Flock CEO Goes Ballistic on Critics as More Americans Question Mass Driver Surveillance

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Pictured above: city council members in Oak Park Village, Illinois debating license plate readers (photo by Paul Goyette)

The company Flock, which sells participation in a nationwide license plate reader network as well as other surveillance technology, has been under a lot of pressure lately as increasing numbers of Americans realize they don’t like the mass surveillance the company sells or its use in the Trump Administration’s war on immigrants. That pressure seems to be resulting in demagogic attacks on the motives of its critics, with the CEO saying they want to “normalize lawlessness” and “weaken public safety.”

As we have been saying for years, the creation of a giant automated infrastructure for the surveillance of drivers’ comings and goings raises a lot of profound issues — about the balance of power between government and the governed, how much power we should grant the government to investigate and prevent crime, how much privacy we should allow people to have in their public movements over time and space, the psychological, practical, and political effects of a diminishment of such privacy — and ultimately, what will best give people in this country a shot at living happy and fulfilling lives free of domination by others.

Americans disagree about how to weigh those values, with some concluding that they want license plate scanning technology in the hands of the police agencies that are supposed to serve them. That kind of disagreement is inevitable in a democratic society.

Flock, however, apparently doesn’t credit its critics with good faith or rational desires.

In a December email reportedly sent to all its law enforcement clients, CEO Garrett Langley claimed that attacks on Flock were attacks on law enforcement. “Let's call this what it is,” he wrote. “Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack.” Langley then portrays Flock’s critics as motivated not by legitimate disagreement over the relative importance of different values and the role of mass surveillance in a brutal mass deportation effort, but as some kind of nihilists who wish to destroy society:

The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.

Langley also told police departments that “activist groups” are also “trying to turn a public records process into a weapon against you and against us.” In a democratic society where sovereignty rests with the people, transparency into what the government is doing is vital. In an era where powerful new technologies promise to give the government expansive new powers never before seen in human history, transparency becomes even more urgent.

Last week, responding to critical coverage of the release of data on millions of police surveillance targets by reporters at 404Media, Flock charged that behind the criticism lay “activists trying to let murderers go free.”

C’mon, Flock — seriously? Are you really saying that a desire to “see murderers go free” and “normalize lawlessness” is what’s motivating privacy advocates, residents, city council members, and people exercising their First Amendment rights who are dealing with retaliation by federal agents, including those abusing license plate databases for non-law enforcement purposes by tapping into them to drive to observers’ homes in order to intimidate them?

Ironically, if there is anyone who does want those things right now, it is those participating in Trump’s deportation drive, which has come closer to “normalizing lawlessness” than anything we have seen in this nation in a long time. Langley might be better off aiming his criticism toward some of his financial backers like Mark Andreessen, whose venture capital firm A16Z has been an early and significant investor in Flock and other surveillance companies — and who has also been a supporter of the man pushing the federal lawlessness we’re seeing on the streets of American cities today: President Trump.

To their credit, at least some recipients of Flock’s letter responded with consummate professionalism. Staunton, Virginia police chief Jim Williams, who released the Flock email, wrote back to rebuke Langley:

As far as your assertion that we are currently under attack, I do not believe that this is so…. What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes. These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders. ln short, it is democracy in action.

In Charlottesville, VA, the police chief reacted similarly, telling a local news outlet that “people have a right to disagree and have issues with things,” and that “at the end of the day communities get to have a say on how they want to be policed.”

In its earlier years Flock implicitly accepted the importance of privacy, emphasizing (though exaggerating) certain privacy-protective limits in its license plate recognition product. Now, apparently, the company has adopted the attitude that, in essence, if you are concerned at all about mass surveillance and limiting the power of law enforcement, you support criminals. It is a simplistic, juvenile, and ultimately authoritarian stance.