r/TheCreepState

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley is in full damage-control mode after his mass surveillance company, which operates 120,000 license plate reading cameras across 49 states and partners with 6,000 law enforcement agencies and 1,000 private customers, became the target of a growing nationwide backlash. Langley told Bloomberg “we’re not Big Brother” and insisted the company is “focused on protecting people,” even as at least 54 U.S. cities have voted to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock’s automatic license plate readers since the start of the year. The pushback comes amid mounting reports of the technology’s misuse, including false arrests, a case of a crooked cop stalking innocent women, and a recent 404 Media report that Flock had been planning to infiltrate Uber and Lyft drivers’ dash cams to scan nearby vehicles’ plates at massive scale. The backlash has grown intense enough that people are being celebrated online for physically cutting down Flock’s surveillance towers.

In response to the scrutiny, Flock announced platform changes including a new audit tool requiring law enforcement customers to flag abnormal behavior, and a reduction in footage retention from 30 days down to seven. Civil liberties groups remain unconvinced. The American Civil Liberties Union called the moves a “step in the right direction” but dismissed other changes as “merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures,” while Institute for Justice senior attorney Robert Frommer told the Associated Press, “this is window dressing that doesn’t address the fundamental problem, which is that police officers are the ones deciding who and when to search, and that should be done by judges with real warrants.” Despite the crisis, Flock’s business is thriving, with annual revenue climbing from $300 million in January to $500 million by June, according to Langley’s comments to Bloomberg, and the company is now pushing to expand into drones, surveillance trailers, and gunshot-detecting hardware.

The technology’s core function also remains deeply flawed. A Roseville, California police department investigation found the cameras mistook one license plate for another 71% of the time between 2023 and 2024. That failure rate isn’t abstract: The Drive’s director of content Joel Feder was wrongly flagged over “stolen” plates after Flock’s camera network misregistered his license plate number, leading police to ambush and box in his vehicle, accusing him of being unable to afford the “six-figure luxury SUV” he was driving. Flock directly referenced Feder’s case in its own announcement this week, stating, “the central point is simple, an alert is a lead, not a conclusion, which should be confirmed by an officer.”

An investigation from Australia’s ABC News found that Meta has been paying self-avowed neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, funneling money to accounts that appeared to clearly violate the platform’s own hate speech policies through its invitation-only “Content Monetization” program. One recipient, Hugo Lennon, a known far-right agitator and white nationalist with ties to neo-Nazi groups, has received Facebook payments since September 2025 despite being a well-documented figure who was previously removed by police for hurling racial abuse at India’s prime minister Narendra Modi at a Melbourne hotel and is believed to have helped organize an anti-immigration march on a sacred Indigenous site last year. The Facebook page for Australian white supremacist site The Noticer has similarly been monetized since November 2025, a fact made more striking given that even X, under Elon Musk, has banned The Noticer for violating its own “hateful profile policy.”

Facebook’s monetization program is lucrative at scale, having paid out nearly $3 billion to 16 million accounts in 2025, though the exact earnings of these specific pages remain unclear, according to data collated by the tech accountability nonprofit What to Fix. What to Fix executive director Victoire Rio argued Meta bears direct responsibility given its financial relationship with these creators, saying “if we consider that Meta is in a direct commercial relationship with its publishers, insofar that they’re paying them royalties and that they have a monetization agreement with them, then you could argue that they are liable for the content that gets produced by their business partner in some ways.” Right-wing extremism researcher Kaz Ross added that the underlying incentive structure rewards exactly this kind of content, noting Meta’s “financial model is to reward content creators who get engagement, and as we know, the best way of getting engagement is to produce rage bait, extremist material, aggravating material.”

The revelations align with Meta’s broader retreat from stricter content moderation, which loosened shortly before President Trump’s second inauguration, particularly around gender identity and immigration, two issues frequently exploited by far-right accounts. Meta hasn’t addressed questions about the specific pages it paid, instead issuing a statement arguing “it is important to distinguish between speech that is offensive and content that could potentially lead to offline violence,” adding that “such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness.”

At least 54 cities across the US have voted to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock Safety’s automatic license plate reader contracts since the start of 2026, according to data compiled by the Washington Examiner, following prior reporting that roughly 30 cities had done the same throughout 2025. Cities in 23 states have now cut ties with Flock this year, led by California and Wisconsin with seven rejections or cancellations each, followed by New York, Washington, and Massachusetts with four apiece, and Virginia with three.

The most high-profile cancellation came when the Los Angeles Police Department declined to renew its longstanding contract with Flock, a decision driven by an internal audit that found the company’s cameras generated 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts over just two months, a false-positive rate of 32.3 percent. Despite the mounting rejections, Flock’s cameras remain deployed in more than 5,000 US cities as of July 2026, meaning the recent wave of cancellations, while significant, still represents a small fraction of its overall footprint.

The backlash reflects broader public unease over privacy and civil rights concerns tied to mass surveillance technology, with some residents in cities where local leaders have been slow to act instead taking matters into their own hands by damaging, obscuring, or outright stealing the cameras. The growing number of official cancellations suggests municipal leaders are increasingly responding to that same public sentiment through formal channels rather than leaving citizens to act unilaterally.

Last week, Nieman Lab revealed that USA Today’s parent company, USA Today Co, formerly Gannett, is partnering with AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize what CEO Mike Reed described as “actionable intelligence” gathered from the newspaper’s audience data. Reed said the goal is to “build a common intelligence layer” on reader data to “monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.” The deal has raised plenty of eyebrows given Palantir’s long history of controversy, including its collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, links to US airstrikes that killed over 120 schoolchildren in Iran, and its mercurial CEO’s history of strange public outbursts.

Workers represented by The News Guild, the country’s largest communications and media labor union, including journalists at USA Today, said they were “shocked” by the news and are calling for the company to “immediately end its partnership with Palantir.” In a statement, the union wrote, “while [Reed] championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers.” They added, “we have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns,” arguing that partnering with “a major player in the news we cover” creates “an inherent conflict of interest” and “fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”

The News Guild also accused USA Today Co of failing to disclose key details about the partnership and raised concerns over how readers’ personal data will be treated and protected, asking, “without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?” The union is calling on the company to “steer clear” of Palantir in order to preserve journalistic integrity and uphold “the kind of responsibility and skepticism that the nation’s largest network of journalists should exhibit,” while also pointing to the broader instability in the news industry, where AI adoption has repeatedly been cited to justify major layoffs across publications. Even within Palantir’s own ranks, employees have started speaking up, with some reportedly wondering whether “they’re the bad guys,” as Wired reported earlier this year. The company’s reputation has taken such a hit that even its major contract with the UK government’s National Health Service is on shaky ground, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan separately blocked a Palantir contract with the city’s Metropolitan Police force, arguing the department “did not adequately demonstrate value for money for Londoners.”