I spent 7 days evading America’s 82 MILLION surveillance cameras
The rise of the Flock camera system in American cities has set off alarmbells for citizens nationwide, but what many don't know, is that there's a much larger surveillance system at play.
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.
The youtube video above 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.


Hey Chris, I actually created this system IRL. It doesn't involve carrying large displays.
the flock camera production is excellent and informative - very serious stuff with touches of humor and irony. much appreciated. thank you.