Flock's Spy System Has to Die

The death of freedom.

I’ve written the speech Flock CEO Garrett Langley gave last week on YouTube.

Not that exact speech, but speeches of that genus, species, and subspecies. Every political or crisis-communications operative dragged into the conference room after a corporate client steps on its dick knows the form. Founder. Soft lighting. Tasteful background. Slow cadence. Concerned eyes.

Langley looked almost human, spinning his nationwide Panopticon like a suburban dad discussing his pickleball league. “Nine years ago we set out to build safer communities. I’ve learned a lot. We’re not perfect. Far from it.”

Sure, pal.

That last bit is mandatory. The preemptive humility beat, the sensation of a focus group nodding along tested lines, a man who admits he isn’t perfect, especially when the admission costs nothing, concedes less, and makes the general counsel nearly smile. It’s the corporate version of the politician who tells you his greatest weakness is caring too much.

I know the speech, the cadence, the lawyered verbs, the tense shifts, the carefully constructed moments when phony sincerity is lubed enough to slide right past the ugly truth.

Once you know the trick, you can’t unsee it.

Watch the verbs. Watch the tense. Watch what he elides. Listen carefully to the question he appears to answer, then ask yourself whether he actually answered it because he never does.

By that standard, Langley’s twelve minutes are a masterpiece of crisis communications.

Honesty? Not so much.

Because behind the soft lighting and delicate piano music track is a hell of a story: an Atlanta venture-backed startup has built a substantial piece of the infrastructure for an American surveillance state, sold it to roughly 7,000 police agencies without a national vote, meaningful federal regulation, or much public debate, and is now spending heavily on lobbyists and crisis communications to keep local governments from taking it away.

Jason Hunyar reported on just one Flock lobbying team working in Georgia.

Targeted Victory is a $100 million Republican digital and political consulting firm, part of Stagwell Global. If the name sounds familiar, it should: in 2022, the Washington Post reported that Meta had paid Targeted Victory to orchestrate a nationwide campaign against TikTok that included planting op-eds in regional newspapers, recruiting politicians and reporters, and seeding negative stories in local media. That is their documented, public record playbook. Their own website describes their pitch as: “communication is personal and trust is local” and promises clients help to “navigate political fights and reputational thickets.” Their public affairs page lists Crisis Communications, Risk & Reputation Strategic Consulting, and Victory at Scale among their services, and advertises a network of 1,000 operatives and 50-state activation capability.

SixAM Strategies is Targeted Victory’s sister company under Stagwell Global, founded in November 2025, two months before this meeting. Their website is worth reading in full, but a few lines stand out: they call their execution capability “Activations”, described as building hyperlocal campaigns blending “community outreach, grassroots advocacy, and media engagement.” They can deploy within 48 hours, and their services run “from corporate reputation development to direct advocacy to state and federal policymakers.” Both of their representatives confirmed attendance.

Allow me to translate from Consultant.

Your neighbor gets up at the county commission meeting and says the cameras make her nervous. The members of the county commission all read very, very similar talking points about contracts and privacy and safety.

Then come the letters to the editor. The heartwarming video about Flock finding somebody’s lost grandmother. The supportive local official. The police-union statement praises Flock for stopping murderrrrrs. The scary column about suburban crime follows, reposted on a hundred local Facebook groups.

And, amazingly enough, they all arrive at roughly the same conclusion:

Every car should be monitored by an army of Flock cameras, everywhere forever. If you’re not committing a crime you have nothing to worry about, right?

The client’s fingerprints barely show. That’s the point.

Meanwhile, Flock increased its federal lobbying spending tenfold in 2025, to more than half a million dollars. Quite a Washington operation for a company selling what we’re told is basically a neighborhood safety tool.

Hell, many people at Flock would bridle at being called lobbyists. Make of it what you will, but anyone who has worked around lobbying knows this routine.

Lobbyist? Good heavens, no. He’s a senior adviser. A government counselor. A special policy consultant. Former Congressman Smith would never demean himself by something so base as lobbying.

