In the United States, there’s practically no escaping from mass surveillance company Flock Safety’s 120,000 license plate reading cameras spread across 49 states.
The company has partnered with 6,000 law enforcement agencies and 1,000 private customers, leading to terrifying false arrests and even crooked cops stalking innocent women. Just last week, 404 Media reported that the Flock had been planning to infiltrate the dash cams of Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to scan license plate numbers of nearby vehicles at unprecedented scale.
In short, it’s no wonder people are being celebrated for physically cutting down Flock’s surveillance towers as the controversy surrounding privacy and civil rights continues to grow. At least 54 cities across the US have voted to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock’s automatic license plate readers since the beginning of the year, highlighting a major PR crisis for the company.
Consequently, Flock CEO Garrett Langley is now in full damage control mode. The narrative he’s pushing: that it’s all a big misunderstanding. In a new interview, he told Bloomberg that “we’re not Big Brother” — definitely not a thing that Big Brother would say, right? — and that “we’re focused on protecting people.”
