Songs of the Resistance: Flock on the Pole
This is a history lesson to set the record straight on the total disruption of the surveillance industry, and other disruptors who will follow the same pattern in the future. I have been careful to provide footnotes and references so you can do your own research and draw your own conclusions.
On August 21, 2017, Flock Safety pitched their company at Y Combinator’s Summer Demo Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. TechCrunch listed it as “Wireless security systems for neighborhoods” and repeated the company’s line that it had “already solved its first crime.”1 BBC the next day showed the hardware on the floor and a $50-a-house-a-year price, with seven Atlanta-area neighborhoods.2 That was nine years ago.
The cameras are already on the record, but the rest of the story is seen in the 0people and money behind it.
How does an ambitious young startup founder transition into calling citizens of our nation terrorists when they criticize his products? How can he justify working with law enforcement to “uphold the law” when he is blind to the U.S. Constitution, which still stands with the Fourth Amendment?
In 2015, I wrote that to a technocrat that there is no such thing as too much data.3 In 2018 I wrote that plate readers sit inside the smart-city stack, and that we are living in a fishbowl.4 Those books do not name Flock; the 2022 book used Rekor as the vehicle panopticon.5
Indeed, what can be surveilled can be controlled, and that was the point.6
Who They Were Before The Cameras
The legal name is Flock Group Inc., a Delaware company founded in 2017. It does business as Flock Safety. That is the brand and the website, not the legal name.7 39 Jon Padfield of Business Reform said the same in an Atlanta interview last week, published here.38
Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 list names two founders: Garrett Langley, the CEO, and Matt Feury, the CTO.8 The August 29, 2018 SEC Form D names Langley as officer and director, Feury as director, and Ilya Sukhar of Matrix Partners as director. Paige Todd is not on that filing and is not on the YC founder block.7 8 Atlanta press in 2018 called her a first employee,9 and the company now styles her a cofounder.
They are commercial Atlanta studio people, not cops, not intel, and not license-plate-reader people from before 2017.
Langley, from Atlanta, had a Georgia Tech electrical-engineering degree in 2009.11 15 He was an early employee at Tripp Rackley’s Firethorn, sold to Qualcomm in 2007.12 Then Experience; the 2014 Cox coverage named Rackley, not him, and valued the deal at more than $200 million.13 Clutch was bought by Cox Automotive in August 2018 after Langley had left.14
Feury is from Marietta and studied computer science at Georgia Tech in 2011. He engineered at Experience from November 2012 to April 2017 and had not founded a company before Flock.15 Todd gained a Georgia Tech Management degree in 2007, an Emory MBA, then worked in operations at Experience and Moment.10 The documented meeting place is Experience LLC, inside Rackley’s Kenzie Lane studio.
The origin pitch has been stable since 2017: neighborhood property crime, police want a plate, and city cameras cost $25,000 to $250,000, so they put an Android phone in a waterproof box and sold it to homeowners’ associations. Silicon Valley, on September 3, 2017, reported seven Atlanta-area HOA contracts and two open cases, not a closed arrest during the batch.16 It was a pitch, not a blotter.
Y Combinator, Then The Money
Y Combinator’s published 2017 deal was $120,000 for 7 percent, and Crunchbase News later reported that seed money as YC-led.17 Langley’s YC-page essay does not name an introducer, an interview panel, or who called with the yes.8
Sam Altman was President of YC Group in 2017, Michael Seibel ran the flagship batch from September 2016, and Dalton Caldwell ran admissions.18 There is no public letter, tweet, interview, or founder quote in which Altman names Flock. However, it is inconceivable that Altman was absent when the decision was made to accept Flock into the program.
Y Combinator’s website today lists Garry Tan as Primary Partner, but that field is a later rewrite and is absent on the April 2021 archive of the page.8 Tan left YC in November 2015 and returned as president in January 2023.19 He cannot have been the 2017 group partner. That partner is unknown.
The documented 2017 Tan relationship is money. Flock’s own blog, July 2, 2019, said “Alexis Ohanian and his Initialized partner Garry Tan were Flock Safety’s very first investors,” with the check size not disclosed.20
The later money came the ordinary way, and it was not a 2017 walk from Altman to Andreessen Horowitz. Matrix put Sukhar on the board in August 2018.7 Bedrock led a $10 million A-1 in December 2018.21 Although a direct competitor today, Axon bought a minority stake in April 2020.22 Meritech’s Alex Clayton took a board seat in November 2020.23 Andreessen Horowitz wrote its first public check in July 2021: a $150 million Series D; David Ulevitch joined the board.24 Tiger Global led $150 million in February 2022 at $3.5 billion.25 A later paper includes $275 million in March 2025 at $7.5 billion, with a16z as the public lead.26 Forge later listed a March 2026 Class I at $8.25 billion.27
SEC Form Ds run through February 2022, then stop; the company’s February 2022 total, “over $380 million,” matches that reporting.25 No In-Q-Tel check turned up. Marc Andreessen, on Joe Rogan’s show in May 2026, called Flock “one of our companies” and did not mention Altman, Tan, or Y Combinator.28
This is tedious, for sure. But we must follow the money and the power. The money is venture capital; the power is the camera on the pole.
