned for Orbán in the closing days of the Hungarian election and proved, once again, that everything that J.D. Vance touches dies. Orbán has been a motivating figure to far-right candidates everywhere, and a reliable launderer of Russian oil money flowing into far-right figures and organizations in Europe and the United States, including the Heritage Foundation. Orbán’s defeat is therefore a triumph for democracy everywhere and a shot across the bow for the far right in this Country. We also believe that Magyar’s message of accountability and prosecution for those that participated in Orbán’s corruption and oppression is a winning narrative that should be adopted by Democrats and other anti-MAGA forces in this Country.
Speaking of Vance, he couldn’t close a peace deal in the Iran War on Saturday night and, as a result, the quagmire and higher gas prices promise to drag on. Trump’s decision to blockade the Strait of Hormuz could even lead to global commodity shortages and worldwide economic contraction. On the plus side, while we’re no fans of AI slop, Vance is sure to get a star turn in the next piece of Lego-inspired Iranian propaganda videos. Wired and the BBC each have reporting on Explosive Media, the group behind the viral videos.
Some industrious souls have launched an incredibly detailed and comprehensive Epstein Exposed public interest database. It’s a one-stop shop for the people, relationships and business entanglements flowing from Jeffrey Epstein’s massive sex trafficking ring.
The design plans for the Orange King’s proposed 250-foot “Triumphal Arch” outside of Arlington National Cematary have been revealed. We doubt it will ever get built but, if it is, it should be fun to tear it down in 2029.