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Flock Revolt IV: The $0 File Your City Says Costs $33,453
Current Revolt on the Wade Wilkes Show KRFE Radio 95.9FM
Ponzi Man From Austin Hired the Cruz-Paxton Machine to Soften His Sentence
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Flock Revolt IV: The $0 File Your City Says Costs $33,453
Continuing our coverage of the mass surveillance grid your Texas city rents and can’t explain. This week one city accidentally explained it, and now we know why nobody else wanted to.
Pflugerville quoted $1,080 for its Flock audit logs. We agreed to plate redactions, and then they sent everything for free. Over 1.7 million searches swept their cameras in seven months by 465 different agencies.
Houston PD ran half a million searches that swept Pflugerville’s cameras. DPS ran 270,804 while fighting Current Revolt at the AG to keep its own logs secret. For every search a Pflugerville cop ran, 295 searches came from outside agencies.
Nearly 88,000 of those searches cite a traffic infraction. Compare what police told one city council with what the logs say.
The amount of data that is dripping out of these record requests is incredible. Our working theory is that the data volume itself serves to block public access. Hackers got a hold of a Flock camera this month, and they showed these dinky CSV exports are just the tip of the data-collection iceberg. The camera took dozens of photos of each passing car, sometimes more than 100, and it runs machine learning software that detects people and other objects. Records sent in by another reader (patriot) show Flock’s platform has sent the City of Forney 296,891 emails since 2022. The city admitted most are automated alerts.
A flood of garbage data that is folded into the larger spy system which cities bill back to the public at $15 per hour.
It’s clever. But we are making progress. Texans are learning that you do not want to be the generation that wired every road with cameras and tracked everyone. That is not preserving freedom for our future generations, it is setting them up for a nightmare, and it needs to stop.
If you file one request, make it the “Flock Network Audit” export, in CSV, plates redacted. That one file shows every agency searching through your city’s cameras. Pflugerville’s cost zero dollars.
If they give you a crazy estimate for your public records, complain they are overcharging. It kind of works. A reader filed one, and one week later the city attorney cut the $33,453 estimate in half and priced eight of nine items at zero.
Sometimes the data is free, sometimes you get 5-figure discounts. It’s a fun game, and Texans should play.
Bedford was asked to stop reusing a single-use AG letter as the reason for not releasing records. The city answered with a newer letter that ends with the same sentence.
The scoreboard, same nine questions:
Carrollton: free, 605-agency map
Pflugerville:
$1,080$0, 1.77M rows of dataKaufman: free, maps included
Keller: partial, redactions pending
Grapevine: partial, claims 800,000 emails
Mansfield: demands “who” for a domain search - LOL
Bedford:
$1,839$75Roanoke: $2,592.37, 37 cents for computer time they say
Colleyville: $11,826
Forney:
$33,453$16,700.10Two cities: silence past deadline
DPS: at the AG, ruling November
File yours. The template is in our guide. Send what they say to tips@currentrevolt.com.
Click here to find your town and file your request.
Current Revolt on the Wade Wilkes Show KRFE Radio 95.9FM
Current Revolt Publisher Tony Ortiz was on the Wade Wilkes Show yesterday where everything Texas politics was discussed. Scandals, oil and gas, Bo French, political violence, and more.
Give it a listen and check out KRFE Radio here.
Ponzi Man From Austin Hired the Cruz-Paxton Machine to Soften His Sentence
Austin-based Indian man Siddharth “Sid” Jawahar ran a company called Swiftarc Capital where between 2016 and 2023 he took in more than $35 million from 64 different investors. Travis Kelce being one of them. Jawahar put only about $10 million to work and used the remainder to pay earlier investors, fund private jets, luxury apartments in Austin, club memberships, and high-end restaurant tabs.
Jawahar invested nearly all client money in one Pakistani tobacco stock and lied about the returns when the stock went tits up. Jawahar even continued raising money after the Texas State Securities Board yanked his registration. A federal judge in Missouri gave him 11 years in jail on September 15th and ordered $31.35 million in restitution. Take a guess on whether he’s paid any of it.
So where does the Cruz-Paxton campaign machine come in? Enter Axiom Strategies, Jeff Roe’s Kansas City mega-firm, that ran Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign and Senate races. Axiom is also handling Ken Paxton’s current Senate bid.
In late August 2026, weeks before sentencing, Jawahar signed a $10,000 contract with Axiom for “strategic communications” and support letters meant to reach the judge in his case. One support letter came from Rep. Sam Graves, a longtime Roe client, urging the judge only give Jawahar four years:
