In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real

Posted by Frieren 13 hours ago

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Comment by alexjplant 12 hours ago

> “I give my wife a lot of credit. She was, like, you should never apologize,” Langley said. “Sure, people make mistakes. I've made a lot of mistakes in the last nine years. I made a lot of mistakes this summer. But we do good work.”

So this guy admits he did things that he shouldn't have then contends that he shouldn't have to say sorry for them? Am I reading this right? Isn't the point of an apology to acknowledge the bad outcome and signal to aggrieved parties that the offender will try avoid repeating the negative behavior? If yes and this guy is refusing to do it then what does that say about his world view?

Comment by ryandvm 11 hours ago

Well, at least he won't have to apologize to his wife for throwing her under the bus.

Comment by neya 7 hours ago

Did you miss the part about "But we do good work" ?

In his twisted mind, he did nothing wrong, therefore no apology needed. It's a classic case of delusion mixed with relative morals and pretty much it's the best case of "Rules for thee, but not for me". Because, he blurred his house on Google maps, because, privacy is fundamental...just for him. Fuck everyone else.

Comment by BeetleB 8 hours ago

It's a certain personality type, and nothing new. I've met people like this my whole life. For them, apologizing runs the risk of signaling weakness (and for sure, there's the other personality type that will take that message from an apology). So you can introspect and acknowledge mistakes you made to yourself, and maybe to some confidantes, but never to others.

Comment by kylecazar 8 hours ago

Actually, introspection is out as well

https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-zero-introsp...

Comment by 14u2c 4 hours ago

> Great men of history had little to no introspection.

These people are completely detached from reality. How do they think we know the thoughts of these so called great men?

Comment by fooqux 4 hours ago

> How do they think we know the thoughts of these so called great men?

Many have biographies and autobiographies. Is not hard to spot.

Comment by 14u2c 3 hours ago

Yes, exactly. In other words, they were introspective.

Comment by BeetleB 4 hours ago

He'll say whatever will sell or raise his profile.

His blog in 2007, which people loved:

https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html

Search for "Anti-Todo" and read that section. Then tell me he doesn't believe in some introspection.

Comment by 10111001 8 hours ago

> It's a certain personality type, and nothing new. I've met people like this my whole life. For them, apologizing runs the risk of signaling weakness (and for sure, there's the other personality type that will take that message from an apology). So you can introspect and acknowledge mistakes you made to yourself, and maybe to some confidantes, but never to others.

Is that type narcissism?

Comment by debo_ 6 hours ago

I don't think we need a diagnosis for "asshole"

Comment by applebottomjean 11 hours ago

I mean, it works for the president of the US. I think this attitude is a lot more common than people would like to admit.

Comment by datsci_est_2015 11 hours ago

Only due to the cultural shift over the past 10 years, I would say. You also see it coming out of “streamer” culture, as well as evangelical “prosperity gospel” culture, where any means justify the ends of acquiring wealth - and no shame need be felt.

Comment by Terr_ 9 hours ago

IMO there's an ongoing battle between two very different concepts of what speech means.

1. I speak "X" because I believe X to be true. I am virtuous because I am correct, and honest.

2. I speak "X" because that is is the current signal for demonstrating loyalty in the in-group. I am virtuous because I demonstrate allegiance and membership.

_____

In the first case, you apologize for an error because it's how you get back to a state of being correct. (Or if you don't apologize, it's because you double-down and insist it isn't an error.)

In the second case, you don't apologize because the "error" was merely a strategic misstep of over-triggering the dirty out-group, and anyway caring about them too much is suspicious.

Comment by done_lurking 7 hours ago

I think this is almost at the truth. My view is that everyone values two frequently opposing things: truth and social reward. Whether you behave like (1) or (2) depends on which you value more, and how much pressure is being applied from either direction. I like to think that most people usually value being correct over social reward but this is not always the case, and frequently this difference in values results in totally unproductive arguments. There is no persuading someone who defends a position for social reward. The best thing you can do is try to make their position seem absurd and silly as a social punishment, and hopefully witnesses will think agreeing with you will result in higher social reward. I believe this is also why high profile debates are frequently just two people slinging insults back and forth. This is actually what a significant number of people find persuasive, since it determines whether their social circle will reward them or punish them for their beliefs.

Comment by dexwiz 10 hours ago

Tea party of the early 2010s also played by this rule. Lots of "I cannot recall"s which translates to "I won't even acknowledge wrong doing so why would I apologize?"

Comment by estearum 9 hours ago

MAGA is the cultural descendent of the Tea Party so yeah this tracks. The birth of vice signaling.

Comment by RunSet 10 hours ago

It seems to me that corporate entities will also pay any amount of money rather than admit wrongdoing.

Comment by sodapopcan 8 hours ago

"At least you got your bag" is the saying these days.

Comment by digitaltrees 8 hours ago

This will fade. People are tired of it and will start to ostracize this antisocial behavior.

Comment by applebottomjean 3 hours ago

Gosh I hope you’re right.

Comment by toomuchtodo 11 hours ago

The president is unlikely to feel consequences for the attitude, but Langley likely will as Flock enterprise value trends towards zero.

Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762835 - September 2026 (45 comments)

Cities terminate Flock contracts at record pace in August - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/cities-terminate... - August 28th, 2026

Comment by jmcqk6 10 hours ago

If there is something the president has truly shown me is that just because consequences look inevitable, does not make them so. He exemplifies the ability to avoid consequences and responsibility.

I only trust that consequences will arrive when they actually arrive.

Comment by someguyiguess 9 hours ago

He isn’t avoiding consequences. Only delaying them.

Comment by philipov 9 hours ago

If he can delay them long enough that he dies of old age first, he will have avoided them.

