Flim Flammy Flock CEO Garrett Langley: I Met All 9 Garretts So You Don't Have To | Episode 2
The short version: Denise's Take digs into Flock CEO Garrett Langley's shifting public persona, from calling critics "terrorists" to backpedaling months later.
Our Take
Denise's Take is doing something a lot of tech journalism forgets to do: paying attention to how a CEO talks when he thinks the cameras (ironic, we know) aren't really watching. In this episode, she tracks Garrett Langley's own words over time — the "terrorists" comment aimed at critics, walked back eight months later once the PR math stopped working. That kind of flip isn't a gaffe, it's a pattern. When the man running the largest private ALPR network in the country treats pushback from residents and privacy advocates as an existential threat rather than a normal part of democratic accountability, that tells you something about how the company views the public it's surveilling.
The detail about outsourcing "AI" analysis to gig workers in the Philippines is worth sitting with too. Flock has spent years selling the narrative that its system is a sleek, automated crime-fighting machine. If real people overseas are quietly doing the pattern-matching work marketed as artificial intelligence, that's not just a labor story — it's a transparency problem. Communities approving these contracts, and the drivers whose plates get logged thousands of times a year, deserve to know who and what is actually behind the "AI" label, not just the sales deck.
Credit to Denise's Take for keeping receipts on a company that relies heavily on friendly messaging and soft local-news coverage. If you want to see whether one of these cameras is already clocking your daily commute, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back at a city council meeting, our take-action page has a starting point.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Denise's Take, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.