(Zero Hedge)—On Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced he’ll soon sponsor “a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments” that deploy Flock-style cameras to surveil law-abiding citizens. He attached a Gadsden flag parody: a coiled rattlesnake wrapped around an automated license plate reader on a pole, over the words “don’t flock me.”
Rather than regulating or litigating the cameras, Massie’s bill would cut off federal funding to every city and police department that installs them. Flock’s business model runs on local government contracts across roughly 6,000 communities, so a funding-withholding bill aims directly at its customer base.
Third Strike In A Week
Massie’s bill is the third Republican move against Flock in a matter of days.
On July 21, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) filed H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which would bar federal agencies from purchasing, funding, or accessing automated license plate readers – Flock is named explicitly – along with biometric tracking tech covering fingerprints, iris, voice, and gait. Any data a federal agency obtained would have to be deleted within 30 days and would be inadmissible in court. Burchett’s pitch: “We gotta ban these dadgum things.”
Earlier this month, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) tried to attach an amendment restricting the readers in committee. It failed, and Perry responded that the fight wasn’t over: “STOP THE FLOCK.”
In April, Massie teamed with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on the Surveillance Accountability Act, which would require a probable-cause warrant before federal or local agencies surveil Americans, ban warrantless facial recognition in public spaces, block the government from buying its way around the Fourth Amendment via third-party data brokers, and make individual federal employees personally suable for violations. Boebert’s framing: the government is building a “digital footprint of your entire life” without a warrant or probable cause.
The Company That Swears It Isn’t Tracking You
Flock Safety is the Atlanta company, founded in 2017, whose cameras photograph every passing vehicle and log not just the plate but the “vehicle fingerprint” – make, model, color, dents, roof racks, bumper stickers – into a searchable national network queried by thousands of law enforcement agencies. The install base has now crossed 100,000 cameras, a rollout ZeroHedge has chronicled as the economics of the surveillance state: one quiet law enforcement contract at a time until the country was blanketed.
Last September we noted the coming collision between the license-plate-reader gold rush and the public. Fast forward to June of this year, security researcher Benn Jordan found dozens of Flock cameras streaming publicly, documented AI features that zoom in on and follow individual people, and showed that plotting the stored data amounts to putting a month-long GPS tracker on a car. Flock’s response has been that the system captures discrete points in time rather than “tracking” anyone, though those points can be plotted on a map to reconstruct movements.
Audit logs reviewed by journalists and officials showed local police running searches on behalf of federal agencies, with reasons entered as “ICE” or “immigration” – roughly 4,000 immigration-related lookups through a system whose vendor publishes a blog titled “Does Flock Share Data With ICE? No.” The ACLU’s assessment of that post: the company knew ICE had indirect access the whole time. A Texas police department used the network to search across state lines – including Washington state – for a woman who had an abortion. A San Francisco class action alleges out-of-state and federal agencies – ICE, CBP, FBI, ATF – queried that one city’s cameras more than 1.6 million times in seven months. A Dayton audit turned up 7,000 immigration searches by outside agencies; an Illinois audit stripped access from 47 agencies; small towns discovered the ATF, the Air Force, and the GSA Inspector General rummaging through their feeds.
The system also misfires. As we noted last week, automotive journalist Joel Feder and his wife were boxed in by Minnesota officers with hands on their weapons and patted down in a parking lot after Flock’s system flagged a press vehicle’s manufacturer plate off a flawed partial match. Flock’s response was that the cameras performed as designed.
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The Exodus – And The Counterattack
Cities are canceling. Estimates run from 30 to more than 50 depending on the count: Santa Cruz, Mountain View, South Pasadena, Evanston, Oak Park. Denver removed all 110 of its cameras when its contract expired in March. Oshkosh rescinded its contract one day after approving it, after the police chief found Flock had misrepresented its heat-map tracking capabilities to the city council. This month the LAPD let its contract lapse. Meanwhile the crowdsourced DeFlock project has mapped more than 76,000 camera locations, and a parallel campaign of unsanctioned camera removals that ZeroHedge has covered extensively keeps making local news.
Flock has defended itself – insisting that its network helps solve roughly 700,000 crimes a year, and points to genuine wins – including helping track the Brown University shooting suspect in December. Flock also says new contracts outpace cancellations, with nearly 800 fresh city deals in 2026 and a network bigger than ever. In January it added a “Federal Sharing” kill switch to its admin settings, which critics call an admission that the default had been leaking all along.
Why This One Might Bite
Every federal attempt against Flock so far has failed – Perry’s amendment died in committee, and neither the Burchett nor the Massie-Boebert bill has advanced. The opposing coalition is unusual: the left objects to ICE access to local cameras, the right objects to warrantless dragnet tracking of every driver, and the AP notes it is one of the few issues on which a divided country has found common ground. As the Rutherford Institute’s John and Natasha Whitehead wrote earlier this month, the danger isn’t the camera but the AI layer that turns a photograph of a car into the building blocks of a suspect society – an “electronic concentration camp” assembled one pole at a time.
Regarding Massie’s bill – we want to know: which federal grant streams get cut, how “surveilling law-abiding citizens” is defined – any Flock deployment, or only warrantless dragnet use – and whether House leadership gives it floor time. Text is expected in the coming weeks.
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.
