The San Diego City Council chamber was not expecting visitors from the dark side.
On August 19, 2026, a man walked into the Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee dressed as Darth Vader, mechanical breathing included, and took the microphone as if the Empire itself had something to say about surveillance cameras.
With dead-serious delivery, he declared that “the emperor is a Flock supporter” and that the technology is used to “track down rebel scum.” It was all satire: his real target was Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company that has already installed more than 500 automatic license plate-reading cameras in the city. Behind the joke was a concrete case: a San Diego man spent a month in prison because of a system identification error.
The local ACLU is calling for the contracts to be canceled, and according to the DeFlock project, around 100 municipalities in the United States have already done so. Flock responded by cutting data storage from 30 to 7 days.
The costume went viral, but the question it left hanging in the chamber was far less amusing than the mask.