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Flock Safety’s CEO Garrett Langley has publicly backtracked after referring to non-violent activists as “terroristic,” telling Forbes his language went too far as a nationwide pushback against the company’s license-plate reader network gains momentum. The story has become a flashpoint between a company selling public-safety tech and citizens worried about a surveillance apparatus expanding into everyday life.
Make no mistake: Flock is not a mom-and-pop operation — it has grown into a multibillion-dollar surveillance behemoth whose cameras and data-sharing networks now blanket thousands of communities, and opponents have organized mapping projects and public campaigns to expose their footprints. Those grassroots efforts, like crowdsourced maps that show where cameras are installed, have rattled municipal customers and put the company under intense scrutiny.
Langley’s off-the-cuff attacks on critics weren’t born in a vacuum; reporting shows he and others at the company used stark language in internal communications, painting critics as threats to policing and public safety. That rhetoric only hardened resistance, because ordinary Americans don’t respond well when private firms and their executives try to silence scrutiny with labels and legal pressure.
The backlash has had real consequences: several cities and counties are rethinking or cancelling contracts, and state-level measures are moving to rein in automated license-plate readers after concerns about privacy and mission creep. Voters and local officials — not tech bros in Silicon Valley — should decide how surveillance is used in their towns, and recent legislative actions prove that local control is fighting back.
Conservatives who care about safe streets and free citizens should be skeptical of both unaccountable surveillance and pious corporate sanctimony. Flock’s official statements defending their practices do not erase the damage done by a CEO who equated civic pushback with terrorism; accountability and transparency are common-sense fixes that protect both law-abiding communities and civil liberties.
If there is a lesson here for patriots who believe in rule of law and limited government, it is this: support tools that help police fight real crime, but demand strict rules, local control, and unforgiving transparency for any private company hoovering up our movements. An apology is a start, but the real work is ensuring these systems operate under clear safeguards written and enforced by elected officials, not CEOs or anonymous activists alone.
