Most people think the surveillance state started after 9/11. It started in 1956. In this episode of America Hijacked, I pull the original FBI memos, the Senate transcripts, the patent filings, and the court records law enforcement tried to hide, and I show you how the same machine that watched Martin Luther King is now sitting on a pole fifty feet from your driveway. We have the patent that says one thing and the website that says the opposite. We have the Texas court records. We have the 60 cameras broadcasting live to the open internet with no password. This is a 70-year paper trail. And by the end of it, you will not see your street the same way again.
(Man In America/YT)
The pitch was simple. Solar-powered cameras. License plate readers. Help police catch car thieves.
Who’s gonna say no to that?
Nobody. And that’s exactly how these systems always enter. They don’t show up looking threatening. They show up looking convenient. Something any reasonable person would agree to without thinking twice.
And then it scaled. They got picked up by one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful startup programs in 2017. The kind that turns small ideas into billion-dollar companies. Airbnb went through it. Dropbox went through it. And so did Flock. They achieved unicorn business status by 2021. A $7.5 billion valuation by 2025. Over $950 million raised. Their cameras are now installed in more than 5,000 neighborhoods, towns, and cities across the country. And nearly 4,800 police departments have access to the footage. About 80,000 cameras across 49 states.
And the Flock investor list matters. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is in there. Thiel also co-founded Palantir, whose very first customer was the CIA. Initialized Capital is in there too, founded by a former Palantir employee.
Now I want to be careful here. Flock and Palantir are not the same company. But they sit inside the same surveillance ecosystem. The same worldview. The same machine.
And here’s the pattern I want to show you.
COINTELPRO watched your associations. The NSA watched your communications. Flock watches your physical movements. Where you go. When you leave. When you come home. Who else was on that road at the same time.
Every generation, the surveillance gets physically closer to you. And every single generation, the pitch is the same promise. One word: Safety. (…)
This is all the same machine.
The machine that watched Martin Luther King. The machine that collected your grandparents’ telegrams. The machine that vacuumed up your entire digital life. The machine now listening through the smart speaker sitting on your kitchen counter. The machine reading your search history before you even finish typing. The machine in your pocket that knows where you slept last night, who you called, and how long the conversation lasted. The machine in your car tracking every route you have ever driven. The machine watching your kids walk into school every morning. And now the machine on your street corner and the machine on your front porch, connected to each other, connected to law enforcement, connected to federal agencies… all of it feeding one pipeline.
Ring. Flock. Alexa. Your phone. Your car. Your doorbell. Your kid’s school.
One ecosystem. And most people have no idea.
But they can be stopped. We already know that, because it already happened. The public said no to the Ring and Flock partnership. They said it loud enough that the companies had no choice but to walk it back. That is not a small thing. That is proof that the machine has a weak point, and that weak point is us, paying attention and refusing to go along
Frank Church warned about this nearly fifty years ago. He said there would be no place to hide. He warned about the abyss from which there is no return.
And here’s why that should give you actual hope.
Because he also proved this system can be exposed. Challenged. Forced back and made to help, not harm us. We know it can be done because it has been done.
(Read the full article on Man In America)
