Garrett Langley, the founder of Flock Safety, frames surveillance as a Faustian bargain. If we want to live in a world where “crime is unsustainable” and “a thing of the past,” in his words, then we must “sacrifice our privacy.” Imagine: no more carjackings or kidnappings, murders or robberies, rapes or vandalism. “Everyone, in my opinion, deserves the right to be safe,” Langley said, during a TED talk last month. “It should not matter the color of your skin, your political affiliation, or your income level.”
Langley, who is thirty-nine, tells the story of creating Flock from the vantage point of a humble vigilante. In 2017, as his neighborhood, in Atlanta, became the target of repeated thefts, he called his local police precinct and pleaded with them to do something. The officer he spoke with lamented a lack of options; the best way to catch the perpetrators was to retrieve their license-plate numbers, but this was possible only if bystanders reported suspicious vehicles on their street, or if officers staked out the neighborhood and caught criminals in the act. Without evidence from such eyewitnesses, or any relevant footage or recognition software to identify the suspects, these carjackers were as good as invisible, stalking the night with impunity. Langley has characterized this conversation as a light-bulb moment. An already accomplished tech entrepreneur with a degree in engineering, he called up two of his former classmates, Matt Feury and Paige Todd, and began creating makeshift license-plate-reading cameras out of Android phones and solar panels that could be affixed to street poles. They sold their first models to homeowners’ associations and private communities but soon attracted the attention of law-enforcement agencies, who were interested not in shutting the project down but in collaborating. By 2020, Flock cameras were popping up on public roads across the country, in partnership with local police departments. Langley describes the company’s rapid growth as a product of organic, word-of-mouth enthusiasm: “That police chief is telling his friends; that mayor is telling her friends.” But, even as Flock was finding its footing, Langley was already envisioning something much larger: a nationwide surveillance network. Early indicators suggested that he was well on his way, and in the intervening years he has grown ever closer to achieving that goal.
Flock was recently reported to have a valuation of more than eight billion dollars, with its biggest investor being the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Around forty per cent of the United States’ law-enforcement agencies now have contracts with the company, and a reported hundred and thirty thousand cameras monitor roads in every state but Alaska. Flock cameras have evolved from their initial prototype, and now read more than just license plates: they record the make, model, and color of passing vehicles, data that are then controlled by whatever entity operates the camera. Police can use this information, without obtaining a warrant or judicial approval, to make arrests or to present as evidence in court. For Langley and his legion of law-enforcement allies, such capabilities are proof of Flock’s limitless potential for catching and prosecuting criminals. Just last year, a mass shooter at Brown University was tracked using data from Flock cameras, a triumph touted by both the Providence police chief and the F.B.I. (The shooter was dead when he was found, but still, they said.) The company has claimed that its products have broken up crime rings, intercepted child abductions, and solved missing-persons cases. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has called automated license-plate readers (A.L.P.R.s) like Flock’s a “crime-fighting star.” Politicians across the aisle have expressed support for the technology, though those endorsements are complicated by reports of increased lobbying and political donations from the company.
The surveillance of it all is conveniently ignored by people in power who laud Flock, and by Langley himself. “I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t want to be safer,” Langley told NBC News, last month. “I’ve travelled the country, and I have not met that person yet.” Langley, it seems, has not been meeting the right people. In recent months, Flock cameras and the larger A.L.P.R. industry have faced mounting backlash, as people around the country, and across the political spectrum, denounce the spread of surveillance infrastructure into public life as undemocratic.
Almost half of Americans oppose A.L.P.R.s, according to the Washington Post, and some of them have taken to damaging, stealing, and defacing Flock cameras at parks, street corners, and traffic stops. When one Georgia sheriff posted a video to Facebook offering a thousand-dollar reward for information about the destruction of a Flock camera in a public park—“it was to keep our kids safe,” he said, from “sex offenders”—commenters ridiculed him, and lauded the assailant as a hero. “Looks like a Constitutional wind blew it over,” one user wrote; “Kudos to the citizen that threw tea in the harbor!” another added. The crowdsourced-data app DeFlock has become a leader in the anti-A.L.P.R. movement, providing a nationwide map of Flock cameras, alongside legal and community resources. Langley called the project “terroristic,” a comment he later tried to walk back. But the public tides seem to have turned against Langley’s hollow rhetoric of safety, and his evocation of terrorism rang alarm bells for anyone fluent in post-9/11 propaganda-speak. Telling people that they need to compromise on privacy is a polite way of framing a nonconsensual takeover; calling a community opposition movement “terroristic,” however, gives the game away. In her 2019 book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Shoshana Zuboff diagnosed this tension, showing how concessions around privacy expose the paradox within Big Tech’s continual promise of progress: “The precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment.”
Even leaders in the country’s most reliably red states, heeding the cries of their constituents, are now cutting ties with Flock. No one wants to get spied on, it seems, even Blue Lives Matter conservatives. Late last month, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, instructed state agencies to freeze spending on Flock cameras; a few days later, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, revoked permits for A.L.P.R.s on state highways and ordered their removal. Republican officials in tough-on-crime states such as Indiana, Kansas, and Tennessee have also endorsed A.L.P.R. restrictions, invoking the public’s right to privacy amid growing evidence that the technology is being regularly abused. Police officers have been accused of exploiting Flock to stalk ex-girlfriends, track love interests, and monitor family members. A sheriff’s deputy in Texas searched a data pool of more than eighty thousand Flock cameras to incriminate a woman who had allegedly received a medication abortion. ICE has also tapped Flock data with the help of municipal police departments in order to hunt down and detain immigrants. Langley has distanced himself from such deployments of his product by performing the role of the detached inventor. He told Politico that he viewed his “job as building tools and then giving those which we elect democratically the control to decide how they’re implemented.” He “didn’t want to have” the “responsibility” of regulating his products and making difficult ethical determinations, as he admitted to the BBC.
