(Just The News)—Strengthening privacy, accountability and security. That’s the new focus license-plate-reading camera giant Flock said it plans after facing widespread criticism across the U.S.
The company has faced mounting scrutiny for blanketing public rights-of-way – and even private property – with advanced automatic license plate reading cameras, or ALPRs, and for how local law enforcement has used and, in some cases, abused that data.
There’s also growing alarm over the security of Flock’s massive license-plate database itself. On Wednesday’s The States, West Virginia State Delegate Tristan Leavitt voiced those exact concerns about the risk of a breach. He said a Flock representative spoke to the legislature and took questions about stories of the network being hacked.
“He was asked by my colleague, a delegate from an area that has just adopted Flock cameras in their municipality, about videos on YouTube purporting to contain hacked video. And he said, ‘no, that is absolutely false, that we have not ever been hacked,’” Tristan recalled. “There are obviously concerns about these cameras from really across the political spectrum. And so as lawmakers trying to decide what level of involvement the state legislature should have, it’s very difficult if you are not getting straight information directly from Flock themselves.”
Several attempts by The Center Square to set up an interview with someone from Flock were met with no response.
Through a public-relations firm, Flock announced Thursday it is taking concrete steps to answer the rising chorus of criticism over mass surveillance and the potential for abuse.
“Last month alone, we helped detect over a thousand missing people, you know, over 20,000 stolen cars,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a produced video. “We’ve realized our responsibility and our opportunity to set a new standard for safety and privacy has grown with it. And so for us, this is an evolution.”
One change: retention. Previously, Flock recommended keeping license-plate data for 30 days. That window is now being cut to seven days.
For the cases that legitimately need more time, the company is introducing “evidence mode.” Detectives can lock specific ALPR hits in as evidence in an active investigation – consistent with existing laws and policies.
But Langley stressed that Flock has always believed in local control.
“Cities should have a choice,” Langley said. “But what I’ve also realized is that cities rely on us as the expert for what we think is best. As we looked at the data, what we saw is about 90% of investigative searches happened within seven days. So will it solve less crime? It will.”
Cities will now be able to decide exactly which categories of offenses other agencies can search against their cameras, the company said. For example, City A could permit City B to query its network only for stolen vehicles, missing persons, or violent crime – while blocking any searches tied to immigration enforcement. Flock said this gives communities tighter control over data sharing without hindering legitimate collaboration.
Accountability is getting an upgrade too. Langley said the company is strengthening its audit assistance program to produce better, more usable audit logs.
“We are finding bad cops and holding them accountable,” Langley said. “And about a third of our customers actually adopted it over the last four months. We think now is the right time to say, ‘look, this should be required.’ And I would challenge, you know, state regulators to make this a law for all police technology to have this level of accountability so we can curb police abuse.”
Every law enforcement customer will be required to adopt the improved audit tools by the end of this year, the news release said. On top of that, Flock is adding proactive lockouts: when a user’s activity trips defined thresholds for abnormal behavior, the system will automatically suspend access until an administrator reviews it. The company said the goal is to stop misuse before it becomes habitual or widespread.
“These changes, like I said, are the next chapter of a long book I hope to write on how we build a better version of America that’s both safer, protects our privacy, and holds those who have power accountable,” Langley said.
On the security front, Flock said it is committed to running the strongest program in the industry. This year it brought in independent security firm Bishop Fox for a full review of its products and capabilities. A summary of the findings and the company’s remediations is expected to be published next month.
Whether these moves will quiet the criticism over Flock’s nationwide network is unclear.
“There are others like Motorola and other providers,” Leavitt said. “But in terms of dealing with the technology overall, we want to make sure that people are safe and protected. We want to make sure their civil liberties are protected.”
Leavitt said state legislators should also ensure they get accurate information from the companies and provide accountability.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
