From “The Free Thought Project”
A leaked corporate playbook is teaching police departments how to sell mass surveillance to the public. The public keeps reading the script back to them, torn to shreds, in the comments.
When the Coral Springs Police Department in Florida decided to get ahead of resident anger over its Flock Safety license plate cameras, it posted a friendly “myth vs. fact” list assuring everyone that the cameras don’t track them personally and that access is tightly controlled. The post drew more than 24,700 comments, almost none of them grateful, with residents asking whether the department had let the vendor write its homework and pointing out the obvious irony that the only people qualified to promise you aren’t being tracked are the ones doing the tracking. Facebook itself eventually slapped a Community Note on the department’s post, informing readers that it hadn’t actually addressed their concerns, and the department had to hold a live public Q&A just to make the story go away.
That kind of faceplant would be easy to write off as a one-department problem, except it is happening in the exact same shape from Florida to Massachusetts to all the way down in Louisiana, which is the tell that something coordinated is going on above the department level. It turns out there is, and now we have the document to prove it.
Last week 404 Media obtained an internal Flock Safety coaching guide built to teach police departments how to talk to their own city councils, and the instruction sitting at the center of it is refreshingly honest about what it actually is: agencies are told to “own the narrative before someone else does,” briefing city managers and council members privately, long before the public ever gets near a microphone. On the objection that matters most, whether these camera networks amount to mass surveillance, the guide doesn’t bother pretending the label is wrong. Flock’s own strategist Jamie Hudson tells departments plainly, “don’t avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you’re not going to convince opponents that it’s not,” which is corporate-speak for concede the point and change the subject because trying to say otherwise would be a glaring lie.
The guide goes on to instruct agencies to have a “carefully scripted presentation” ready before a single resident speaks, and to reframe the cost of the technology away from what taxpayers are paying and toward “the cost of unresolved crime.” The EFF’s Sarah T. Hamid summed it up for 404 Media about as bluntly as you can: Flock isn’t just selling surveillance, it’s scripting the public case for buying it. A private company is writing the government’s talking points for a debate over whether the government should be allowed to watch you, and that alone ought to tell you who this technology is really built to serve.
Once you know the script exists, you start noticing it everywhere, and so, apparently, does everyone else. Augusta Free Press columnist Zach Caudle has pointed out that the recent wave of glossy “community outreach” content flooding police social media accounts isn’t some spontaneous PR instinct, it’s a coordinated smokescreen designed to normalize a dragnet before residents notice their town signed up for one. The guide’s own case studies bear that out. When Oakland, California approved its Flock contract despite more than 140 public comments and formal opposition from its own Privacy Advisory Commission, Flock holds it up as a success story precisely because officials stopped trying to convince the public to trust the technology and pivoted instead to talking about audits and procedure, which is narrative redirection working exactly as designed.
But the script just as often collapses on contact with an audience that has already made up its mind. In Cohasset, Massachusetts, police posted about a stolen car their cameras helped recover, expecting the usual pat on the back, and instead watched the top reply inform them that a nationwide surveillance network is contrary to the guarantees of the Constitution, with the second-highest reply simply agreeing. The Boston Globe reports the same pattern playing out town after town across the state. It’s happening all over the county: when two men from Lafayette, Louisiana were arrested for allegedly tearing down a Flock camera, KLFY’s Facebook post on the arrests drew hundreds of comments, and a clear majority of them weren’t condemning the men who did it, they were condemning the cameras.
This is the part of the playbook Flock can’t script around. City councils can be briefed privately, contract votes can be timed ahead of organized opposition, talking points can be handed out to officers before a single question is asked, but none of that stops thousands of ordinary residents from typing into the same comment thread at the same time, and that thread has effectively become the public hearing city councils keep trying to schedule around it. When Syracuse announced it was dropping Flock for a competing vendor, Axon, expecting the move to buy it some goodwill, the public wasn’t fooled for a second. “People, we need to reign in these big brother authoritarian goons, not let them just change the camera brand,” one commenter wrote in coverage from CNN, which gets at the real objection better than any city press release could: nobody actually cares whose logo is stamped on the pole.
