Weekly Member Update - April 6, 2026
Photo Credit - Jim Franco, Albany Times Union
We didn’t have much time to bask in the post-No Kings 3 afterglow, because the work always persists, of course, and because the insidious scourge of Flock surveillance systems continues to demand our focus, particularly — but not exclusively — where it concerns the current local Flock Ground Zero in the City of Troy. When we last discussed the Troy Flock situation, the citizens of Troy had just shown up in unprecedented force at the March 19 Finance Committee meeting of the Troy City Council. As you’ll recall, once the City Council had spent a couple of hours flaying Mayor Carmella Mantello, Troy Police officials and Flock representatives and thereby making it abundantly clear that the Mantello administration had no working familiarity with the technology that has been surveilling Trojans for the past five years and that the Mayor and her team didn’t even really understand the mechanics of the contract between Troy and Flock, a steady succession of Trojans took to the stage. One after the other, they made their voices heard; some dialed down on the ubitquitious data sharing that makes Flock into a national surveillance nightmare, some others focused on the technical vulnerabilities of Flock’s data collection system, and still others focused on the basic issues of local governance and why the citizens of Troy had never been consulted before Flock surveillance had been thrust upon them. By the morning of March 20, the People had been heard and the Troy City Council had formally voted to table the Resolution which would have authorized Mantello to enter into a new two-year contract with Flock.
In the aftermath of this demonstration of people power, Mayor Mantello remained defiant, insisting that the 26 Flock cameras would remain in place in the Collar City but acknowledging that Flock’s National Search Feature had only recently been disabled, meaning that data about the movements, patterns and behaviors of innocent Trojans had been shared with law enforcement agencies across the country for more than five years. Mantello also seemed to suggest that the contract had renewed of its own accord — the Council’s failure to authorize renewal and public outcry notwithstanding — and that the issue had therefore been settled. On April 1, the Troy City Council directed the Troy City Auditor to withhold further payments to Flock while the Council considered the path forward. Rather than an accept a reasonable pause on Troy’s relationship with Flock in order to sit down with her legislative partners and negotiate a mutually agreeable solution to the problem, Mayor Mantello went nuclear, invoking her emergency powers under the Troy City charter in order to override the City Council and insure that Flock continued to receive taxpayer funds while it surveils those very same taxpayers. To be clear, Mayor Mantello’s invocation of her emergency powers — which are intended to address “conflagration, riot, storm, earthquake, or other unusual peril to the lives or property of the citizens of Troy” — is a gross and unlawful abuse of her authority, a Trumpian my-way-or-the-highway power grab which disregards the deep convictions of her constituents and the reasonable objections of a duly-elected City Council alike. Naturally, the People of Troy were outraged by this demeaning abuse of power and, in less than 48 hours, they were demonstrating outside of Troy City Hall in a rally organized by DeFlock Troy with the enthusiastic support and solidarity of Troy Indivisible and Indivisible Albany. So Mayor Mantello can bang on the table and declare the conversation closed — notably, Flock is nowhere to be found on this week’s City Council agendas — all that she wants, but she can rest assured that the People of Troy do not consider the issue over by any means. There is far more to come in the debate over the future of Flock surveillance in the City of Troy and we will continue to assist DeFlock Troy as they build public awareness about the Flock menace and lead the fight against Flock in that community. To that end, Indivisible Albany will be presenting another installment of its ongoing public education campaign in Troy on Tuesday, April 14 with a What the Flock forum sponsored by our friends at Troy Indivisible. You don’t need to be a Trojan to attend!
Photo Credit - Jim Franco, Albany Times Union
But, please remember, Flock cameras are not just a Troy issue, because these surveillance systems are in virtually every community within the greater 518. Just this past week, Indivisible Albany took our show on the road to Saratoga Springs, where we joined with our comrades in Indivisible ADK/Saratoga for yet another anti-Flock educational forum. Everywhere we go with this presentation, we see the same thing in the audience; stupefied shock at the scope of the issue, confusion about how and why this has happened under the noses of our elected officials — Republicans and Democrats alike, by the way — and a demand to know what can be done to stop it. Frankly, this issue obliterates party lines because nobody wants to be watched 24/7 by the government or by a data-aggregating company who takes taxpayer money to spy on us all and then sell our data to the highest bidder. And, as the DeFlock Troy movement makes abundantly clear, it is clear that young people are particularly attuned to the issue of the mass surveillance state; they see their future freedoms being given over to AI and anti-democratic corporations like Flock and Palantir and they know, better than most, that the fight for their future starts in the here and now. So, if you are reading this and are curious about Flock in your own Capital Region community, drop us a line. We’d be more than happy to give a presentation in your community and to help you build a local working group to tackle the issue from the ground up. Flock surveillance systems are not going away of their accord, they are only becoming more entrenched and more interconnected, and sometimes they even stick around when the municipality tells them to go; the responsibility to lead the fight against Flock surveillance belongs to you, and that fight starts now.
Indivisible Albany's Tech Lead Matt Brockbank compares a map of local Flock camera installations with a map of local ICE detentions tracked by the Capital Region Sanctuary Coalition. Photo credit to Emma Ralls - Medianews Group.