Comment by R1D3R 8 hours ago

No, he is avoiding them. He was found guilty of 34 felonies related to election interference in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. Judge Juan Merchan declined to sentence him to any punishment whatsoever. He was then re-elected president. He will never face any consequences for those crimes.

The Supreme Court has ruled that (Republican) presidents are above the law. Official actions can't be prosecuted, but you have to ask the court what official means on a case-by-case basis, making the ruling implicitly partisan. Trump will thus never face consequences for his crimes in office.

Trump is an admitted (Access Hollywood) and convicted (E Jean Carroll) sexual predator. He has paid several million dollars to E Jean Carroll for raping her but that is the extent of any consequence he has suffered. He continues to be president.

Comment by tw04 9 hours ago

I highly doubt apologizing would’ve had any effect on the outcome. He never had any intention of changing the direction of the company.

Comment by someguyiguess 9 hours ago

Let’s hope so

Comment by moomoo11 7 hours ago

this is honestly why i don't trust guys who are "wife guys" (also extends to "family guys")

aka the guys who bring up their wife all the time regardless of the situation.

its really not masculine and makes me trust that "man" less

billions of people have spouses. it isn't a big deal. stop bringing them in as a deflection mechanism to soften whatever shit they're gonna say next lol

Comment by bko 10 hours ago

I think his point is that the people that are against the technology will never change their mind, regardless of what you do to assuage them. It's a lost cause.

Everyone and every business makes mistakes. We don't go on an apology tour every time we make a mistake. On the net he believes he's doing good in this world.

For instance, a mistake he spoke about was not providing strict enough guards on operators, allowing them to conduct unlawful searches. He's since corrected that and looks for new ways to restrict and audit platform access. What's the point of dwelling on this? Is the anti-flock lunatic cutting down cameras going to read the press release and think "gee, Flock is turning a new leaf", obviously not. It just adds more fuel to the fire taking away from the good work they do.

Comment by preg_match 9 hours ago

Correct, flock is broken at a conceptual level and that means really no amount of implementation details will fix it.

That doesn’t mean that flock should just keep doing what they’re doing. Quite the contrary - flock should not exist. It is anti-American to its core, and there’s no salvaging it. Flock can only exist if it changes in every way possible.

Providing private mass-surveillance as a product for our government is, fundamentally, broken. It’s not a good idea, and no amount of twiddling will make it good. Similar to how running a hit-man business is fundamentally bad. Doesn’t matter how many background checks I do on the hitmen. Doesn’t matter if I extra triple check they’re only murdering bad people. The concept itself is immoral and deplorable.

Comment by jptlnk 8 hours ago

hear hear. imo the constitution should be read as eyes open tradeoffs. the 4th amendment is an clear one and this is a great case for it: its not that flock couldnt theoretically reduce crime. it that the reduction isnt worth giving up the power to the government to do so.

Comment by lazystar 7 hours ago

this. and note that while it is likely true that bots were driving awareness of the anti-flock campaign, that does not mean that the anti-flock campaign is wrong - in his cognitive dissonance, he is affirming the consequent.

Comment by lopsotronic 10 hours ago

Flock's value proposition is essentially Uber's, except instead of evading taxi regs Flock lets your LEOs evade the need to get warrants.

Comment by cosmicgadget 8 hours ago

> looks for new ways to restrict and audit platform access. What's the point of dwelling on this?

Well, for one, seeing if anything changes. "Auditing tools" could be the loud part and "that are completely unused" is the soft part.

This is definitely not the person to be afforded the benefit of doubt.

Comment by pesus 10 hours ago

If allowing unlawful searches to be done is just a little whoopsie, then all the actions by those "lunatics" you're complaining about are even less than a little whoopsie.

Comment by monkeyshine 10 hours ago

Flock does not do good work.

Flock enables mass surveillance of a type that destroys liberty, and is opposed by sensible people who understand freedom, history, and who respect the brave men and women who have fought for our rights.

Flock is defended exclusively by pathetic, weak little men who are afraid of their own shadows, and who (wrongly) believe that unchecked government power is a good thing.

Comment by 010ED67913 10 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by o2359 10 hours ago

Have you ever lived in a red state? In a rural area? "Never apologize, especially when you know you're wrong" is a foundational principle in many cultures and households.

Comment by Loughla 9 hours ago

I live in a very rural area, and most people are sort of overly apologetic about their mistakes. The ones that refuse to acknowledge their mistakes or apologize are what we call "assholes".

In a rural community, being labeled as an asshole has real repercussions. A neighbor down the road is moving away because of this. He called the cops on a guy who was trying to catch some horses that got out of their pen when the man looking for his horses pulled into his driveway to then back out and turn around. The place he bought was my neighbor's grandpa's farm. There was an old barn with a wooden door inside that my neighbor asked to buy from him (his grandpa had carved his and the grandma's initials on it when they were dating). So the asshole said sure, for $25k. When my neighbor said no, the asshole burned the door. He's an asshole, and because of that nobody would help him when he needed help with his crops because his combine died.

Now he's leaving. Community is important when there's not much of it around.

But I digress. I'm not sure geography or politics has anything to do with emotional maturity.

Comment by runjake 10 hours ago

I live in a rural area in a red state and it's quite the opposite. People are perhaps maybe a bit too apologetic. I think the unwillingness to apologize or acknowledge oneself as wrong is a symptom of emotional immaturity rather than political persuasion.

Comment by jmcqk6 10 hours ago

It is more contextual than a simple binary, especially the emotional context. If the event triggers their shame more than their identity, you get the larger than required apologies. If their identity is the primary thing that is triggered, they will get defensive and double down. It's not just a rural thing.

