'I Would Never Do This To You:' Protesting Flock, Arizona Man Presents Plan to Surveil Government Officials
404 Media Samantha Cole
An Arizona man pitched a fake company to spy on city officials with satellites, just to prove a point about Flock cameras. He flipped the surveillance script on the council that approved tracking its own citizens.
Based on reporting by 404 Media, Samantha Cole — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Jacob Petrosky walked into a Casa Grande City Council meeting on July 20 and pitched something that sounded, for a few uncomfortable minutes, entirely real: a company called Shepherd Safety that would use satellites and AI to track government officials, their spouses, their kids, even their cars, all in the name of "safety." He described combining Bluetooth signals, advertising IDs, and commercial data to let "authorized users" replay the daily movements of every official and their family. Then he dropped the punchline. It was satire. "I would never do this to you," he told the stunned council. "Could I? Probably. But I wouldn't because it's wrong. Just like what you guys are doing to us is wrong."
The stunt didn't come out of nowhere. Casa Grande signed a 10-year, $10 million contract with Flock last year, and Petrosky says roughly 200 cameras went up almost overnight, so fast it unsettled him. He couldn't leave his own neighborhood on a paved road without passing one. That's when he registered to vote for the first time and started showing up to council meetings, pushing officials to at least require a warrant before anyone can access the footage.
He's since built a website, DeFlockCG, and a petition calling for limits on third-party access, accountability for misuse, and, for some signers, outright removal of the cameras. Almost 900 people have signed on. According to local outlet Pinal Central, about 140 of the planned 200 cameras were installed by late June, split between license plate readers and pan-tilt-zoom units. The city frames the program as crime prevention and transparency, but its own transparency portal links straight to Flock's website, and in May the council voted, again unanimously, to give police access to cameras at elementary schools.
Petrosky isn't alone in worrying about where this data goes. A recent 404 Media investigation found police departments nationwide have used Flock's network to search for people based on vague physical descriptions, sometimes referencing race or political signage, hundreds of times. Some cities have already walked away from Flock contracts entirely over exactly these concerns. Petrosky says he's not chasing viral fame, and admits he felt embarrassed watching the clip spread. He just wants the council to feel, even briefly, what it's like to be tracked without consent, and then to do something about it. "I just want this to go away," he said. "I want these things to at least just be put behind a warrant."
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Turning the cameras back on the people who approved them is a cheap trick, and that's exactly why it works. Officials who wave off resident privacy concerns as paranoia suddenly get very uncomfortable when the tracking has their name on it. If a warrant requirement is too much friction for police investigating crimes, it's definitely too much friction for random businesses monitoring council members' kids, and any city defending that double standard deserves the mockery it gets.
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