Transcript · Brandon Porter

Source

• Video: City Council meeting (starts ~t=9960)
• Minutes: MIN-07062026 (name-only: “spoke regarding Flock cameras”)
• Method: Cleaned resident transcription; hesitations shortened.
• Council response: None on substance; chair closed visitor section and moved on.

Position (from speech): Absolute opposition to Flock/surveillance. Not a transparency compromise or add-on limits.

National misuse anecdotes and patent excerpts in the speech are comparative context. Not City of Blue Springs evaluation evidence. Eval categories: 211-2026.

Transcript

Thank you. Good evening. My name is Brandon Porter. I'm a Blue Springs resident, voter, and a father of two. I'm here tonight to speak out against the Flock surveillance systems.

I know that other members of this community have come forward to speak on this issue, but most of them have taken a position of compromise, either asking for a little bit more transparency or adding some sort of limitations. And I understand where they're coming from. They're trying to meet in a middle ground, but I'm here to speak out absolutely against these cameras.

Flock has a proven track record of not disclosing violations or taking accountability with their flawed systems and misuses. All of the incidents that have come out from across the country have come either from criminal investigations, subpoenas, FOIA requests, or citizens having to look at their own data.

The incident that happened in Dunwoody, Georgia, where Flock employees were watching and recording young girls in pool and gymnastics classes only came to light out of a FOIA request by a citizen. These have been repeatedly revealed: retained private data they weren't supposed to have access to, or kept data longer than city contracts allowed.

Like other big tech companies, they care little about violating the law. They care as long as they can make a profit. An expensive legal battle or a fine is just the cost of doing business for them.

Just today, another news story came out of a woman being stalked using a mass surveillance system. In Florida, a police officer who worked as event security met a woman who was working as an actress on a show. After meeting her, catcalling her, harassing her for her full name, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on the Florida DMV database. He then put her license plate on a surveillance system hot list. Court records associated with this case show how he met, harassed, and stalked the woman, who was not suspected of committing any crime, had nothing to do with him, and had no idea she was being tracked using a series of police surveillance software, hardware, and government databases.

When these incidents happen, they leave our city open to liability. If someone sues the city, we know that Flock is not going to cover the bill. And so we, the taxpayers, will have to pay for that on top of the obscene $4.6 million that we're paying for this contract.

This company tracks and sells our info, including of our children. You can look at just their patent to show that these are not just license plate readers. They are for tracking everything about us. From the US patent that was issued to Flock Group, Incorporated—just an excerpt from it shows: the object class identified is that of a human being; then the object detection module may further analyze the image using a neural network module configured to identify different classes of people—

[Chair: time] — Thank you for your comments tonight.

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