Comment by 306bobby 9 hours ago

Yeah that's just human nature I fear. Nothing to do with politics or geography

Crazy to be self aware of it and blatantly not give af

Comment by cosmicgadget 8 hours ago

It can be both. Never admitting fault is very much core to MAGA but it's somewhat neutral with other major political ideologies. Being emotionally immature may also make people remorse-averse.

Comment by whoanoway 8 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by asveikau 10 hours ago

This attitude is also very common for law enforcement or prosecutors.

Comment by mitkebes 10 hours ago

In some careers, admitting fault can open you up to lawsuits or additional consequences.

Comment by asveikau 7 hours ago

Yes, but in the case of prosecutors it can be very messed up. When someone is wrongfully convicted and there is very unambiguous exonerating evidence, prosecutors will fight overturning convictions.

It's bad enough to wrongfully send someone to prison, but to keep fighting for wrongful imprisonment when it's shown they made a mistake is downright evil.

Comment by someguyiguess 9 hours ago

This is the mantra of blue cities too.

Comment by drivingmenuts 10 hours ago

As is throwing your wife under the bus when you get challenged.

Comment by everdrive 13 hours ago

Better not prosecute people who cut down the cameras then, since that's part of the non-real backlash.

Comment by adjejmxbdjdn 11 hours ago

True. Such people clearly don’t exist and it’s obviously a company product failure and the company should be paying fines and penalties.

Comment by rconti 11 hours ago

> Langley suggested during the session with Rausch that eventually the opposition to Flock will die down: “Whenever this industry finds a highly effective tool, it has to go through this period of intense debate. But then you get on the other side. I think right now we’re not at the bottom, but we’re real, dang, near close to it and about to come back up on the other side.”

So every other law enforcement tool has also been subjected to russian troll farms and eventually the fake furor dies down?

Or is he admitting that those of us who don't stand to make billions off of a private surveillance network are actually the real humans here?

Comment by BoxwoodSeed 12 hours ago

Historically it was an easy step going from "these people are not real" to "these people are now dead".

Comment by bko 11 hours ago

What does this mean? Flock CEO will start... killing people?

Comment by fedpost 8 hours ago

He already has been. Flock cameras routinely draw the police into situations where they're not need and cause shootings/high speed chases that end in dead bodies.

Comment by natebc 9 hours ago

In yesterday's video from Benn Jordan [0] there was a Flock employee that told 911 multiple times "I'm not sure if they are armed." when reporting that a few people were filming from the perimeter of a Flock office building in Georgia.

He also said several times that "we're under lockdown here."

/shrug Seems like he was certainly trying to cause some form of harm.

Flock sucks.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP5GDiLZ1Nw

https://youtu.be/OP5GDiLZ1Nw?t=1130 if you want a timestamp.

Comment by buildsjets 9 hours ago

If it generates profit, yes.

Comment by ted_bunny 6 hours ago

SWATting, but with a lot more resources

Comment by vkou 9 hours ago

Do you think he will shut down LEO access to its systems if the government decides to have a purge of the undesirables, or two?

Comment by alterom 11 hours ago

>What does this mean? Flock CEO will start... killing people?

No, he'll merely facilitate that, at scale.

IBM technically didn't kill any Jews too in WW2[1].

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...

Comment by lawn 10 hours ago

Many of the Nazis didn't kill people themselves, they just helped in the process.

Comment by nilamo 11 hours ago

More like another reason for cops to mow down protesters. True Citizens would never protest something so obviously beneficial to everyone /s

Comment by bko 11 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by nkrisc 11 hours ago

Good did not hit an officer with her car, and was driving away from him when she was shot through the side window of her car.

Pretti was legally armed and was shot and killed while face down on the ground.

This is all corroborated with video and contradicts statements from the involved federal agents. Charitably they were “mistaken”, realistically they lied to cover themselves.

There are many more instances where federal agents lied about what happened and their accounts were later refuted by eyewitness testimony and video. Just in those cases the victims did not die. Look up all the cases that were thrown out of court because government’s case rested on falsehoods.

Comment by bko 11 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by nilamo 10 hours ago

How are people so chill about police killing anyone? These people are literally paid by the community, to protect the community. Anyone dying at their hands is an insane level of failure, we shouldn't need hundreds of examples when every single instance should be an outlier in the data.

Comment by pesus 10 hours ago

They either believe it could never happen to them and/or believe the protestors deserve it. Usually both.

Comment by malfist 10 hours ago

Following your logic, how many people must the police murder without provocation before it constitutes "mowing down". Please, give an exact number

Comment by nkrisc 7 hours ago

These aren’t the only two protesters shot by federal agents in the past year, they’re just two that died from it. More have been shot and killed, but they were targets of ICE stops, not protesters.

There are more cases of people being shot by ICE agents, then charged, then charges dropped because agents lied and/or evidence was tampered with or destroyed.

I watched the videos of Good and Pretti being killed. It looked like vengeful executions than anything else. It should deeply bother everyone of any political party.

Comment by cxvrfr 10 hours ago

What's questionable about them? If people in power see that they can callously murder people and everyone is as apathetic what do you think will happen next?

Comment by alterom 11 hours ago

>Do cops really "mow down protestors"?

Yes [1].

>The only cases I could find are ...

I am aware that Google's search quality has gone down, but surely not to that extent.

Or, as kids say today: skill issue.

> Alex Pretti who was armed at the time and arguably resisting arrest

> arguably

As argued by the people who killed him, of course.

In any case, ICE are not police, i.e. not cops, so I dunno why you would derail the discussion to ICE if you are talking in good faith.

