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Ranked #1 on Hacker News with 142 points and 110 comments.

Garrett Langley, the founder of Flock Safety, frames surveillance as a Faustian bargain. If we want to live in a world where “crime is unsustainable” and “a thing of the past,” in his words, then we must “sacrifice our privacy.” Imagine: no more carjackings or kidnappings, murders or robberies, rapes or vandalism. “Everyone, in my opinion, deserves the right to be safe,” Langley said, during a TED talk last month. “It should not matter the color of your skin, your political affiliation, or your income level.”

Langley, who is thirty-nine, tells the story of creating Flock from the vantage point of a humble vigilante. In 2017, as his neighborhood, in Atlanta, became the target of repeated thefts, he called his local police precinct and pleaded with them to do something. The officer he spoke with lamented a lack of options; the best way to catch the perpetrators was to retrieve their license-plate numbers, but this was possible only if bystanders reported suspicious vehicles on their street, or if officers staked out the neighborhood and caught criminals in the act. Without evidence from such eyewitnesses, or any relevant footage or recognition software to identify the suspects, these carjackers were as good as invisible, stalking the night with impunity. Langley has characterized this conversation as a light-bulb moment. An already accomplished tech entrepreneur with a degree in engineering, he called up two of his former classmates, Matt Feury and Paige Todd, and began creating makeshift license-plate-reading cameras out of Android phones and solar panels that could be affixed to street poles. They sold their first models to homeowners’ associations and private communities but soon attracted the attention of law-enforcement agencies, who were interested not in shutting the project down but in collaborating. By 2020, Flock cameras were popping up on public roads across the country, in partnership with local police departments. Langley describes the company’s rapid growth as a product of organic, word-of-mouth enthusiasm: “That police chief is telling his friends; that mayor is telling her friends.” But, even as Flock was finding its footing, Langley was already envisioning something much larger: a nationwide surveillance network. Early indicators suggested that he was well on his way, and in the intervening years he has grown ever closer to achieving that goal.

The surveillance of it all is conveniently ignored by people in power who laud Flock, and by Langley himself. “I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t want to be safer,” Langley told NBC News, last month. “I’ve travelled the country, and I have not met that person yet.” Langley, it seems, has not been meeting the right people. In recent months, Flock cameras and the larger A.L.P.R. industry have faced mounting backlash, as people around the country, and across the political spectrum, denounce the spread of surveillance infrastructure into public life as undemocratic.

Almost half of Americans oppose A.L.P.R.s , according to the Washington Post, and some of them have taken to damaging, stealing, and defacing Flock cameras at parks, street corners, and traffic stops. When one Georgia sheriff posted a video to Facebook offering a thousand-dollar reward for information about the destruction of a Flock camera in a public park—“it was to keep our kids safe,” he said, from “sex offenders”—commenters ridiculed him, and lauded the assailant as a hero. “Looks like a Constitutional wind blew it over,” one user wrote; “Kudos to the citizen that threw tea in the harbor!” another added. The crowdsourced-data app DeFlock has become a leader in the anti-A.L.P.R. movement, providing a nationwide map of Flock cameras, alongside legal and community resources. Langley called the project “terroristic,” a comment he later tried to walk back. But the public tides seem to have turned against Langley’s hollow rhetoric of safety, and his evocation of terrorism rang alarm bells for anyone fluent in post-9/11 propaganda-speak. Telling people that they need to compromise on privacy is a polite way of framing a nonconsensual takeover; calling a community opposition movement “terroristic,” however, gives the game away. In her 2019 book, “ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism ,” Shoshana Zuboff diagnosed this tension, showing how concessions around privacy expose the paradox within Big Tech’s continual promise of progress: “The precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment.”

Even leaders in the country’s most reliably red states, heeding the cries of their constituents, are now cutting ties with Flock. No one wants to get spied on, it seems, even Blue Lives Matter conservatives. Late last month, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott , instructed state agencies to freeze spending on Flock cameras; a few days later, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, revoked permits for A.L.P.R.s on state highways and ordered their removal. Republican officials in tough-on-crime states such as Indiana, Kansas, and Tennessee have also endorsed A.L.P.R. restrictions, invoking the public’s right to privacy amid growing evidence that the technology is being regularly abused. Police officers have been accused of exploiting Flock to stalk ex-girlfriends, track love interests, and monitor family members. A sheriff’s deputy in Texas searched a data pool of more than eighty thousand Flock cameras to incriminate a woman who had allegedly received a medication abortion. ICE has also tapped Flock data with the help of municipal police departments in order to hunt down and detain immigrants. Langley has distanced himself from such deployments of his product by performing the role of the detached inventor. He told Politico that he viewed his “job as building tools and then giving those which we elect democratically the control to decide how they’re implemented.” He “didn’t want to have” the “responsibility” of regulating his products and making difficult ethical determinations, as he admitted to the BBC .

Listen to Langley talk long enough, and a core contradiction in his messaging emerges: he moralizes about safety and societal progress, about how his company is primed to change the course of human history, yet, when faced with genuine concerns about how his product creates less safe conditions for citizens, by repressing their autonomy, freedom, and right to public space, he holds up his hands, shakes his head, and pretends that none of that is any of his business. Flock cameras are meant to be a munificent gift from him to us. All he’s asking for in return is everything.