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September 14, 2026- by Steven E Greer
I filed a federal lawsuit against Flock Group and my local city to end the use of warrantless surveillance, and am learning more about the bigger picture that led to this current police state. It is truly shocking.
Federal spy agencies can obtain from so-called private companies like Flock, Axon, Amazon’s Ring cameras, Smart TV, Microsoft, and your cell phones, absolutely all of your personal data: where you have traveled, words you have spoken inside of your house, items you have purchased, friends who visited you, etc. The Feds circumvent laws by purchasing all if this from “private companies”, all thanks to the PATRIOT Act of 2001, among other unconstitutional laws passed during the crisis of 9/11.
The deep state system is a now vast network of private company carve-outs and government actors. The unchallenged unconstitutional laws make it legal for local police to share details on traffic stops to the CIA, and vice versa. The local cops have access to everything about you that only the FBI and CIA used to have.
This data gathered by private devices are placed into central hubs, which obliterate local laws and protections. When you talk to a cop with an Axon body camera, speak on the phone to 911, or drive past a Flock camera, it is all placed into a global central hub accessible to any police force in the country and even spy agencies of foreign nations.
Americans used to tolerate the fact that only a certain elite force of spies could do this. We glamorized it with James Bond films. But now, hundreds of thousands of poorly trained police, ICE, etc. are in possession of this powerful information.
This invasion of privacy is no longer an ideological issue. Local cops will visit you at your home for making a Facebook post that exposes them. Your car will be taken away from you based on inaccurate Flock information. People who have never visited a certain state have been extradited and jailed based on erroneous facial recognition surrounding crimes.
We live in a world that George Orwell did not imagine. It is much worse than what Ed Snowden exposed more than a decade ago.
Here is a structured summary of the key legal pillars, historical models, and the corporate outsourcing gimmick outlined in the text:
1. The Core Legal Spine (Post-2001 Statutes)
These five legal framework items altered the intelligence system and set the stage for modern camera networks:
USA PATRIOT Act (2001):
The foundational shift. It knocked down the “wall” separating foreign intelligence from criminal policing, allowing the FBI and spy agencies to share data. It granted easier access to business records and third-party data, establishing the core rule: if a private company holds the record, the government can ask for or buy it instead of getting a warrant.
Homeland Security Act (2002):
Created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and birthed the Fusion Center Network. This infrastructure allows a camera feed in one city to be searched by officers who do not work for that city.
Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (2004):
Created the Director of National Intelligence and the Information Sharing Environment. It established the official policy that local, state, and federal agencies must pool “terrorism and crime” data, making multi-agency camera sharing standard operating procedure.
Protect America Act (2007) & FISA Amendments Act / Section 702 (2008):
Legalized mass warrantless collection of foreign communications that “incidentally” snared Americans. It taught Washington that targeting foreigners could still build a massive, searchable database of U.S. citizens.
Later Add-Ons:
Continuous PATRIOT reauthorizations and the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (2015) permanently cemented a “share first, warrant later (or never)” environment.
2. The Legacy Pipelines & Software Models
The technical and organizational “pipes” that modern vendors plug into include:
DHS Fusion Centers (Started ~2003):
The literal pipeline Flock uses is this. They sit between local police and federal agencies (FBI, ICE, CBP), allowing plate reads, tips, and suspicious activity reports to flow freely nationwide.
Federal License-Plate Operations:
Pervasive existing networks (CBP readers at borders, ICE buying commercial plate databases, and DEA sharing data) that created a federal appetite for tracking “every car that passed this point.”
Palantir & Analytics Software:
Funded early by the CIA’s venture arm (In-Q-Tel), this acting “spreadsheet-on-steroids” layer allows analysts to fuse multiple distinct data streams into one trackable person or vehicle.
DARPA’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) (2002–2003):
A research vision to build a single dashboard over government and commercial records to mine patterns. Congress killed the office after a massive public backlash, and its pieces were moved into classified NSA projects (like Basketball and Topsail). TIA was the blueprint; the later laws became the machine.
3. The Private-Company Outsourcing Gimmick
When the public rejected centralized government tracking via TIA, the state shifted from a building model to a rental model. By exploiting the Third-Party Doctrine—the legal precedent that you lose a reasonable expectation of privacy over data voluntarily exposed in public or given to a third party—the government systematically bypasses the Fourth Amendment through a multi-step private-sector loop:
The Vendor Array (Building the Grid):
Private corporations build the specialized surveillance nodes that the government cannot legally deploy at scale. Flock Safety tracks vehicles on public roads, Axon controls body cameras and cloud evidence vaults (Evidence.com), Clearview AI scrapes biometric faces, and commercial data brokers package device location pings.
The Federal Subsidy (Laundering the Money):
The federal government acts as the venture capitalist for local mass surveillance. Federal agencies like the Department of Justice (DOJ) use massive budgets to issue highly flexible grants directly to state and local law enforcement:
Byrne JAG (Justice Assistance Grants): Explicitly used by local police chiefs to purchase “technology upgrades” like Flock networks, bypassing standard city council budgeting.
COPS Grants (Community Oriented Policing Services): Heavily diverted from putting boots on the ground into funding enterprise “technology and equipment” subscriptions.
BJA (Bureau of Justice Assistance) Programs: Earmarks millions for “Smart Policing Initiatives,” heavily incentivizing local agencies to adopt corporate cloud-based AI tools.
The Network Switch (The Upward Data Loop):
Once local police buy these private enterprise subscriptions, the data is federalized through software infrastructure. Most vendor dashboards feature built-in “sharing switches.” With a single click, local departments pool their live camera feeds and historical data logs with neighboring towns, state police, and DHS Fusion Centers.
The Fusion Pipeline (The Ultimate Recipient):
Because Fusion Centers are physically staffed by a joint mix of local analysts and federal agents (FBI, ICE, CBP, DHS), the locally captured data flows straight back up to the federal intelligence apparatus. The federal government avoids seizing your data; they simply query a network that a local municipality bought for them using federal allowance money.
The Liability Shield (Insulating the Deep State):
This architecture creates a closed loop that completely insulates federal agencies from constitutional accountability:
No Warrants Required:
Federal agents do not need to show probable cause to a judge to track a target; they seamlessly pull the data from cooperative local Fusion Center databases.
Legal Deflection:
If a civil liberties group sues the federal government for warrantless tracking, DOJ lawyers can accurately state in court: “The federal government does not own, operate, or maintain this surveillance infrastructure.”
Subverting Democracy:
If a progressive city council passes a law banning the use of local tax dollars for facial recognition or automated license plate readers, the police department simply bypasses local oversight by securing an independent federal grant to fund the vendor contract.