How crude.

So Langley’s soft-focus video is the visible end of a very expensive PR and lobbying operation.

Now the important part. Flock’s system is a direct, immediate threat to your privacy, your political autonomy, and your security not because some rogue peckerwood cop using to to track down his ex-wife Lurleen, that bitch.

It’s a threat because today’s Flock camera is a crude early part of a national infrastructure of surveillance and control. That line trotted out by Flock stans that “only criminals who have something to hide hate Flock” misses that in the Flock system the definition of criminal is in the hands of local and state law enforcement agencies, not the courts.

You’re a criminal when local MAGA sheriff Billy Bob Bumblefuck scopes every car within in mile of the latest No Kings rally, dumps that data into the local fusion center and feeds it to DHS.

Today’s Flock ALPR camera isn’t a camera. It’s a beta test, a first-gen database-entry generator for an authoritarian state. That isn’t a bunch of cameras on poles: it’s a tool set building a searchable index of where Americans drive, shop, eat. It’s a record of their attendance at political rallies and their infidelities.

Every passing vehicle becomes a timestamped record: plate, location, make, model, color, damage, bumper stickers, roof racks. Multiply that by 120,000 devices across roughly 7,000 agencies, most importantly ICE and DHS.

Built without warrants or without notice, absent any national law authorizing the architecture. Authoritarianism in America won’t necessarily arrive by decree. It will arrive with an API and a dashboard of metrics.

You don’t need some new Stasi if the search box finds you, regardless.

Who parked near that church? Who drove to that abortion clinic? Who went to that gun show? Who was near that anti-ICE twice last month? And who are their friends? Who do they associate with? Where do they work?

Nobody has to be suspected of anything. The record already exists. Somebody just has to decide to search it. And spare me the “slippery slope” objection. We’re already sliding, with a thousand points of data streaming off our phones, laptops, smart watches, cars, medical devices, shopping histories, and ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.

---

---

A Texas officer ran a nationwide plate search for a woman who had an abortion, reaching into Illinois despite a state law written to stop exactly that.

FOIA’d audit logs from Danville, Illinois showed thousands of searches with “immigration,” “ICE,” or “ICE warrant” entered as the reason.

Researchers in Washington State found three different ways federal immigration agents obtained local data: formal sharing agreements, searches where sharing supposedly wasn’t enabled, and friendly local cops running searches for the feds.

Oxnard, California set its system for California-only access, discovered nationwide searches had been enabled anyway because of a vendor issue, and yanked the cameras.

We’re told Flock never searches or records people’s faces, but hundreds of Flock cameras are installed facing away from roads and parking lots, and if you walk by one at night, the IR lights illuminate and the unit records your face, your gait, your clothes, and your race.

Then there’s Nova, Flock’s AI platform. Flock’s own roadmap, exposed through leaked internal materials, showed a product designed to move from a plate to a person, then to that person’s associates, using commercial data-broker records.

No warrant. No crime. Not even real suspicion. After the reporting landed, Flock assured everyone it wouldn’t use breached data…a fascinating promise that smells of lawyers.

Here’s the test.

Suppose an administration wants to know every car that visited a mosque, Mormon temple, Planned Parenthood clinic, union hall, gun show, political meeting, or Tesla dealership last Saturday. Does it need Congress to pass a law? Nope. It needs a need one cop with a password. Flock claims it has no relationship to Palantir, but Flock’s data gets fed to fusion centers by local cops that does feed Palantir’s maw. You’ll be shocked to learn Peter Thiel’s Founders’ Fund is an investor in Flock.

Now watch Langley’s video again.

Remember, all this tech with the cameras is the tip of the iceberg for Flock and the surveillance goons.

Take Flock’s Raven snitch system, which listens, instead of sees.

Flock nervously said, “Our products do not and will not identify human voices.” They didn’t say “Cannot.” “Will not” is a thin reed.

Great. What did they do?