Cheers.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7331505/

Comment by chasd00 11 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by monkeyshine 10 hours ago

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Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by customguy 11 hours ago

It's everywhere though. Not to detract from the massive problem of mass surveillance, but just recently when that data center in Russia got, and those derpy images of "stats about Russian" bots were circulated, I saw a lot of "the right-wing support is not organic" stuff.

Something is driving people into bubbles so they only talk about the other, never with. And both agree that "centrists", "normies", etc. are the most despicable of all. Seems like a recipe for something.

Comment by datsci_est_2015 10 hours ago

Idk seems like a lot of cross-aisle discussion happens in this forum. The tech world in general is somewhat a clash of cultures across the spectrum from anarchists to neofeudalists.

In fact, just look at this thread…

Comment by twodave 10 hours ago

My experience has been more talking past each other and being downvoted. Which is why I rarely engage anymore.

Comment by atmavatar 11 hours ago

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Comment by Georgelemental 11 hours ago

"Illegal alien" is a term used throughout federal immigration law, e.g. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1366

Comment by atmavatar 11 hours ago

"Alien" is the term referring to the person. "Illegal" is merely a status.

It's arguable that "illegal alien" is itself dehumanizing, implying that a person can be legal or illegal merely by existing, when in reality, it's the actions they perform which are legal or illegal. In this case, the action is entering the country without following proper procedure, which is more like trespassing, except at a country-level rather than individual property level.

Shortening the label to "illegal" removes the last vestige of reference to the target as a person and further cements the idea that a person's existence can be good or bad.

Comment by kadoban 11 hours ago

You are implying that the law cannot be dehumanizing?

Comment by jmcqk6 10 hours ago

That doesn't make it exempt from being dehumanizing. Indeed codified dehumanization is one the primary mechanisms by which it is realized.

Comment by pesus 10 hours ago

The current regime is openly racist and dehumanizing towards many groups, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

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Comment by ribosometronome 11 hours ago

"Illegals" != "Illegal alien"

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Comment by arjie 11 hours ago

That's just some kind of language bifurcation by political affiliation in the US. The right-wing term for immigrants who didn't enter the US through ports with documentation is indeed "illegals", though it seems the word "immigrants" is as pejorative among that crowd. The left-wing term for immigrants, both domestic and international and irrespective of arrival method is "transplant" and is fairly pejorative as well. I don't think "transplant" is any more specifically humanizing.

It's just that documentation-status matters to one, and does not matter to the other.

Comment by TFNA 11 hours ago

"Transplant" is certainly not any kind of mainstream left term in the USA, and this is the first time I have ever heard the claim. The left counterpart of the right's "illegal immigrant" is instead "undocumented immigrant" vel sim.

It is amusing to talk to actual border officials, because the term in their lingo for people running across from Mexico is usually simply "alien", which always makes me think of The X-Files theme tune.

Comment by arjie 9 hours ago

Haha, I have an Alien Number so I'm familiar with that. "Transplant" as the word for "immigrant" is pretty common in coastal California. Here are a few examples that should illustrate:

* The Bold Italic[0] - a popular San Francisco essay magazine talking about transplants

* Eric Adams is quoted by the WaPo prior to announcing his candidacy for mayor[1] (he was eventually elected mayor):

> “Go back to Iowa,” Adams, who is expected to be a top Democratic contender in New York’s 2021 mayoral race, told transplants. “You go back to Ohio! New York City belongs to the people that [were] here and made New York City what it is.”

* Great Replacement Theory is reframed[2]:

> ...multi-decades-old Black businesses and Black-owned or traditionally Black folk-rented homes are being replaced by a new population–some call them transplants.

I think it's pretty common lingo these days on the left. If you ask an LLM what a "transplant" is in the context of people, it can easily describe the term[3]. I say that only to say that it is commonly enough used as such that it is recognizable.

0: https://www.thebolditalic.com/the-last-black-man-in-san-fran...

1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/01/21/adams-brook...

2: https://ourtimepress.com/say-it-aint-so-developers-target-sm...

3: https://claude.ai/share/bf6cfb17-314a-4e4b-b3eb-e99bbed07e86

Comment by TFNA 9 hours ago

It is OK to simply admit that you didn't understand the context in which "transplant" was used and its (ir)relevance to this particular thread. To post three separate replies where you are reaching for a way to avoid admitting this by concocting some fantastical left-right difference, is not convincing anyone otherwise.

Comment by arjie 8 hours ago

I am simply conversing with people who are directly responding to me. But I hear you, and we will likely not encounter each other again on this site.

Comment by delecti 9 hours ago

> It is amusing to talk to actual border officials, because the term in their lingo for people running across from Mexico is usually simply "alien", which always makes me think of The X-Files theme tune.

Along similar lines, it makes me think of Men in Black.

Comment by nemomarx 11 hours ago

Transplant means anyone who moves into your city, in my experience. It has a kind of NIMBY ish or anti gentrification tone, like "NJ transplants don't understand like real new yorkers" but I don't think it refers to immigration specifically.

Comment by arjie 9 hours ago

Exactly, either a domestic or international migrant. While right-wing ire is usually focused on international migrants, left-wing ire doesn't discriminate between domestic/international. It's build the wall rhetoric but oriented more towards localities as opposed to the US as a whole.

Comment by strbean 8 hours ago

transplant isn't inherently pejorative. People who move cities will frequently refer to themselves by this moniker.

I've always literally never heard it used to refer to someone who migrated from another country. Only someone who moved domestically.

Comment by arjie 8 hours ago

> transplant isn't inherently pejorative. People who move cities will frequently refer to themselves by this moniker.

A standard that also covers the n-word.

> I've always literally never heard it used to refer to someone who migrated from another country. Only someone who moved domestically.