One final word about Flock before we move on. This issue is a moving target. Flock got the jump on everybody and had wormed itself into law enforcement infrastructure nationwide almost before the People and their electeds had noticed. Flock considers our local law enforcement to be its partners in their mass surveillance project and they have accordingly done an excellent job at providing local police with talking points to persuade the populace that their concerns are overblown or hyperbolic. We’ve repeatedly heard those very same talking points in Troy. But we also knew that when local electeds and police begin to understand that they themselves have been misled about what Flock is doing, they become part of the solution instead of perpetuating the problem. So we think that it is imperative that we keep increasing our own knowledge — legal, technical, political and contractual — about Flock surveillance systems and how communities across the Country have come together to expel them. So, if Flock concerns you, immerse yourself in the topic, learn all you can and bring that knowledge to bear in the fight in your own neighborhood, and in your conversations with friends and family. For instance, one thing we consistently have heard from Troy officials is the assurance that Troy PD “owns” all its data and that these are just license-plate readers that look at the backs of your car; just this week, Troy Chief of Police Dan DeWolf told the oft-repeated whopper that Flock cameras don’t photograph people — we guess that Flocks don’t work on motorcycles or convertibles then, Chief? Thanks to the dedicated work of outfits like DeFlock.me and Have I Been Flocked?, however, we know that these frequently repeated assertions are demonstrably untrue. Flock’s own contracts provide the company with a “non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license” to essentially use aggregated data as Flock sees fit and, as Have I Been Flocked? has recently revealed, it is not altogether clear that local law enforcement — the putative owner of its own data — even has access to the original imagery that the cameras are uploading onto Flock’s AI-powered network, raising serious questions as to the true evidentiary value that these surveillance systems actually provide to local law enforcement. In our view, Flock and its charming CEO Garrett Langley have done a masterful job of selling their products to police and electeds everywhere; it will take the sustained efforts of an educated and integrated popular movement to overcome the mass surveillance scourge that Flock embodies.
There’s a lot going on over the next few weeks to mark in your calendar. In fact, this coming Saturday alone provides a a whole day’s worth of activism opportunities for all types of interests. You could kick of the day in Schenectady with a Home Depot protest, and then join Indivisible Albany and a collective of UAlbany students and other activists at a rally in West Capitol Park to encourage the passage of #NY4All. From there, go join We Get Out the Resistance for a presentation on resisting the Trump Regime, keeping our neighbors safe from ICE and supporting Democrats to win the 2026 mid-terms. And then you can finish the day at a benefit dinner to help underwrite the important work of the Capital Region Sanctuary Coalition. The following day, on April 12, Troy Indivisible is hosting a comprehensive event about the single-payer health reforms embodied in the NY Health Act and, the day after that, join us for our Monthly Member Meeting at the Love Albany Center. For this month’s meeting, we’re doing a Flock-adjacent training session on How to Foil Fascists with FOIL: An Introduction to Public Records Requests. Finally, if you haven’t done so already, mark your calendars for Friday, May 1, where we will celebrate working people everywhere with a May Day Celebration. We’re still working on the precise local details with our friends and comrades, but we’re proud to be a coalition partner with May Day Strong, a national umbrella organization helping to drive a national “No School. No Work. No Shopping.” day of action. You can join May Day Strong on Thursday, April 9 for a national organizing call.
Odds & Ends
We know we have some local lawyers on our distribution list and, if you work in the legal field, you certainly know the Thomson Reuters company and its ubiquitous Westlaw legal research tools. The indispensable 404 Media revealed this past week that Thomson Reuters has been a longtime partner with ICE and recently started integrating its own CLEAR informational database with the work of that true corporate-Satan, Palantir. Good to know where you stand, Thomson Reuters.
In the aftermath of the long-overdue firing of “freckle-chested dragon lady” Pam Bondi this week, one of her potential successors, Deputy AG Todd Blanche, was waxing poetic about why anyone would object to the presence of ICE at polling locations this fall. Well, as the Brennan Center points out, the deployment of federal authorities to polling locations is plainly illegal. To that end, ACLU Arizona has promulgated guidance about the presence of law enforcement at the polls, and we consider it an indispensable resource as we build towards the mid-terms this fall.
We spoke above about our Saturday protest action with UAlbany demanding the passage of #NY4All. On that point, the need to categorically eliminate any cooperation between our local law enforcement and ICE/CBP took on renewed urgency this week with the determination that the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam — a visually impaired Rohingya refugee who died on the frigid streets of Buffalo five days after being released at a closed coffee shop by Border Patrol — has been officially labeled a homicide by the Erie County Medical Examiner. If it was ever justified before, there is no longer colorable argument that local enforcement should be partnering with the murderous and masked goons of the Trump Regime’s “immigration” enforcers.
Finally, a small bit of levity. It came to our attention this week that there is a free online resource called MTV Rewind that allows you to play randomized music videos spanning the entirety of MTV’s half-century existence. For those younger boomers and the Gen Xers in our midst, you can set it to the 1980s and immediately flash back with Martha Quinn and Nina Blackwell to a simpler time of big hair and fluorescent colors where all we had to worry about was mutually assured nuclear annihilation at the hands of the USSR. Ahhh, the good ole’ days….