Flock marketed distress detection for its acoustic sensors with an ad depicting a police alert for screaming. After EFF reported on it, “screaming” became “distress.” Cities ran live pilots of Flock’s Raven system. The feature reportedly died after sustained public pressure, while the underlying ability to capture voices, conversations, and other sounds remained.

Langley describes this as “underestimating community concerns.”

Beautiful. Then there’s the wrong noun. “We’ve never sold it and we never will.”

Sold. Nobody’s complaint about Danville or Renton or Oxnard depends on Flock selling anything.

The issue is access. Again, watch the rhetorical trick: deny something nobody accused you of doing, very sincerely, and hope the audience doesn’t notice.

Then comes the magic qualifier: “We will not add facial recognition to our devices.”

To our devices.

Nova was designed to identify people without recognizing a face at all, using other data, including phone, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi identifiers, so that little phrase is doing a lot of work. Flock’s unarmed (for now) drone systems are its latest frontier.

Then there are the things Langley would rather leave in the memory hole.

In April, Flock’s own chief information security officer told the Oshkosh, Wisconsin city council that the system did not create heat maps showing an individual vehicle’s movements.

The council approved the contract that night. The next morning, members learned that wasn’t true. They reconvened and killed the contract in a day. Flock later acknowledged the heat-map capability and called the discrepancy a “minor nuance.”

On federal access, Langley publicly denied it, then acknowledged pilot contracts with CBP and DHS providing direct access. His explanation?

Flock had “communicated poorly.”

No, bro. That’s called a lie.

The big announcement in the new speech is that default local data retention falls from thirty days to seven. Privacy victory! Huzzah! Except that Langley concedes that roughly 90 percent of searches already happen within a week. So why keep the other twenty-three days?

Because storage is cheap and data is priceless. But listen closely to one word. The images are purged from the customer’s database. The customer’s.

His promises are about the police department’s instance of the product.

What does Flock itself keep? In what form? For how long? Here’s the answer: all of it, forever. Funny how that part never gets the soft-focus treatment. Flock’s contract terms added a perpetual right to use customer data to support and improve its services, surviving termination.

Your city’s retention period ends. Flock’s ownership of your data doesn’t. That’s not a retention limit. It’s the opposite. Around the same time, the old language saying Flock did not own or sell customer data disappeared. Nothing to see here, kids. Move along.

Langley also admits Flock retains some images to improve plate-reading accuracy after stripping customer-identifying metadata.

It does not necessarily remove your plate. No retention period is attached to that corpus in Flock’s cloud. Then there’s Evidence Mode, which Flock’s own material describes as moving data into cold storage. Cold storage is a cheaper hard drive. Everything, everywhere points to Flock keeping all the data its cameras generate, forever.

And the company’s entire accountability pitch of case codes, audit trails, flagged searches, investigations of misuse, and so on depends on durable records of who searched what and when. You can’t simultaneously brag about permanent accountability and pretend permanence isn’t part of the system.

So there is one question every city council member in America should ask the Flock rep, on camera, with the microphone on:

After our retention period expires, what exactly do you keep? Raw images. Vehicle records. Search indexes. Audit logs. Backups. Aggregates. Training data. Give me every category, every retention period, and tell me exactly what disappears when we cancel. Will Flock agree to stop negotiating with state and local agencies under NDAs? If not, why not?

No mission statement about safety fixes Flock. No story about a stolen Kia with a puppy in back fixes Flock. No tale of grandmother lost and wandering, found by Flock’s drones fixes Flock. No hyperbolic stories of crime sweeping the suburbs fixes Flock.

More than sixty communities have moved to cancel, pause, or reject Flock.

Look at who’s doing it: libertarians, immigrant-rights groups, gun owners, ACLU chapters, women’s rights groups, suburban moms, and privacy nerds, left, right, far-left, far-right, and center.

It’s a strange coalition. Good. Democracy is supposed to look strange.

Citizens discover their government bought something that threatens their freedom. They organize. They show up. They complain. They make elected officials uncomfortable. Sometimes they win.

