City of Camarillo
Comments received by 3:00 p.m. for City
Council; 4:00 p.m. for Planning Commission
on the meeting date, will be distributed to all
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Written comments received after the stated
time will be distributed after the meeting.
Item Type Agenda Item
Position Oppose
Comments **Written Public Comment — Item S: Obtain the Logs Before Drawing Conclusions**
Mayor, Councilmembers, and members of the public:
My central concern is straightforward:
The Council should not treat tonight’s Flock discussion as informed until it has obtained and examined the system’s audit logs, access records, contracts, subcontractors, integrations, and data-sharing settings.
I recently attempted to deliver a public-records request for Flock audit logs. Five uniformed officers became involved. They attempted to discourage me from leaving the request, cited local policy as justification for what I understood to be noncompliance with state law, declined requests for identifying
PUBLIC COMMENTS
Agency City Council / Camarillo Sanitary District / Camarillo Library Board
Item Number or Subject S - Automated License Plate Reader discussion NOTICE
This is a public document and will be posted as part of the public record. Any attachments, pictures, and information submitted will be subject to disclosure in accordance with applicable law, including the Public Records Act.
Wednesday, August 26, 2026 02:53 PM
City Council / Camarillo Sanitary
District / Camarillo Library Board
Meeting Date
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Planning Commission Meeting Date
1 information, and asked me not to record the encounter.
During that interaction, an officer pushed an Axon body camera into my face and mocked me.
I documented the encounter. The agency’s records-response period apparently remains open for approximately another week, so I am not yet claiming to know its final response.
But the Council does not need to wait for my CPRA process.
It can request the logs directly as part of its oversight.
Before accepting assurances about Flock, the Council should obtain:
* A complete list of searches involving Camarillo data; * The user, agency, purpose, case number, and time associated with each search;
* Every agency and third party with direct or indirect access; * All default and custom sharing settings;
* All contracts, subcontractors, cloud providers, integrations, and data-processing agreements;
* All suspected misuse, unauthorized access, policy violations, and corrective actions;
* The retention rules for raw data, alerts, exports, metadata, backups, and derived analytics;
* A complete data-flow diagram showing where information travels from capture through storage, search, export, and deletion.
If an improper sharing function was enabled by default and remained enabled for years, describing it as a bug does not answer who approved the configuration, who monitored it, or why officials failed to disable it.
A preventable setting is still a governance decision when nobody takes responsibility for checking it.
Flock is a private company accountable to investors. The City therefore needs enforceable safeguards independent of the vendor’s promises. The Council must also examine whether connected products can create profiles, associations, alerts, or narratives that fall outside the narrow definition of “ALPR data” used in public statements.
That examination should include actual or potential
interoperability involving Flock, Axon, Skydio, Wingtra RAY, Ring, private cameras, businesses, third-party contractors, federal agencies, neighboring law-enforcement agencies, and cloud- hosted analytic platforms.
These systems should not be discussed separately when they can operate together—or when their manufacturers are actively designing them to do so.
2 Flock and Ring announced a planned integration and later canceled it before launch. According to both companies, no Ring customer videos were transferred through that planned connection.[1] That correction matters.
But the proposal also matters.
It demonstrates how short the intended jump was between a commercial doorbell-camera network and Flock’s law-
enforcement platform. The fact that public opposition or technical difficulty stopped one integration does not erase the architecture, the commercial incentive, or the possibility of similar integrations through another vendor.
The Council should therefore ask not only, “Is Camarillo connected to Ring today?” It should ask:
* Has any Ring footage entered the broader evidence
ecosystem through another route?
* Can private video be requested, uploaded, exported, or associated with Flock-generated investigative records?
* Can Axon or another evidence-management platform serve as the bridge?
* Would a future integration require another public vote, or could it appear through a software update, subcontract, default setting, or administrative approval?
The famous pre-launch Flock–Ring integration was canceled.
That tells us what did not launch under that particular name and configuration.
It does not tell us what happened next.
We do not know whether the proposal disappeared, was divided among other vendors, restructured through Axon or another evidence platform, replaced by a less visible integration, or followed by something more invasive. Cancellation of a publicly controversial contract is not proof that the underlying capability or commercial objective was abandoned.
That is why the Council must request successor agreements, amendments, subcontracts, API access, evidence-platform connections, pilot programs, software updates, and integrations adopted after the announced cancellation.
Camarillo has lived through an earlier version of this argument.
Residents fought back against red-light cameras and the normalization of automated monitoring. Roughly a decade later, officials now discuss a far broader camera network as if that public dispute and its lessons never happened.
The old system watched selected intersections for an alleged violation.
3 The new system can record vehicles whether or not anybody violated anything.
You removed—or declined—the obvious camera and later
returned with a more powerful one on practically every corner.
Renaming the function does not erase the history.
There is another critical point of custody.