Migrants are migrants. Anti-immigration sentiment restricted to domestic immigration alone is nor specifically more acceptable than that for foreigners.

Comment by jmcqk6 10 hours ago

I have never heard the word transplant use that way. I prefer to simply use "immigrants."

I have heard liberals emphasize "undocumented" instead of "illegal" which makes sense to me.

Comment by arjie 9 hours ago

That's normal to say "immigrant" if you're neither right-wing nor aiming to use it pejoratively. The blue-tribe pejorative for immigrant is "transplant".

It's pretty common, I'd say, in the zeitgeist. As an example here's a popular content creator (Conan was on his show): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vQ6TOleoCTY

It's really not that different in use. A right-wing commentator might say "Immigrants need to assimilate and put down roots here, not just bring their own culture here" whereas a left-wing commentator might say (as you see in the above clip, paraphrased): "Transplants need to put down roots here and volunteer to join the community"

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by derbOac 12 hours ago

Clearly a company denying that the public comprises real people with real autonomy should be entrusted with privacy issues.

Comment by zelphirkalt 9 hours ago

It seems to be a typical case of unscrupulous people getting ahead. The more ruthless, the fewer obstacles, the easier they can beat competition. The more they grow, the more they get affirmation of "doing well", which only reinforces their corruption.

Comment by chuckadams 8 hours ago

Yep, Florida ordering you to remove every one of your cameras from state highways didn't happen. Entire states moving to ban your product isn't a thing. And of course there are no tanks in Baghdad.

Comment by beart 7 hours ago

Most of the comments here are focusing on crimes in urban areas. The town I live in has a population of about 6,000. It also has low crime. But the municipal government has installed several flock cameras. I struggle to understand how these benefit me, as a citizen of the town. They definitely make me feel uncomfortable whenever I drive past, knowing that someone, somewhere is likely tracking and cataloguing my movements.

Comment by actionfromafar 7 hours ago

Apparently you are paid to feel that way. Or you aren't real. (According to Flock CEO.)

Maybe Flock isn't real? I mean, if birds aren't real, flocks can't be either.

Comment by tehlike 11 hours ago

The anti-Americanness Langley exhibits boggles my mind.

Comment by j_horvat 10 hours ago

I would say that his views are very in line with modern American values. At least the values of those who actually have power.

Comment by willis936 8 hours ago

More like South Africa. American values are very much against concentration of power. Something those concentrating power will be reminded of.

Comment by fedpost 8 hours ago

Time for American 2.0 update/patch/modification/changeset/???

Comment by vkou 9 hours ago

Authoritarianism is as American as sliced bread. It's in the country's bones, starting from its founding, and continuing forward through segregation, the red scares, and into today.

Two years ago, half the voters were explicitly asked if they wanted more of it, and they said 'absolutely'!

Comment by Loughla 7 hours ago

I won't say America is founded on authoritarianism. I will say it's founded in the practice of letting businesses run how they see fit, though, with minimal oversight from the government. . . So flock is doing what we value as a nation, just not for the reasons you claim.

Comment by vkou 6 hours ago

If businesses ran as they saw fit with minimal oversight from the government, the government wouldn't be called in so frequently to use incredible amounts of violence against its subjects.

Comment by tehlike 4 hours ago

The America i believe is the one that gave me 1st, 2nd, and 4th amendment. I will vote to keep it that way. Even if that means voting for a different party every time, including libertarian. Sucks that there's no good option, and there's only 1 guy in the congress i believe in his honesty.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by tastyface 9 hours ago

Flock (YC S17)

Comment by Zigurd 11 hours ago

The Flock CEO is another example of investor blindness to founder weirdness. It used to be a positive signal if a founder was a bit odd. But compared to current tech industry leaders, what's odd?

Garrett Langley scares the normies. That's fine if your audience is just cops. But it doesn't go over well with the public at large. By many accounts Steve Jobs could be a raging asshole, but he never showed that face to the public. But if the people advising you are accelerationists with a thing for the antichrist, you're going to be clueless about what normal people think of you.

Comment by isoprophlex 10 hours ago

Is this "unreal backlash" in the room with us right now?

Comment by CGMthrowaway 12 hours ago

As with most antistate issues today, there is a mix of bots/institutional interference (both foreign and domestic), and real people. Both can be true.

Comment by slowin 12 hours ago

Yeah, I don't think so. The backlash is 100% real people. I don't know a single pro-Flock person but I know 100s that want to go take them down.

Comment by mh- 11 hours ago

Unless you've been very careful to only surround yourself with people who share your exact views, you probably do know some. They just don't speak up, because: what's the point debating it with you?

Comment by nkrisc 11 hours ago

Data centers and Flock are the two things uniting left and right protesters.

Comment by zmgsabst 8 hours ago

Also food safety.

For example, community supported agriculture programs cross traditional political boundaries.

Comment by BeetleB 6 hours ago

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/who-likes-flock-ai-cameras-...

35% of Democrats are pro-Flock.

54% of Republicans.

If someone doesn't know a pro-Flock person, he/she is living in a bubble. Agreed with the first responder: You likely know multiple people, but they're scared to reveal themselves.

Comment by slowin 11 hours ago

The vast majority of people are not pro-techno fascism and mass surveillance. I think you'd have to work very hard to find that kind of person. People on the left and the right are very united in their hatred of spy cams.

Comment by xboxnolifes 11 hours ago

I find it very easy to find people who support systems marketed as empowering police to better catch criminals.

Comment by Freedom2 11 hours ago

I think this point is most accurate. I know a few pro-Flock people - most are either working for a YC company or are in the process of their application.

Comment by CGMthrowaway 7 hours ago

>Yeah, I don't think so. The backlash is 100% real people. I don't know a single pro-Flock person but I know 100s that want to go take them down.