Listen to Langley talk long enough, and a core contradiction in his messaging emerges: he moralizes about safety and societal progress, about how his company is primed to change the course of human history, yet, when faced with genuine concerns about how his product creates less safe conditions for citizens, by repressing their autonomy, freedom, and right to public space, he holds up his hands, shakes his head, and pretends that none of that is any of his business. Flock cameras are meant to be a munificent gift from him to us. All he’s asking for in return is everything.
Privacy has long been a contested subject in American law. The Constitution does not explicitly guarantee a right to privacy—the word itself never appears in the text—and courts have spent decades debating whether such a right can be derived from its provisions and, if so, whom and what it protects. The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable government searches and seizures is considered the foundation of American privacy law, and courts have, over time, extended protections to one’s cellphone and to reproductive and sexual behavior. But the concept of privacy, like that of freedom or of justice, is a supple one. The legal definition of the concept has shrunk or ballooned to meet the needs of political and capitalist forces, proving how malleable the notion could be when needed. As Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote for The New Yorker, in 2022, “The right to privacy should have been understood from the start as a prerogative of the people, establishing a zone where the state cannot readily trespass,” but, instead, became “a prerogative of the privileged, intent on keeping the general public at bay.” This tension—privacy as a right or as a privilege—has been intensified by national-security powers and by revolutions in digital technology. Writing for n+1, in 2013, Jill Priluck noted that “the expanded privacy rights of the 20th century have with the transition to digital data become obsolete in many situations.” She referred to Justice Samuel Alito’s concurrence in the case United States v. Jones, from 2012, which held that the Fourth Amendment applied to G.P.S. surveillance. “New technology may provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy,” Alito warned. “Many people may find the tradeoff worthwhile.”
Trade-off, security, safety—this was the language of the post-9/11 surveillance boom, and, lucky us, it never left. The journalist Richard Beck, in his book “Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life,” from 2024, summarizes the ends to which the fear of terrorism drove an unimpeded and irreversible increase in mass surveillance within the U.S. When the Patriot Act was introduced to Congress, a month after 9/11, a “remarkable spirit of bipartisan unity” allowed for “the biggest expansion of law enforcement detention and surveillance powers in history.” Even so, some Democratic senators, such as Pat Leahy, though they broadly supported the bill, were concerned that it granted the intelligence agencies too much power, and lacked sufficient transparency measures and judicial oversight. As the bill reached a logjam in Congress, Attorney General John Ashcroft began publicly to put pressure on the senators holding it up. “We think that there is a very serious threat of additional problems now,” he said during an appearance on “Face the Nation.” Later, he told CNN that he was “deeply concerned about the rather slow pace at which we seem to be making this come true for America. . . . Talk won’t prevent terrorism; tools can help prevent terrorism.” The tools Ashcroft was referring to were being developed in tandem with Silicon Valley executives—biometric data, facial-recognition software, omnipresent CCTV cameras, electronic-communication surveillance. “The kinds of surveillance the government wanted to implement dovetailed nicely” with Silicon Valley’s own goals, Beck observed, noting how these surveillance systems required unfettered digital access to everyone, not just perceived foreign antagonizers or known criminals. Anyone could be a terrorist, the thinking went, and so everyone must be monitored.
Mass surveillance can be difficult to comprehend or think plainly about, ensconced as we are in the digital cocoon of contemporary life. How are we to understand the scope, nature, and threat of systems we cannot see or touch? When we use social media, or accept online privacy-policy updates and agreements, it can be unclear how, exactly, we are being violated. Are we not consenting to these services? Are we not uploading images of ourselves and freely conversing with friends and colleagues, knowing the potential risks of being tracked by our government and tech overlords? How are we to engage with these digital platforms without feeling paranoid, or dissociating from the fact that we are potentially being watched by law-enforcement agencies and large corporations? Zuboff, in her book, described this quandary as “a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and codified.” In other words, we must convince ourselves that the digital communication and information systems we use are harmless and, indeed, beneficial, in order to keep using them. Opting out of online life has become nearly impossible given how crucial these tools have become in many professional, academic, and personal contexts. We’ve accepted the compromises of the internet mostly out of submission; there is no visible or viable path for existing in the modern world without in some way resigning ourselves to the realities of surveillance.
Langley, it seems, is hoping that Flock can become similarly indispensable in our increasingly tech-shaped social environment. By threatening us with the violent fantasies of an unsurveilled world, he is pushing something that strikes me as the antithesis of safety: a community ethic founded on suspicion, a closely monitored world with no exit. But, unlike internet data mining or nebulous government intelligence gathering, A.L.P.R. cameras are both visible and tangible, literal black boxes perched high on street poles, designed to watch us. Such tools of mass surveillance no longer feel shrouded in mystery: they are visual reminders of the endangerment of our anonymity and privacy, a monument to our inescapably technocratic society. Langley may have us believe that he is most interested in public safety, but Beck highlights a more obvious impulse behind the perpetuation of technology like Flock: “The motivations behind Silicon Valley’s pursuit of mass surveillance and bulk data collection don’t need investigating,” he writes. “They did it for the money.” As private equity continues to pour resources into Flock, and as its cameras multiply across the country, questions will persist about how much compromise, sacrifice, and trade-off we can withstand before nothing is left of us to give away. ♦