Flock’s own information-security addendum states that it exclusively uses Amazon Web Services for its data-center facilities and stores customer data in encrypted AWS S3 containers or Flock databases.[2]
That means the data does not travel directly from a roadside camera into a sealed evidence locker controlled exclusively by local police. It enters infrastructure operated through Flock and hosted by AWS before an officer searches or receives it.
I would not describe cloud hosting alone as automatically destroying legal chain of custody. But it does mean custody, control, security, and accountability begin with private corporate entities before the information reaches a police user.
Amazon and AWS are not neutral public vaults. They are
enormous corporations with shareholders, customers,
government contracts, subcontractors, employees, security policies, and institutional interests of their own.
So who possesses the data at each stage?
Who controls the encryption keys?
Who can access backups?
Which Flock employees or contractors can temporarily
download customer data for analysis or troubleshooting? What logs document that access?
Which contractual provisions survive termination?
How long can deleted information remain in backups?
What happens when AWS, Flock, a federal agency, or another litigant receives legal process seeking access?
Those are not speculative questions. They arise from the architecture described in Flock’s own agreement.
AWS also publicly maintains government and defense-cloud operations. Oracle publicly markets its own defense-cloud infrastructure. This does not prove that Camarillo’s Flock data is being used for military or intelligence purposes, and I am not claiming that it does.
4 It demonstrates something more basic: the same giant cloud providers that host ordinary municipal systems also build infrastructure for policing, intelligence, defense, and operations conducted on actual warfronts.
Local data does not become military data merely because it resides in the same corporate ecosystem. But neither should the Council pretend these corporate ecosystems are isolated.
AWS and Palantir publicly document technical integrations between AWS services and Palantir Foundry. AWS describes Foundry running through services including S3, EC2, and AWS Key Management Service and explains how data can be
connected, transformed, modeled, and operationalized across the two platforms.[3]
Again, that does not prove that Camarillo’s Flock data currently flows into Palantir.
It proves that the technical distance is short.
Flock to AWS is not hypothetical; Flock’s own contract says so.
Palantir operating through and integrating with AWS is not hypothetical; AWS says so.
The relevant oversight question is therefore not, “Can you prove Camarillo data is already in Palantir?” The relevant question is:
**What contractual, technical, and legal barriers prevent it from becoming a curated and readily available data source for Palantir or a comparable platform?**
If the answer is “vendor policy,” identify the policy.
If the answer is “encryption,” identify who controls the keys.
If the answer is “access controls,” produce the logs.
If the answer is “we would never do that,” then the Council has confused an assurance with a safeguard.
The Council must also examine where these cameras are
placed and who is required to live beneath them.
The apparent distribution is not socially or economically neutral.
Publicly mapped camera locations appear to warrant immediate analysis against household income, home value, renter
concentration, race and ethnicity, affordable-housing locations, commuting corridors, and neighborhood political influence.
If the system is concentrated disproportionately around lower- income communities and lower-value housing, then the City has created unequal surveillance exposure: residents with fewer 5 resources are watched more intensely while residents with greater property wealth and political influence receive greater practical privacy.
The Council should not answer this with a citywide camera count. A citywide total conceals geographic inequality.
Publish every camera’s coordinates and ownership
classification. Distinguish City cameras, law-enforcement cameras, private Flock cameras, Ring cameras, HOA systems, business cameras, and other registered or integrated devices.
Overlay those locations with Census household-income data and assessed or estimated home values. Then calculate
cameras per roadway mile, per resident, and per square mile for each neighborhood.
Also disclose who selected each location, what criteria were used, whether residents were consulted, and whether
placement was reviewed for disparate impact.
If officials believe the cameras are distributed equitably, the map and analysis should demonstrate that.
Until then, the City should not assume that surveillance imposed on lower-income neighborhoods is simply “public safety” while privacy enjoyed in wealthier neighborhoods is treated as normal.
Ventura County also has a well-observed consultant-capture problem. The same relatively small ecosystem of consultants, contractors, business associations, economic-development intermediaries, public-private partnerships, grant-supported programs, and technology promoters repeatedly appears
around public decisions.
A consultant recommends a system. Another consultant helps define the need. A regional organization validates the concept.
A contractor implements it. A vendor supplies the platform.
Staff later cite the accumulated work as proof that continued spending is inevitable.
Each individual step may appear ordinary. Collectively, the process can manufacture consensus before the public knows a consequential decision is being made.
That is consultant capture: not necessarily a secret conspiracy, but a closed feedback loop in which the entities benefiting from continued complexity become the entities defining the problem, evaluating the solution, and explaining why another contract is necessary.
The Council should therefore disclose any financial,
professional, governance, institutional, consulting, or immediate-family relationships connecting decision-makers, City-supported organizations, contractors, business
6 associations, participating companies, surveillance vendors, cloud providers, and relevant investors.
This is not an accusation that every relationship is corrupt. It is a demand that overlapping interests and incentives be
disclosed before officials dismiss residents’ concerns about the vendor ecosystem.
