A police chief in Oshkosh, Wisconsin caught Flock lying to his city council, and killed the $8 billion surveillance company's contract less than a day after the council had approved it. Here's how it happened. The night before, Oshkosh's council was set to renew its deal with Flock Safety, the license plate camera company backed by a16z and Tiger Global. One council member asked the Flock rep a plain yes-or-no question. Does this system build a heat map of everywhere a specific car travels over time? Flock's rep said no. The council believed him and voted 5 to 2 to renew. By the next morning, Chief Dean Smith's own officers had told him that answer was false. So he pulled up the system himself. He watched it generate the exact heat map Flock had just sworn it couldn't make. Then he walked into an emergency meeting and said it out loud: "Because of this misrepresentation, I can no longer recommend Flock." Understand what a heat map is, because it's the whole trick. Flock sells cities a tidy little story. A car drives by, we snap a photo, we read the plate, that's all it is. But the same system can quietly average out where your car goes day after day and paint your routine onto a map. Not one snapshot at one corner. Your pattern. Where you sleep, where you work, where you keep going back and how often. A Flock employee later admitted on the record that the software does exactly that. So the pitch and the product are two different things. The company wins the contract selling a plate reader, then sits on a moving map of your life. The only reason Oshkosh caught it was one skeptical question and a police chief who bothered to check the answer. The vote to rescind was 7 to 0. Unanimous. Flock called the whole thing "one small misconception" from a long meeting and said it was disappointed nobody let it explain. A surveillance company worth eight billion dollars got caught lying about whether it maps where you drive. Its defense was that the lie was small. Oshkosh got one honest answer by accident. Congress can make it the rule. petitions.other98.com/defund… 🎩The Other 98%

A congressional staffer walked into the FDA in 1990 with one question. Where are the studies? Millions of American women had silicone implants. Bags of gel. Cut open, slid in, left inside the body for decades. Diana Zuckerman wanted to read the safety research. There wasn't any. Not a single study on women. 30 years of sales. Zero. Here is why. Congress gave the FDA power over medical devices in 1976. Implants were already on shelves. Dow Corning had been selling them since 1962. So they were waved through. Grandfathered. Older than the law meant to catch them. Nobody had ever thought to ask. She built the first hearing in history on it. Brought the women. Brought the empty file. The FDA moved. 1992. Silicone implants pulled off the general market. Litigation buried Dow Corning. Chapter 11 in 1995. A 3.2 billion dollar settlement fund. Then she found the bigger thing. The implants were never the problem. They were the symptom. Here is how America approves a device that goes inside you. There are two doors. Door one is hard. Clinical trials. Real patients. Real evidence. Years of it. Door two asks one question. Is your product a lot like something already being sold? Say yes. You are through. No trial. No patients. Nothing. They call it substantial equivalence. It means copy something. Now follow it. The device you copied was also cleared by copying. And that one copied another. Chains running back decades. Back to products from before testing rules existed. Nobody at the front of the chain ever proved anything. Everyone behind them inherited the permission. More than 95 percent of devices come through door two. Fewer than 5 percent are ever tested on a human being. You have seen the ads. Late at night. A lawyer, a phone number, the word mesh. Hernia mesh. Hip replacements. Pacemakers. Spinal cages. Knees. Door two. 2011. She published the study. With Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic. They pulled the FDA's own recall list. Five years of it. Every device the agency said could seriously injure or kill. 113 of them. Only 21 had ever been through a clinical trial. 19 percent. 80 came through door two. 8 skipped the FDA completely. 78 percent were never tested on a human being. The biggest category was heart devices. 35 of them. Sitting inside people's chests. It ran in Archives of Internal Medicine. Using the agency's own data. The FDA could not argue with its own list. She kept going. Panel after panel. Hearing after hearing. She watched plastic surgeons fill the implant advisory panels. Men whose entire income was implants. Voting on implants. 2006. The FDA let silicone back on one condition. Each company would study 40,000 women for 10 years. The studies started. None were finished. Nobody made them finish. Then a rare lymphoma began appearing. In the scar tissue around textured implants. Hundreds of cases. Dozens of women dead. July 2019. Allergan pulled every textured implant off the market worldwide. 2021. The FDA ordered a black box warning. The strongest warning it has. On the exact product she asked about in 1990. 31 years. That is how long the paperwork took. Think about what she proved. Products living inside human bodies. Never tested. Legal because something older was never tested either. A door built for bandages and thermometers. Now walked through by heart valves. She is still testifying. Same sentence for 40 years. Show me the study. Meanwhile door two is open. It is open right now. Somebody is on a table this morning. They signed a form. The surgeon is excellent. The hospital is excellent. Nobody in that room knows which door the device came through. Neither did you, until now. 🎩 Weird But True