Imagine you run a company that is, fairly unambiguously, in the controversy business. Your product is a network of automatic license plate readers that photograph every car that drives past — plate, color, make, model — and build a timestamped log of where everyone goes. Local police can query that log without a warrant, and because you, unlike your competitors, have stitched the cameras into one national network — around 80,000 cameras by a recent count — a cop in one state can search another state’s cameras entirely. Your customers love this. A growing number of everyone else does not. Dozens of cities have canceled their contracts with you over the last 18 months. Reporters keep finding that your cameras were used for immigration enforcement lookups and, in one case in Texas, to search nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion. What do you do?
If you are Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock, one answer, apparently, is: get onstage at a police chiefs’ conference and explain that the backlash is not real. Joseph Cox at 404 Media obtained leaked audio of Langley telling an audience of police chiefs on Sunday — in a fireside chat with David Rausch, the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, at the IACP conference running Saturday to Tuesday in Orlando — that the viral criticism of his company is bot-driven astroturfing. “Somebody was paying for [the social media posts and] stopped paying for it,” Langley said. “Social media chatter on Flock is down about 95 percent from July. It went down 50 percent last week when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Literally 50 percent overnight.”
There is a lot going on in that paragraph, so let me just flag the main thing: the theory that Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers meaningfully disrupted internet bot activity has been disproven, and 404 Media describes Langley’s version of it as made “without evidence.” Langley pressed on anyway: “It’s anonymous bots, and so it is not real. Inorganic activity has led to organic activity, but when I look at protests across the country, it is the same people with the same signs and the same message. That’s not normal. That’s not organic at all.”
I want to sit with that last claim for a second, because it has the structure of an unfalsifiable argument. If lots of different people object to your product with lots of different messages, that’s just your critics. But if lots of different people object to your product with a consistent message — “we don’t want license plate cameras logging everyone’s movements,” say — then the consistency itself is proof of coordination. Same signs, same message: not organic. The complaint booth is open, but the only complaints that count are the incoherent ones.
Langley also offered a theory of crisis communications, which is that he shouldn’t have one. Flock has been through an extended stretch of damage control as the criticism grew — including an apology from Langley for calling DeFlock, a group that maps the locations of Flock cameras, a “terroristic organization.” In the audio, he suggested the apologizing was the mistake. “I give my wife a lot of credit. She was, like, you should never apologize,” he said. “Sure, people make mistakes. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the last nine years. I made a lot of mistakes this summer. But we do good work.”
“Never apologize” is, to be fair, a consistent strategy, and consistency appears to be something Langley values in a message. He’d also like off the media circuit entirely: “The media gets to say whatever they want to say about you,” he said, adding, “I’d like to never do media again if that’s possible. I don’t know if any chiefs can tell me.” The ask there is worth pausing on. The CEO of a company whose entire business is a frictionless, warrantless database of the movements of hundreds of millions of people would like, personally, to become harder to observe. He would like a smaller public footprint. He is crowdsourcing tips on opting out of scrutiny, from a room full of chiefs, at an event — per the conference schedule — billed as examining “the opportunities, challenges, and public debate surrounding the technology [ALPRs], including issues related to privacy, transparency, governance, data use, and community trust.”
Sure. Transparency was on the agenda, for the cameras.
The backdrop to all of this is that the scrutiny Langley wants to escape has been unusually concrete. 404 Media’s reporting on Flock — including its revelation last year that local cops were running lookups in the system for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — helped set off a national argument over whether communities want the cameras on their roads or, as the outlet puts it, inside their children’s gymnastics classes. Flock has become something close to a meme on TikTok and Instagram; some opponents have vandalized, destroyed or reverse-engineered the cameras, and the government has been monitoring anti-Flock social media accounts and even flagging turnout at city council meetings. The debate has reached Capitol Hill, where multiple lawmakers — an ideologically improbable list of them — have proposed bills that would ban or sharply restrict the network. This is, one notes, the sort of organic, cross-partisan, legislative response that Russian data centers traditionally struggle to produce, drone strike or no.
Langley, though, thinks the storm passes. “Whenever this industry finds a highly effective tool, it has to go through this period of intense debate. But then you get on the other side,” he said. “I think right now we’re not at the bottom, but we’re real, dang, near close to it and about to come back up on the other side.”
Which is one way to describe a surveillance company’s situation: almost through the valley. Another way is to note that the company did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment, that its CEO wants to stop doing interviews, and that its main read on the public is that the public isn’t real. Meanwhile, per the conference schedule, Flock competitor Axon threw a party at the Hard Rock Cafe on Sunday night. Somebody in this industry is reading the room.