I spent 7 days evading America’s 82 MILLION surveillance cameras

Video Description

There are currently over 82 million surveillance cameras in the United States. Add in 100,000 Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPR), millions of Ring doorbells, and municipal CCTV networks, and it is mathematically impossible to leave your house without being logged into a database. So in order to learn about them, I spent 7 days trying to avoid them. This required abandoning my car, walking through Minneapolis with a bedsheet over my head, and eventually strapping a live-streaming flat-screen TV to my back to become completely invisible to facial recognition software. It worked on the cameras. But it did not make me invisible to my neighbors. This video explores the rapid, unchecked expansion of America's mass surveillance grid. We look into how Flock cameras actually operate, how local police departments justify ALPR data collection, the reality of false arrests from AI tracking, and how these local neighborhood databases are quietly being utilized by federal agencies like ICE. I also address the aftermath of my last video, where I used a drone to map North Oaks, Minnesota... the only city in America to scrub itself from Google Maps. I had to make a decision about the future of those images, which I explain at the end of this video. Explore the flock camera map here: deflock.me A massive thank you to the people who helped make this project happen: Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404media... You can read his incredibly important tech and surveillance reporting at 404media.co Chief John Sherwin of the Faribault Police Department, who was literally the only law enforcement officer out of 100 departments to respond to my emails. Chris Melore at the Daily Mail, for interviewing me about the North Oaks mapping incident and inadvertently giving me a crisis of conscience. You can read his article here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15509447/exposed-US-city-erased-Google-Maps-Minnesota.html Graham Peterson, for filming me filming him. You read that right. Here's his instagram, it's mostly pics of him and his girlfriend: instagram.com/grahampeterson_/ Robert Pirogovsky, for providing the original music. You can find his work at https://robertpirogovsky.com/