Venture Capital Fuels Mass Surveillance Industry Growth #shorts

Our Take

Auditing Reno 911 packs a real point into a short clip: Flock Safety isn't a scrappy public-safety nonprofit, it's a venture-backed company with investors expecting returns. That changes the incentive structure entirely — the goal isn't just solving crimes, it's expanding footprint, locking in recurring subscription revenue, and justifying the next funding round. When the business model depends on more cameras, more cities, more data, "public safety" becomes the marketing pitch, not necessarily the mission.

This matters because the people selling you mass surveillance infrastructure have every incentive to downplay the privacy costs and oversell the crime-fighting wins. Venture capital wants growth metrics, not civil liberties audits. That's exactly why communities need to ask hard questions before signing multi-year contracts, and why independent tracking of where these cameras actually are matters — check our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you.

Credit to Auditing Reno 911 for cutting through the PR language in under a minute. If this clip makes you want to do more than watch, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level, where these contracts actually get approved.