What should genuinely worry the surveillance lobby is that this fight refuses to sort itself along the usual partisan lines. In West Virginia, House Republicans have joined Democrats in opposing Flock camera surveillance, while the state’s own Freedom Caucus is pushing to ban the cameras outright and the ACLU is separately suing the city of Huntington over its $2.1 million Flock contract. Caucus chairman Delegate Chris Anders told Fox News the technology represents “a dramatic expansion of government surveillance that is fundamentally at odds with the Fourth Amendment,” and House Republicans framed their opposition in terms any voluntaryist could sign onto without changing a word, with the caucus declaring that as representatives of a state whose motto is “mountaineers are always free,” they’re committed to protecting citizens from unwarranted government surveillance. Nationally, the picture is the same: at least 80 communities across 28 states have already cut ties with or blocked Flock contracts outright, an alliance of privacy-minded conservatives and civil liberties progressives who agree on almost nothing else but agree completely that they don’t want a permanent record of their own driveway.
Even Flock’s own executives seem to sense the script isn’t holding. Chief legal officer Dan Haley told The Boston Globe that the backlash has actually pushed the company toward building more transparency tools, framing it almost warmly: people are holding their public officials and law enforcement accountable, and using Flock’s own tool to do it, which he called a great thing. Compare that to what CEO Garrett Langley said about the ordinary citizens who started independently mapping Flock’s camera locations for the sake of transparency, doing nothing more than publishing the locations of cameras already sitting on public poles. Langley branded them a “terroristic organization.” One executive calls public accountability a great thing and the other calls it terrorism, which isn’t a messaging slip so much as a company that hasn’t decided whether it views the public as a customer base or a threat while it’s busy writing scripts for police departments to recite.
And the guide’s central selling point, that all this surveillance is worth it because it helps solve crime, just took a direct hit from the FBI’s own numbers. Atlanta has the largest ALPR buildout in the country, with over 5,000 Flock cameras now blanketing the city, so if the “cost of unresolved crime” pitch were going to prove out anywhere, it would be there. Instead, FBI data first reported by the Atlanta Community Press Collective shows the Atlanta Police Department’s clearance rates for homicide, robbery, larceny, and shoplifting all declined between 2021 and 2025, the exact years the camera network exploded across the city. Homicide closures fell from 53.4 percent to 48 percent over that span, and rape closures sat flat at a dismal 37.7 percent, dipping as low as 21.2 percent along the way. The categories that did improve barely moved at all, with aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft ticking up by two- and three-tenths of a percentage point respectively, which is a rounding error for a technology whose entire pitch is reading license plates, and it means Atlanta police were still only solving one stolen car in ten in 2025 despite thousands of ALPRs running around the clock. Len Phillips of the anti-ALPR group DeFlock Atlanta put the actual trade in plain terms, telling ACPC that the public had been asked to accept a significant expansion of surveillance on the promise that it would dramatically improve public safety, and that in reality the whole arrangement turned out to be a one-way transaction.
What all of this exposes is the false premise the entire Flock playbook is built on, that opposition to mass surveillance is a communications problem, a misunderstanding that better messaging and an earlier phone call to the city manager can smooth over. People objecting to a private company logging their car, their movements, and their so-called “vehicle fingerprint” into a searchable, nationwide database aren’t confused about how the technology works, they understand it fine, and their objection is a claim about who owns their own movement and their own property, not a knowledge gap that a myth-versus-fact graphic can close. You cannot focus-group your way out of a Fourth Amendment objection, and you certainly can’t reframe your way past a police department’s own numbers showing the trade didn’t even deliver the safety it promised.
Flock spent real money teaching police departments how to own the narrative before someone else does, and the someone else showed up anyway, by the hundreds of thousands, in comment sections from coast to coast, and in a West Virginia statehouse where Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on much of anything else but agree completely on this. The company wrote the sales pitch and forgot that the public gets a reply button, and the actual lesson in all of it is a hopeful one: showing up to the council meeting, leaving the comment, and calling the delegate is already working in 80 communities and counting. No corporate script beats a public that refuses to stay quiet and roll over while their every move is meticulously monitored and documented.
Flock may very well be the catalyst for a long-awaited revolution in this country. And, so far, it appears to be entirely peaceful and highly effective.
If you want in on it, you don’t have to wait for a leaked corporate memo to know what to do next. Start by finding out what’s already watching you: DeFlock is a free, crowdsourced map of tens of thousands of ALPR camera locations nationwide, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance tracks which local agencies are running Flock and other surveillance tech in the first place. Once you know your city or county is on the list, the ACLU’s “Get the Flock Out” campaign has a state-by-state advocacy network already organizing against these contracts, and its local advocacy toolkit comes with public-records request templates, a model ordinance for community oversight, and sample emails you can send your own city council tonight. None of this requires permission from anyone in Washington. It requires showing up to the next council meeting and doing what the comment sections have already been doing for free.