[john_strinlai]

>“The city of Dunwoody is one city in our demo partner program,” a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “The cities involved in this program have authorized select Flock employees to demonstrate new products and features as we develop them in partnership with the city.

the two things i still dont understand are:

1) why is there not a dedicated demo environment for demos, like practically every other software? i cant think of any reason why they need live data for a demonstration. (this might be addressed in the article, but the paragraph where it looks like it might be mentioned is also where the article is cut off)

2) is the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MCJCCA) city-owned? if not, the city should not be able to give permission to use the cameras. if so, was the MJCCA notified that the cameras would be used for demo purposes? were the parents notified?

[chneu]

Answer to 1 is simple and obvious based on Flocks previous actions: they have no idea what they are doing and are reacting instead of planning.

[roysting]

They all should be prosecuted and jailed for life for the egregious harm and, if citizens, their blatant treason of the nation and the constitution.

I don’t think people are aware just how bad things are with these tyrannical and dystopian Flock cameras and the tyrannical illegitimate, treasonous government officials that install them.

They are tracking your egress and arrival in your neighborhood, your patterns of life, your coming and going, your personal movements. They’re tracking your travel on the interstate. They’re tracking your travel on rural roads and everything in between. They’re tracking every single bottleneck, choke point, and intersection.

Even the Deflock.me type sites miss a critical point; that it’s not the cameras themselves at specific points, it’s that the cameras are placed specifically to catch every single path anywhere. A better defrock.me type map would show all the paths, i.e., roads, that are fully tracked.

This is tyranny in modern form… a tiny little box with a solar panel that provides tyranny and totalitarian control no tyrant or dictator or megalomaniac psychopath all throughout history could have ever even dreamt of. This is not American. It is tyranny. It is the final nail in the coffin of this is not ended immediately.

Unfortunately, I believe the psychopathic, narcissistic ruling class will pull out all the stops to rationalize why this clear tyrannical and treasonous violation of the constitution is really Constitutional, in spite of your lying eyes and the fact that every single founder of America would be irate that we haven’t disposed of all these tyrants by now.

And no, mods, that’s not flame baiting. It’s just reality, objective reality. Regardless of whether proper want to rationalize and elude themselves into how it’s really not all that bad that the tyrants that rape and murder children by the dozens have a totalitarian surveillance stranglehold around everyone else’s neck.

[PunchyHamster]

or they have exact idea what they are doing and don't give a shit

[roenxi]

Cluelessness seems more likely. They'd have to be pretty stupid to use a live video for a demo in this way - there is almost literally no benefit compared to something more carefully curated, pre-recorded and staged. The money saved would not justify the risk of something weird happening on camera and disrupting the sale. Or, case in point, the current headline.

If they want a creepy vibe approach or to appeal to the powerful paedophile market or whatever they're trying to do here then it is a lot easier to just hire some actors.

[BoorishBears]

I implore you to read the original source.

https://jasonhunyar.substack.com/p/why-are-flock-employees-w...

404 media is massively underplaying what happened.

> [Bob Carter - Flock VP of Strategic Relations and BD] also has some interesting searches. On September 30th, 2025 - Bob looked at just one camera. This camera is in the gymnastics room of the JCC.

> [Randy Gluck - Flock Growth/Strategy] clicked through 3 private cameras at the JCC before he settled on JCC camera ‘Main Pool Right’. It was over 3 hours later before his next view on traffic cameras.

> [James Harding] The 1/7 session is the more notable one. He manually clicked through every JCC baseball field camera one per second, then paused 16 seconds before hitting Fitness, then Front Pool(1), Front Pool(2), Front Pool(3) — with 4-7 second pauses between each pool camera. Then after browsing other cameras, came back to Holding Cell 1 and 2, then Brook Run Playground 4 times over 33 seconds, then went back to Fitness again 12 minutes later. [...] his saved dashboard includes both holding cells and all three pool cameras, which is an unusual set of cameras to keep on a monitoring dashboard.

> [Yoruel Sanguillen] was manually clicking through JCC cameras one per second — baseball fields, cafe, camp cameras, clock tower — then hit Fitline Desk and paused 58 seconds. Moved to Front Pool(1) and paused 47 seconds. Then FitLine Weight, Fitness, paused 72 seconds, then Fitness North Exit and rapidly through all three Front Pool cameras in 3 seconds before moving to Guard House.

> [Kayce Lowe] came back on 2/14 - her first views were Gymnastics M/H front view left, Fitness, Gymnastics, Fitline Hall, FitLine Weight. She picked up exactly where she left off.

Note these people are targeting a community center across multiple months.