That's not a sound refutation. For example, 100% of published opinion can be 100% anti-Floc, while still being composed of 50% real people and 50% astroturf.

Perhaps you misunderstood my comment.

Comment by slowin 7 hours ago

You made the claim that it's bots, so you're going to need to provide some sort of proof of astroturfing. It's wholly unnecessary since the vast majority of real people despise Flock.

Comment by bko 11 hours ago

I am a pro-flock real person. I'll get down-voted and likely flagged for saying this so you may believe I don't exist but I do.

Crime has gone down considerably in the last two years.

> The declines were reflected in several of the FBI’s long-term measures. The 2025 robbery rate of 49.4 per 100,000 was the lowest in 20 years, while the rape rate of 36.1 was the lowest since 2012. The murder rate was the lowest in the past 20 years.

I imagine giving police the ability to apprehend violent criminals through technology is driving this reduction in crime. Not a stretch. You can think that this is not worth the tradeoff, but if you think giving police a tool like Flock will not have an impact of apprehension of criminals you have your head in the sand.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/violent-crime-falls-at-hist...

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/flock-mass-surveillance-and...

Comment by arjie 11 hours ago

Supervisor Matt Dorsey in San Francisco is pro-camera-enforcement and I was glad to be able to meet him and thank him for his efforts both for speed cameras and for ALPR in San Francisco. For my part, I'm not wedded to Flock so if people get upset about the brand name, I'm happy if the government uses Axon instead to provide the same outcome. The use of drone policing, ALPR, and speed cameras has substantially improved safety in San Francisco.

Comment by derektank 10 hours ago

Yeah, I am generally pro-surveillance of public spaces and public property, but I think Flock has taken a particularly careless approach to the project. I would much rather have another vendor simply sell the cameras to the municipality and have the government administer the network, rather than have a company like Flock retain the data themselves and make it available to unknown third parties. You can maintain public oversight much more directly that way.

Comment by nemomarx 11 hours ago

Take flock out of some cities and see if their crime trend continues. I expect you'll find the cameras really don't move the needle much.

Comment by bko 11 hours ago

In Houston, three cameras near an attempted child abduction had been cut down. Police Chief Noe Diaz said investigators consequently could not use them to identify and track the suspect's red sedan.

Why do anti-flock activists insist that it doesn't help police apprehend criminals. It obviously does. It only makes sense that a police officer having access to cameras that track license plates in real time would help apprehend criminals escaping capture. Come on, you don't seriously believe this. What would have to be true about the world, police, criminals etc of this not to be true.

https://www.police1.com/alprs-in-focus/why-cities-are-rethin...

Comment by unbalancedevh 10 hours ago

The issue, of course, isn't how cameras can be used to help apprehend criminals. It's that they can be abused by people who have access to them, in ways we haven't even imagined yet. People don't trust that appropriate safeguards are in place, and it's not clear how to defend against abuses, or that it's even possible. In a society that supposedly prioritizes liberty, privacy, and innocence until proven guilty, such technology should be treated with maximum suspicion.

Comment by cosmicgadget 8 hours ago

> Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz said three cameras near the reported attempted kidnapping of a third-grade student had been cut down before investigators could use them to identify the suspect’s vehicle.

That's such a weird way to phrase it. The cameras were, presumably, cut down before the incident?

Comment by rconti 4 hours ago

I'm sure they can help individual cases. It's less clear to me that surveillance societies have less crime. Criminals adjust.

Maybe if you can point to the crime-free paradises that have been enabled by pervasive surveillance, you'd have more people on your side. If you're just selectively pointing out individual cases where they helped, you're not really proving the overall point.

Comment by 10 hours ago

Comment by driverdan 9 hours ago

Correlation is not causation. Do you actually have any data or research to support your claim from an unbiased source? A far right blogger is far from unbiased.

FWIW Benn Jordan, who has his own biases, analyzed this data in his latest video and found it had no impact on most crimes but did have a small improvement in clearance rates for one category.

Comment by rconti 11 hours ago

Have you tried zooming out on the stats at all, or analyzing any other variables? You realize there was a crazy spike in crime in the wake of the pandemic, right? Certainly a reversion to the mean might happen alongside the implementation of cameras.

My own city's police (Redwood City, CA) credited Flock cameras with an increase in the clearance rate from 12% to 13%. Pardon me if I don't go out and celebrate.

Comment by felixgallo 11 hours ago

You can imagine that, but at least in my city, no, crime was going down before Flock, and continued its trajectory; Flock did not cause that. Same for, e.g., SF.

Comment by bko 11 hours ago

SF has (had?) a lot of car thefts.

Suppose there was a technology where, when you report your car as stolen, police would be able to track exactly where this car is currently and it's history over the last 2 weeks.

You don't think this would have ANY impact of police being able to apprehend the thief?

Comment by simoncion 10 hours ago

> You don't think this would have ANY impact of police being able to apprehend the thief?

Speaking as a San Francisco resident: No. SF cops give nearly zero shits about recovering stolen property.

Speaking as a USian: Even if it did lead the cops right to the car and provided unimpeachable evidence that what the footage showed was a theft, rather than something legal, I still don't want these electronic mass-surveillance systems to be deployed. Dragnet surveillance is plainly unacceptable.

If -somehow- we can magically build such surveillance systems to be completely unable to provide data that's unrelated to a search warrant or other such court order, I'd reconsider my stance. However, building such a system is simply impossible.

Comment by bko 8 hours ago

You hold such a ridiculous position I don't know how to argue with it. Cops don't care about crime or stolen property? Why have cops at all? It's like arguing w a third grader

Comment by simoncion 7 hours ago

> Cops don't care about crime or stolen property?