That’s the damn point. Flock’s only defenders? Cops and Fox News.

But the most corrosive part is local law enforcement. When a citizen stands up at city hall and questions the cameras, the person defending Flock often isn’t a Flock employee. It’s her police chief. Usually he means it.

“The system solves cases.” “What are you, pro-criminal?” “If you’re not committing a crime, you have nothing to worry about.”

I’m sure it does solve cases. So what? Crime was at 100-year lows before Flock.

Nobody is arguing that surveillance technology never catches criminals. East Germany’s Stasi caught criminals too. That was not the central problem with East Germany.

The question is what happens when the people operating it stop being the people you trust, because police chiefs change. Sheriffs change. Governors change. Presidents change. Emergencies happen. Panics happen. Political crusades happen.

Databases remain.

And if Flock disappeared tomorrow, the architecture wouldn’t.

Flock is just one company in the Hate Machine’s surveillance architecture.

The DRNsights Platform merges other license plate reader data from cameras and police cars into a single searchable database. Mike Flynn’s local private detectives used it to stalk us during his lawsuit against me.

Axon, the makers of the famous cop body cameras, are in the same business as Flock. Motorola Solutions owns Vigilant, whose plate database ICE has contracted to access for tens of millions of dollars. Vigilant data has flowed into Palantir systems and commercial data-broker platforms. Motorola faces California class actions alleging its network illegally shared drivers’ location information with federal and out-of-state agencies. Chico, California is investigating its own police department for sharing Motorola plate data with ICE and Border Patrol.

Then there’s Leonardo and its ELSAG plate readers. Leonardo isn’t some hoodie-wearing Atlanta startup talking about safer communities. It’s a multibillion-dollar Italian defense conglomerate.

Its SignalTrace product adds sensors to plate readers that can detect Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and RFID signals from devices inside passing cars, allowing the system to associate the vehicle with the phone, earbuds, watch, and other electronics traveling inside it.

Oh, great. Nothing could possibly go wrong. The devices aren’t just a camera stopping at your bumper anymore. It’s reaching into your pocket.

Remember, Stephen Miller runs the system at the top of the pyramid of all this tech. It’s being built out by the Thiels and Ellisons of this world.

And every soothing argument about license plates being “public information” becomes bullshit the second your plate becomes the join key connecting your car to the rest of your digital life.

There’s a conservative argument against this so obvious you could print it on a fucking bumper sticker: Government power is dangerous.

Flock puts itself above the rule of law. Warrants matter. Privacy matters.

The government shouldn’t know where innocent citizens go just because Silicon Valley made it cheap to know. Turns out the government doesn’t even have to build the surveillance state anymore. Venture capital will do it for them. Then they’ll sell it to your sheriff, to advertisers, and to political parties.

No Congress voted for this. No state legislature designed it. No national debate authorized it.

It was assembled contract by contract, city by city, at the level of government with the least scrutiny, the smallest press corps, and the fewest lawyers. Which is precisely how you’d build something like this if you didn’t want a debate.

So I don’t particularly care whether Garrett Langley is a good man who has learned a lot over the last nine years. He’s not. There’s a creepy techbro tism about his presentation that should ring every alarm bell in your head.

This decade has produced a plague of tech founders so mesmerized by what they can build that whether they should build it is apparently a question for the rest of us. Flock will not change. It will hire more PR goons and more lobbyists, but the Panopticon Garrett Langley is building won’t be stopped unless we stop it.

So go to the city council meeting.

They are counting on you staying home.

They’ve hired some very expensive people to help make sure that when you do show up, you feel outnumbered.

Fuck that.

Show up anyway.

Flock is a danger to your liberty, and the creativity of citizen deactivation of Flock cameras is rising by the day. Local leaders are hearing it, loud and clear: Flock’s spy system must die, either by voting to shut it down or to the sound of reciprocating saws in the night.

Update: Holy hell. Breaking news from Wired: they got the code for Flock’s new OS Investigate AI tool, and it’s so much worse than even I wrote about above.