[BoorishBears]

dang or moderators, can this be resubmitted with the excerpts here?

Even if there's an unseen side to this story that somehow contextualizes this in a less nefarious light, it deserves more attention than it got on first posting.

Reading the original after 404 media's characterization was shocking: it's simply not telling the same story.

[ykonstant]

Jesus Christ.

[motbus3]

It is unfortunate to all of us, but I think you are right. And the more they go with the conversation they are the victims the worse it will get.

[heironimus]

I’ve seen dozens of these types of demos and it’s always live footage from a semi public place like this.

It’s much easier to just show live footage rather than rig up canned looping footage.

It’s pretty astonishing how no one watching the demo with me seems to care. No one asking “Hey, will you just be able to do this with our video if we buy from you?”

[TZubiri]

It's just not very concerning. The buyer presumably cares about safety and their risk model are guns. Having a vendor show a couple of seconds of live footage to a potential buyer probably doesn't rank high in their threat model.

[chamomeal]

I would think they would have a real set of cameras for demos, but like in their own office or something. Not pointed at unwitting children. So dystopian

[dimitri-vs]

Woah hold on there, having cameras in their office could be a huge violation of privacy!

[mulmen]

Does this mean there is no testing environment?

[xp84]

Generally on multi-tenant SaaS kind of systems you do have testing environments, but they're filled with garbage data, plus they are usually running pre-release versions that aren't yet ready for the light of day. It's where QA and CI/CD operates. Sales demos are generally done on a production environment, but on dedicated tenants that are set up with "nice looking" well-organized data (e.g. company is named Contoso, users have names like "Jason Anderson" and "Maria Ramirez"). Testing environments have users with names like "1111111" and "`<script>alert(window.domain);`"

I think it's probably a just laziness here, which makes some sense - it would be easy to set up 5 Flock cameras on the sales demo tenant sitting in a storage room at HQ, but it would make for incredibly uncompelling demo. Rather than set up a pipeline to run stock footage in as a camera feed, they got lazy and used real tenants.

[jcgrillo]

There's an obvious answer... just set up the camera in the conference room where you're running the demo.

[mulmen]

Sounds like the testing stage is sticky? It could exist without the tooling to reset it to a known baseline and/or create multiple environments which would enable safe demos.

[0xbadcafebee]

The camera's main selling point is instilling fear: better not misbehave, because Big Brother is watching. The creepier it is, the easier it is to sell to powerful people looking for invasive control.

[expedition32]

Surveillance cameras have been everywhere since the early 90s and lo and behold crime still exists!

Turns out people are either under the influence or simply amazingly stupid. And obviously there is a capacity problem: NYPD isn't going after every purse snatcher.

[Zhenya]

Dunwoody asked the JCC for camera access in case of live shooter events but then used it for many other reasons.

“ In September 2024, Dunwoody PD Major Patrick Krieg requested access to the private securiy cameras at a community center on behalf of the department. When the community center pushed back and demanded to know what the access would be used for, Krieg was unambiguous: “This is solely for real-time critical incident response.” The community center agreed to share their cameras, including cameras in gymnastics rooms, pools, and fitness studios, with Dunwoody PD for emergencies”

https://substack.com/home/post/p-196010541

[FireBeyond]

This is the nudge nudge wink wink of Flock.

"So here's a data sharing scenario, prospect agency"

"Isn't that illegal in [insert our state]?"

"Well, that's for your agency and your state to determine".

"Will that feature be turned off for our agency if it is is prohibited or illegal in our state?"

"Why would we turn it off? You'll use the system responsibly, right? Why don't we take a quick coffee break and after that, we can go through data sharing in the system."

[exe34]

If it really has to be a live system, they could just set one up in a broom closet at hq?

[throwway120385]

I would put it in the lobby or outside the HQ building.

[seanhunter]

A good live demo would be to set it up pointing to a fishtank. You fire up the demo, you see the fish. No privacy invasion but everyone gets to see how the camera behaves.

[nerdsniper]

Unfortunately, it does need to show that you can identify individual people in large rooms, long hallways, outdoor facilities, and vehicles or plate #'s in parking lots, roads, etc.

But the live demo should be Flock's own offices, not their customers.

[heironimus]

That does not demo well at all.

[pornel]

Yeah, the kids didn't like the broom closet.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

The employees were concerned about the lack of privacy setting it up at the entrance.

[NonHyloMorph]

Hehe

[heavyset_go]

They're appealing to entities that have surveillance and voyeuristic fetishes, showing that you can ubiquitously invade privacy in real-time, even in spaces society considers sensitive, is a feature worth demonstrating if you want to get contracts from psychopaths.