Cops have limited resources, so they must prioritize. Even the Supreme Court acknowledges this.

Because of this truth, SF cops give nearly zero shits about recovering stolen property. It has been decided that they spend their limited resources elsewhere.

> Why have cops at all?

Yeah, that's a really good question that folks who are poorly-served by their federal, state, and local police forces often find themselves asking. Folks who are well-served generally ask themselves that question far less often.

Comment by prmoustache 9 hours ago

This would only work for a few months until car thieves start having a habit of mounting different plates.

Obviously the perfect crime is harder to do in an orwellian society. But happiness and freedom too so nothing good is gained from that.

Comment by bko 8 hours ago

Or they move to a neighborhood not patrolled by flock?

Comment by izme 7 hours ago

Is there a reason you say "patrolled by" and not "surveilled by" ?

Comment by newspaper1 10 hours ago

This is a myopic view of the situation. Suppose you had $100M to spend. What would lower crime more:

1. Helping to shelter the homeless, deal with mental health issues and make sure people are properly fed.

2. Build a mass surveillance network at the expense of all of the above.

Regardless, mass surveillance is far worse than any amount of car theft.

Comment by Amezarak 9 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by newspaper1 9 hours ago

Incorrect on all counts: https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/impact-of-social-welfar...

Obviously investing in social health improves crime rates. That's just common sense (and backed by all historical data).

Comment by Amezarak 9 hours ago

About 20% of US GDP is social spending. What percentage of GDP will get us where we need to be? Why does California have so many notorious problems when, compared with many other states, its social spending is so generous?

Social systems are not as simple as "give people more money", particularly when millions of people have already been socialized into criminality. Thinking this is a total misunderstanding. Most criminals are not stealing to get bread to feed their family. They commit crimes because a) it's fun b) it's what their peers are doing / needed for their social standing and c) it beats working for a living. Yes, a well-socialized conscientious person would never do this except in cases of severe hardship - but that's not the reality of what's happening.

Comment by newspaper1 9 hours ago

California notoriously does not house the homeless nor feed them, leading to massive amounts of crime by people with mental illness having to live on the street. It also has some of the worst wealth inequality on the planet. When a 1 bedroom shack costs >$1M, you've basically taken a sledge hammer to any concept of a society.

20% of US GDP goes mostly to social security, imagine how much crime we'd have if we didn't spend that and every senior citizen had to scavenge for food! I would say at least 99% of of the money we spend on police and the military should instead go to social support and local infrastructure improvements.

Comment by felixgallo 8 hours ago

Suppose there was a pre-pardoned, unaccountable, masked band of brownshirts in Temu youtuber military wannabe gear, stalking the streets with impunity, terrorizing people who aren't white, holding down American citizens and emptying guns into their backs. Suppose they have been given access to every database that the US has at its disposal, as well as sweeping powers to demand data from anyone they choose.

Suppose Flock's license agreement additionally said that they could give data to anyone they wanted to, as it does.

Suppose the leader of these brownshirts frequently talks about his opponents, protestors, etc., as enemies of the state and domestic terrorists.

How great do you feel about this nonexistent mystery technology of yours now?

Comment by bko 8 hours ago

Congrats! You just hit the clever hypothetical on my anti flock bingo card!

Step one: find two things that differ in nearly every relevant respect

Step two: identify the broad category they share.

Step three: ask, “If you accept one, why don’t you accept the other?”

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/anti-flock-activist-bing...

Comment by tanjtanjtanj 6 hours ago

So your position is that if you can predict someone's arguments (valid or otherwise) before they make them that those arguments are less valid? Maybe if you had pre-countered them but looking at your comments here and the linked blurb that doesn't seem to be the case.

Comment by felixgallo 7 hours ago

Unlike your hypothetical, mine is actual.

Comment by slowin 11 hours ago

The police (and larger state apparatus) turning antagonistic toward the public will certainly increase crime, not decrease it. When cops go to war with literally everyone, the "law" will cease to apply in any meaningful way. A small sample of this is people cutting down Flock cameras. That's a "crime" that wouldn't even exist had these mass surveillance networks not been constructed in the first place.

Comment by bko 11 hours ago

> A small sample of this is people cutting down Flock cameras. That's a "crime" that wouldn't even exist had these mass surveillance networks not been constructed in the first place.

You can't destroy public property because you disagree with a policy. Let me give you an example.

Suppose I am against abortion. Firebombing an abortion clinic is a "crime" that wouldn't exist had these places that kill unborn children not been constructed in the first place.

Do you get it now?

Comment by newspaper1 10 hours ago

Abortion is not a 90/10 issue. Jaywalking is a more accurate analogy. When you turn normal people into "criminals", the law ceases to have meaning.

Comment by zer0x4d 11 hours ago

Because the rest of the people just don't care about it and understand the technology has been a thing for a long time. You know 100 people that want to take them down but you probably also know 1000 people who don't care and aren't even speaking about it. People just became obsessed with one company, then some agitators sprinkled in a healthy dose of antisemitism plus conspiracies, now you got the public lynching of a company. It's unfortunate.

Don't get me wrong, Flock did have and still has some issues, just like any other company. They've been trying to fix the issues. But, as far as I'm concerned, the positives heavily outweigh the negatives, even though there are rare cases of abuse.

Comment by felixgallo 11 hours ago

I ran an in depth study of Flock for my city. It's been deployed here for several years. What I found is that there is no statistically significant correlation between Flock being installed and any reduction in any kind of crime. I suspect my city is not unique in this regard.

Flock rode a post-COVID wave of general crime reduction and claimed responsibility for it, but it appears that the only meaningfully effective use of Flock is for stalking, terrorizing immigrants, assembling opposition dossiers, and parallel construction.

