There is blood in the water, and it is entirely self-inflicted. Hundreds of canceled government contracts. An 18 percent workforce slaughter. A looming, heavy-handed federal investigation spearheaded by Republican Senator Josh Hawley. You do not get to this level of corporate hemorrhage by accident. You get there by being loud, defensive, and fundamentally misunderstanding the room you are standing in.
Flock Safety thought they were untouchable. They built a massive, nationwide network of automatic license plate readers, sold them to every local municipality that would write a check, and assumed the public would just roll over and accept the new reality. Enter Benn Jordan. He isn’t a rival CEO. He isn’t a massive lobbying firm. He is a musician, a YouTuber, and a guy who likes to take things apart. He started looking up at the street poles in his hometown of Atlanta—which boasts more Flock cameras per square mile than anywhere else—and he started asking questions. And those questions are currently bringing a surveillance empire to its knees.
“You can build the most sophisticated surveillance network in the history of local government, but the second you let your ego drive your public relations, you hand the sledgehammer directly to your critics. Flock didn’t just build a camera system; they built a private, warrantless dragnet, and then they had the audacity to insult the people asking questions about it. If you want to survive in the security sector, you better learn to check your pride at the door.”
The Arrogance Of The Untouchable Tech Bro
Let’s have a real conversation about how you run your security operations. If you are building surveillance tech, your number one asset is trust. Your number two asset is silence. Flock Safety forgot both.
When the heat started turning up, Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, decided to play a character. Instead of extending an olive branch, instead of sitting down with researchers and civil rights groups to find a middle ground, he went on the offensive. He went on television and derided critics as left-wing terrorists. He dug his heels in. He denied security vulnerabilities when they were staring him right in the face.
Calling your critics terrorists while your cameras are basically glorified Android phones spying on soccer moms? Yeah, brilliant move, guys.
I believe in redemption. I believe people and companies can turn their ship around if they are willing to put in the work and eat a little humble pie. But you cannot cry when the market punches you in the mouth after you spent months begging for a fight. Most people who try to play the unapologetic, brash villain in public get absolutely wrecked. Flock got wrecked. They used clever ways of redefining words, they played games with the truth, and the public picked up on it instantly. Now, they are the undisputed villain of the privacy debate.
The Quiet Competitors
While Flock was busy immolating its own PR department, what were their competitors doing? Axon and Motorola were sitting in the dark, quietly cashing government checks. They are not sexy. They do not want to be a company with characters. They are as anonymous as they can be, and that is entirely intentional. When you are taking tax dollars to build surveillance infrastructure, you do not want to be the main character on Twitter.
The Private Loophole That Bypassed The Law
Let’s get into the mechanics of what actually went wrong here, because this is where the lesson lives for your own tech operations. Automatic license plate readers are not new. They have been around since the 1970s, and they started seeing heavy use in the United States in the late 80s and 90s.
In the 2000s, the standard operating procedure was simple. You mount a camera on a police cruiser. If an officer wants to run a plate, they run it. It saves them from typing it in while driving. I don’t have a problem with that. That is a logical, efficient use of technology to keep officers safe and do the job.
But Flock didn’t just build a better dashcam. They built a private, nationwide network. Any police department or city using our system’s equivalent of a shared network can opt in and share their data. Suddenly, a police department in Texas can search somebody’s movement through New York or Atlanta, with 30 days of retention, as long as the data is being shared.
And here is the kicker: they are doing this without a warrant.
Previous data sharing had to go through the National Crime Information Center. That process requires a magistrate judge to look at the context of a situation and issue a warrant to allow tracking. Flock found a legal innovation. By making it a private database, they essentially excused themselves from the warrant process. They bypassed the constitutional guardrails, and they did it in broad daylight.
The Hardware Is A Smokescreen
People get incredibly angry about the cameras themselves. They see the solar panels and the lenses on the street corners and they feel violated. But the hardware is not the impressive part. The hardware is a distraction.
The danger is not the lens. The danger is the database.
If a police officer decides to manually follow someone, or manually scrub through public traffic cams for 30 days, logging every single movement a citizen makes, we would call that a gross abuse of power. We would call it stalking. But when an automated system does it automatically, we call it a smart city initiative.
This is the interlocking relationship between private industry, government, and law enforcement that prioritizes secrecy over transparency. We never voted for an insecure network of cameras on every street corner. We certainly were never asked if we were comfortable giving access to this network to anyone with a badge and a login.
When Local Democracy Bites Back
For the last twenty-five years, since the Patriot Act, we have been having this massive, abstract debate about privacy. We argued about the NSA. We argued about warrantless wiretaps. But you cannot go to a town board meeting and yell at the NSA. They do not care.
But you can absolutely go yell at your local city council.
And that is exactly what is happening right now. Flock went from a company that was selling cameras to everyone—where the idea of adding them was universally assumed to increase safety—to a company fighting for its life in local municipal buildings. Citizens are waking up. They are looking up who their mayor is. They are looking up their city council members. They are showing up to meetings and demanding answers.
In Asheville, North Carolina, the dissatisfaction with surveillance policies is so intense that it is literally changing the political landscape. They are on the verge of ousting their mayor over this exact issue. This is democracy in action. When you force a product onto a populace without giving them the ability to opt out, eventually, they will opt you out of business.
The Low-Hanging Fruit Of Surveillance
The tragedy here is that Benn Jordan doesn’t even hate Flock as a company. He actually talks to them directly now. He reports security vulnerabilities to them when he finds them. He extends an olive branch because he wants real, tangible solutions to surveillance overreach, not just a crusade to tear one single company down.
Flock became the buzzword. They became the low-hanging fruit because they were the loudest and the most defensive. Now, you have politicians running for governor in Georgia claiming to be anti-Flock just to score political points, even though they welcomed the cameras years ago. Politicians will just say Flock is bad to appease the crowd, and then quietly go sign a massive contract with Verkada or Motorola the next day.
Flock made themselves the scapegoat for an entire industry’s sins.
The Hard Truth About Your Own Operations
If you are running a security agency, a government contracting firm, or a surveillance tech company, you need to look at this bloodbath and take notes. Are you building a fragile, ego-driven brand, or are you building an autonomous, resilient system?
You cannot force your will on the market. You cannot insult the people who are asking valid questions about how you handle their data. If you are building tools that track, monitor, or manage sensitive information, you have to operate with absolute integrity. We will never exaggerate results, and we will never lie to the people we serve. That is the ethical compass that keeps you out of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
You need systems in your business that handle the noise so you don’t have to. You need to review your logs weekly to see if there are blind spots in your operations. Are you exposing yourself to legal compliance risks? Are you risking burnout by fighting every battle in the public square? Stop responding to every angry email with a defensive rant. Stop sitting in long, pointless meetings trying to figure out how to spin a PR disaster.
Build an autonomous system that works quietly, efficiently, and ethically in the background. Let your competitors make the noise. Let them take the arrows. You focus on building a million-dollar operation that actually serves the community instead of antagonizing it.
If you’re tired of fighting the market and want to learn how to build an autonomous agency that scales quietly and profitably, we should probably have a conversation.