Prior CPRA records appear, in my interpretation, to show Mayor T seeking to negate or mitigate grassroots criticism and requesting a preferred result rather than an objective
presentation of the facts. If that interpretation is wrong, release the complete communications and allow the public to evaluate them.
The answer to distrust is evidence.
It is not another assurance.
**The following is expressly fictional satire. It describes no real person, survivor, abuser, disclosure, injury, or criminal conduct.
The absurdity is deliberate; the danger being illustrated is not.** Imagine that fictional Councilman T has a fictional adult child named PlateyMc Plateface T the III.
PlateyMc Plateface T the III is escaping a violent and controlling partner. T the III does everything the system tells a survivor to do: obtains a restraining order, changes routines, turns off location sharing, leaves home, and drives to a confidential shelter in another county.
The abusive partner has a friend in another law-enforcement agency—or obtains access through a compromised credential, a permissive sharing relationship, or a user who does not ask enough questions.
One plate search becomes a sighting.
The sighting becomes a route.
The route becomes a destination.
The destination is supposed to be secret.
The abusive partner is now standing outside the shelter.
Fictional Councilman T may then discover that surveillance infrastructure feels different when the dots being connected belong to someone he loves.
Officials may respond that this search would violate policy. Of course it would.
Misuse is rarely authorized in advance.
7 That is why audit logs, purpose restrictions, case-number requirements, access controls, automatic anomaly detection, independent review, and meaningful penalties matter. A policy that prohibits misuse after a survivor has been found is not protection. It is paperwork documenting how the protection failed.
The standard cannot be whether today’s officials promise to use the system responsibly.
Employees change. Credentials are compromised. Agencies share access. Contractors change. Integrations change.
Political priorities change. The collected data may remain.
The same risk applies to immigrants, protesters, journalists, political opponents, religious communities, union organizers, reproductive-health patients, domestic-abuse survivors, and innocent people associated with false or stale alerts.
Independent transparency projects such as DeFlock and Have I Been Flocked should not be forced to reconstruct information that public agencies can release themselves. What has Ventura County voluntarily disclosed to watchdogs? What has it
withheld? Which agencies have searched information
associated with Camarillo residents?
These questions should have been answered before tonight’s discussion.
Instead, the public received a gated participation process and a narrowly framed agenda item—an opportunity to submit words into a system that may acknowledge them without confronting them.
That is not meaningful engagement. It is participation theater.
Please stop mitigating residents’ concerns for the benefit of a preferred vendor and consultant ecosystem or overlapping institutional and economic relationships.
Direct staff and VCSO to produce the audit logs, contracts, sharing agreements, access lists, search justifications, retention settings, cloud architecture, subcontractor list, misuse findings, and derived-data policies. Place those materials before the public. Then hold an informed discussion.
Until that happens, the Council is discussing trust while withholding—or declining to obtain—the evidence necessary to earn it.
I will close with Kurt Vonnegut’s *The Sirens of Titan*. In a passage addressed to Mr. Constant, Vonnegut writes:
> “A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and 8 nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year.”
The larger passage describes a building full of bureaucrats losing records, multiplying forms, delaying decisions, providing misleading answers, calling meetings, and covering their tracks until the truth disappears beneath the administrative machinery.
And so, for the public record:
🙈 T 🙉 T 🙊 T
Mayor T. Chief T. Councilmember T.
Which is which?
We have no idea.[4]
And one final acknowledgement for the City Clerk:
I understand that the clerk does not select the surveillance policy or cast the Council’s votes. But contracts do not acquire administrative momentum by themselves. Agenda descriptions, filing practices, deadlines, records classifications, routing decisions, attachments, minutes, and the boundaries of public participation all pass through the power of the pen.
The degree to which these contracts have been advanced while the underlying questions remain outside the discussion could not have been sustained without administrative machinery.
That machinery can obscure the record.
It can also preserve it.
Please choose the second.
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**Notes for the public record**
[1] Flock and Ring state that their planned Community Requests integration was canceled before launch and that no Ring customer videos were transferred through it.
[2] Flock’s Customer Information Security Addendum states that Flock exclusively uses Amazon Web Services for data- center facilities and stores customer data in AWS S3 containers or encrypted Flock databases. It also states that customer data may be temporarily downloaded to Flock-owned laptops for analysis or troubleshooting.
[3] AWS publicly documents Palantir Foundry’s operation through and integration with AWS services, including S3, EC2, AWS Key Management Service, SageMaker, and Athena. This 9 note establishes technical interoperability; it does not claim that Camarillo or Flock data currently flows to Palantir.
[4] The emojis are, from left to right: the “see-no-evil monkey,” the “hear-no-evil monkey,” and the “speak-no-evil monkey.” Upload Additional Information
IDENTIFICATION
Name Stanley Goodspeed
Address
Telephone
Email
Public Records Acknowledgement
10