Comment by chasd00 11 hours ago

It doesn't seem to me like Flock would reduce crime but increase the rate at which crime's are solved. Maybe a better stat would be median age of a criminal case involving a vehicle before and after Flock was deployed.

edit: i dont know if any stat would work at the city level, the advantage of Flock is the network works across state/county lines. So someone committing a crime in one state and then driving all night can still be located two states away without police departments having to coordinate a search.

Comment by felixgallo 8 hours ago

There is one independent national study ( https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/independent-study-vehicle-t... ) which indicates vehicle thefts fell 11% following a flock installation.

However, the vast majority of vehicle thefts self-resolve ( 85% of passenger vehicle thefts are recovered, a third within one day ). Flock's apparent impact was that vehicles came back on average 1/4 day sooner; it did not appear to impact the rate at which they were recovered, so your instinct would be incorrect.

Additionally, vehicle theft has been steadily decreasing year-over-year since COVID, and it's possible/likely that the effects seen in the study were continuations of that trend rather than anything attributable to flock. The paper even says as much -- that the effect began in the months preceding flock installation.

Intuitively, you'd think that flock cameras would help a lot. I would think so too! But at least in my small-to-mid-sized city, they don't noticeably help at all with any kind of crime.

https://ij.org/how-flock-is-trying-to-take-credit-for-the-po...

Comment by rootusrootus 11 hours ago

> healthy dose of antisemitism

Uh, what?

Comment by red_candle_wax 9 hours ago

Its the new "terrorism", "fascism", and "communism" but all rolled up in one for brain dead propagandists.

You can kinda just apply it to anything you dont like to paint it as inherently bad.

Comment by wyre 11 hours ago

I think its more likely that people don't know about Flock, not that they don't care.

Comment by slowin 11 hours ago

Antisemitism? Public lynching? We're talking about a fascist spy company not a human being.

Comment by CodingJeebus 12 hours ago

The concern with this is that it gives any company/government/etc. latitude to plant paid protestors or bot traffic in order to undermine opposition with greater efficacy in the AI era. Intelligence agencies have understood this tactic for many years.

Comment by api 11 hours ago

Why you shouldn't hang out in echo chambers, at least not exclusively. I'm sure in this guy's echo chambers it's all great.

Comment by mrdependable 9 hours ago

This guy knows he is full of shit.

Comment by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 12 hours ago

"Paid protesters"

Every accusation is a confession. Flock pays for support. They have a marketing department and they tell cops what to tell elected officials to think.

Comment by dylan604 11 hours ago

Can you remind me where I can submit my invoices to get paid for my protests? I must have misplaced my memo

Comment by boringg 12 hours ago

It would be funnier if it was paid protesters that they had paid so that they could say that.

Comment by axus 11 hours ago

Those are FBI agents, not Flock contractors

Comment by rexpop 12 hours ago

I'm attending in-person local political organizing meetings and we're all just locals concerned about, among other things, Flock.

I would like to personally register my own homegrown, organic, hard-working American backlash.

Comment by verdverm 12 hours ago

If they installed flock at county board meetings and gov rep town halls, they would know what real people think about their company

Comment by georgemcbay 11 hours ago

As soon as you make vague and unsubstantiated claims that people physically gathering to protest against you (or your company) are paid protestors you immediately lose whatever credibility you had in the first place (though you likely had very little already if this is where you are) in the eyes of anyone with a functional brain.

Comment by aftbit 10 hours ago

Ah yes, the "all criticism is fake news" strategy.

Comment by josefritzishere 11 hours ago

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Comment by Bud 10 hours ago

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Comment by Madmallard 10 hours ago

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Comment by RAAx707 10 hours ago

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Comment by pessimizer 12 hours ago

You can't blame Flock. They're making the very safe bet that cops are very, very stupid and have a lot of xenophobic, conspiratorial theories about crime.

Meanwhile, Flock is in and of itself a conspiracy. The only way to fight (imagined, arbitrary) conspiracies is (of course) to conspire. They won't fight fair, so you can't either.

It's important to mention that mainstream liberals and European radical NATO centrists believe exactly the same thing, just aimed at the people who they're afraid of. Neither side, the social liberal centrists or the anti-social liberal centrists, is going to slow the adoption of Flock at all. Eventually somebody is going to drag out Obama (at significant cost) to defend it in some commencement speech, and he will also blame the Russian Chinese anti-Semitic mullahs, and youthful idealism. To "No Kings" liberals, this will be completely different.

It's a false equivalence, they'll say. Somebody taught them that a few years ago. Then they'll say something about "whataboutism," and finish up by explaining how two things can be true at the same time.

Comment by rnxrx 8 hours ago

I have to ask.. what in the world is a "radical centrist" ?

Comment by Sohcahtoa82 7 hours ago

Someone so terrified of having their beliefs challenged that they choose to have none.

They'll be the ones saying that "both sides are equally bad" and think it gives them a moral high ground.

GP specifically mentioned "European radical NATO centrists". They likely think that it's up to Zelensky to stop the war and legitimately can't understand why you don't try to appease people like Putin.

Comment by adjejmxbdjdn 11 hours ago

At least come up with conspiracy theories that cannot be disproved by one of the first 3 links on a simple google search.

https://apnews.com/article/flock-cameras-campaigns-midterms-...

If Josh Shapiro is in favor of a ban in his state it’s pretty clear centrists are not the issue.

Comment by slowin 11 hours ago

> If Josh Shapiro is in favor of a ban in his state it’s pretty clear centrists are not the issue.

Yes, but will he actually ban them if elected? It's easy to say, let's see some action.