Flock Safety CEO DEFENDS AI surveillance cameras amid backlash

Our Take

When the CEO of a surveillance company has to go on national television to defend his product, that tells you the backlash is working. Garrett Langley sat down with Fox News to reassure viewers that Flock Safety's network of AI-powered license plate readers is all about catching bad guys, not building a nationwide tracking grid. Funny how that pitch always sounds reasonable in a five-minute segment, and much less reasonable once you realize these cameras are logging every car that passes, law-abiding or not, and feeding that data into a searchable database shared across thousands of police departments.

What Langley won't say in a friendly studio chair is how often this system gets misused: officers running plates for personal reasons, departments sharing data with ICE or out-of-state agencies chasing abortion and immigration cases, and audit logs that are supposed to be the safeguard but rarely get checked. 'Trust us' has never been a great privacy policy, and it's an even worse one when the company's entire business model depends on expanding the number of cameras and the amount of data flowing through them.

We give Fox News credit for putting Langley on the spot in front of a national audience, even if the questions stayed pretty soft. The fact that Flock's leadership now feels compelled to do damage control on cable news is a sign the public is waking up to what's actually being installed on their streets. If you want to see how close this technology has crept to your own neighborhood, check out our camera map, and if you're ready to push back, our take-action guide has concrete steps for taking this fight to your local city council.