Flock ran searches for “coexist bumper sticker,” “white truck with a trump sticker,” and “Star of David,”
Page A4From§Eachthe matinee edition — 17 September 2026
Flock's fake police department searched 'Star of David' and 'Trump sticker'; its patent shows face recognition it denied.
As it ran on the front
Two weeks ago in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to stop paying for Flock's roadside cameras, and Dallas police said they'd shut down more than three hundred of them — 321, by their count, by September 15th — citing Fourth Amendment concerns. In Washington, Rep. Thomas Massie introduced the Flock-Off Act, which would block federal money from buying, installing, or upgrading exactly this kind of camera. A day later, Sen. Josh Hawley said his subcommittee was widening its look at Flock to three more surveillance companies, on the theory that Flock does not stand alone. By the fourteenth, President Trump was asked about it on Air Force One, and he said, simply, "I like them."
That was the debate as everyone understood it: a network of roadside cameras that reads license plates, and a fight over who pays for it and whether it should exist. A Republican governor pulling funding, a Republican congressman writing a bill, a Republican senator widening a probe, a Republican president defending the cameras — four people in the same party, four different readings of the same machine.…
…(cont) Then, on the seventeenth, two documents landed, and it turned out the machine had never been fully described to any of them.
The first is a log. Flock ran an internal account called Flock City PD — a police department that does not exist — through real camera feeds, searching for things like "white truck with a Trump sticker," "coexist bumper sticker," and "Star of David." All together now: those are not license plates. A plate reader does not have an opinion about your bumper sticker, or your religion. Something in that network can look at a car and understand what's stuck to it.
The second document is Flock's own patent. It describes "face recognition data points." Not plate. Face.
All together now: the company that spent two weeks being defended by a president and defunded by a governor of his own party, on the shared understanding that it reads plates, holds a patent for reading faces.
Nobody in this fight was arguing in bad faith. They were all arguing about the wrong machine, because the company only showed them the alibi. The plate was the cover story. The patent is the receipt, and it was sitting in a federal filing the whole time, waiting for someone to read it out loud.
“They tell you it's just a plate reader, some machine that scans a strip of metal on your bumper — turns out it's reading if you got a Star of David on your windshield too, and there's a patent, in writing, saying it does faces. That's not a plate reader wearing a badge, that's a face reader wearing a plate reader's badge, and half the Republican Party is fighting about the wrong end of it while the patent office already told you the truth.”
“Look, if law enforcement says the cameras help them, who are we to second-guess the tool — it reads plates, that's it, plates, data points, face recognition data— did I say that? That's boilerplate, patents cover every hypothetical use, doesn't mean it's deployed. And the internal test searches, "Star of David," whatever that was — that's Flock demonstrating what cops shouldn't search, that's practically a compliance program. We're extremely transparent here. Ask Flock City PD.”
The receipts
“face recognition data points”
· Dallas police shutting down hundreds of Flock cameras after funding pause from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Trump weighs in on Flock debate: 'I like them' from the morgue, 14 Sep 2026
· Massie unveils Flock-Off Act aimed at restricting surveillance cameras from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Dallas shuts down hundreds of Flock cameras after Abbott pauses funding from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Hawley expands Flock camera probe to other AI-powered surveillance systems from the morgue, 4 Sep 2026
· Massie unveils 'Flock off' bill aimed at restricting surveillance cameras from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.