The Product And The Fourth Amendment Argument
For years Flock told the public its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.”29
U.S. patent US11416545B1, granted August 16, 2022, tells a different story. Title: “System and method for object-based query of video content captured by a dynamic surveillance network.” Inventors: Garrett Langley and Matt Feury. Assignee: Flock Group Inc. Priority May 1, 2018; filed October 4, 2020. Those papers were already on this site.36 38
The abstract says:
“A solution for a video surveillance system and method that leverages a dynamic geographic footprint and supports an object-based query of archived video content is described. An exemplary embodiment of the solution receives video footage from any number of unrelated sources. The video footage is parsed for content and stored in a database in connection with data that identifies the content (object class, aspects of the object, confidence scores, time and location data, etc.). Advantageously, the video footage may be queried based on the content of the video footage and not just time and location data.”36
The body of that patent says neural nets (AI) classify an identified object and its aspects. The example is this: “the object is a human, is male, is wearing a jacket, and is about 5’11” and 190 pounds.” Unrelated sources include neighborhood cameras, store cameras, traffic cameras, and “a smartphone associated with a pedestrian.” In the patent’s own burglary scenario, investigators “may be able to query the DSOQ system for any footage … having a person with matching face recognition data points.”36
That is exactly what the patent describes.
Wired, on August 19, 2026, reported a new police tool, first called Nightshift and then OS Investigate, that does both: more than 6,000 communities, twenty billion plate scans a month, about 140,000 monthly users, sixty-nine canned prompts, and forty-five tools. Plates become names, addresses, and associates. Fourteen of the prompts need no plate, no name, and no crime as a starting place. The officer supplies a place, a time, and a behavior, and the system hands back the people who fit.29 Flock says the product is in a small test group. How many agencies have it live is not in this record.
Jay Stanley of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project told Wired the tools give police broad, often warrantless access to a vast movement record, and that the Fourth Amendment applies when police demand those records from a company. Here the departments buy the capability.29
That is Stanley’s argument, but Flock carefully dodges claims that it has violated the Fourth Amendment.
What the record does talk about is use. A Texas officer searched 83,000 cameras for a woman after a self-administered abortion (404 Media, via Wired).29 The Washington Post found 50 officers accused or charged of plate-reader misuse; twenty-six were tracking wives, girlfriends, or exes, and a later recap names a chief who ran more than 600 lookups of an ex and a daughter.29 30 The Electronic Frontier Foundation found about 20 percent of more than 12 million searches logged only “investigation,” “suspect,” or “query,” with more than 50 agencies searching protest activity.29
Illinois regulators found, in August 2025, that Flock violated state law by a now-paused pilot that handed Customs and Border Protection access to cameras in the state.29 Langley’s July 2026 line, “No, we do not work with ICE,” sits against that record.31
Flock leaves most rules to its customers.29 The company claims a 30-day default delete and, from a TED stage, that “three law enforcement officers were arrested” last year off audit logs.28 31
Over 5,000 cities have the cameras, and at least 54 cities in 23 states canceled, did not renew, or rejected the product in 2026.32 Photographing every car and storing the movement file is the product, not a side effect.
Terrorists Attacking Flock?
The 2025 rant and the 2026 apology are not the same voice on the same day. The apology dates the first one, but it does not erase it.
In 2025, on a podcast called Breaking Points, Langley called DeFlock a “terroristic organization… closer to Antifa than they are anything else.”30 DeFlock is Will Freeman’s open-source map of public Flock cameras.31
In December 2025, Langley emailed law-enforcement clients that Flock and its partners were “under coordinated attack,” and that activist groups were turning the public-records process into “a weapon against you and against us.” After 404 Media published police-surveillance data, Flock said the critics were “activists trying to let murderers go free.”33
Jay Stanley answered on January 16, 2026, under the headline “Flock CEO Goes Ballistic on Critics.” If you worry about mass surveillance, Stanley wrote, you support criminals. “It is a simplistic, juvenile, and ultimately authoritarian stance.”33
A customer cop had to remind him. Staunton, Virginia, Chief Jim Williams released the email and wrote back that local citizens were raising concerns: “It is democracy in action.”33
On July 17, 2026, Thomas Brewster at Forbes printed the repair. Langley said, “My comments were a mistake, and I apologize,” and that “We believe in a world where we can have safety and privacy.”31
Note that the apology came after the cancellation wave. On a TED stage, Langley said, “Safety is a fundamental right.”34 Journalist Connor Boyack named that line as “the tyrant’s sales pitch.” 35
On the weekend of August 22, 2026, Langley sat with Kayleigh McEnany on Fox News’s “Saturday in America.” Fox framed the product as automated license plate readers. He called for a national “compromise”:
“When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise.”
“How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”37
He recommended seven-day data retention and audit tools, and said regulators should hold law enforcement accountable rather than ban the technology. His Fox claims of over a million investigations and more than 10,000 missing people are his, not facts established in the record.37
“Uphold The Law” While Blind To The Fourth Amendment
Here is my third question: how can Langley justify working with law enforcement to “uphold the law” when he is blind to the U.S. Constitution, which still stands with the Fourth Amendment?
You can catch a thief while breaking the law, but you cannot enforce the law by breaking it. An illegal search can find the gun; that is a result, not enforcement of the law. If the search is illegal, what it finds can be thrown out. Lawyers call that the fruit of the poisonous tree.
On Flock, the contradiction is the company’s, not the mapper’s. Photographing every car, sharing across state lines where a statute forbids it, letting a chief run his ex 600 times, hunting a woman through 83,000 cameras: those are the named breaks. Calling that “solving crime” is the pitch, with safety as the stand-in for legality. On Fox, he said the country must compromise. Compromise on what the Fourth Amendment clearly states?
Watch what they do, not what they say.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is this. Flock went through Y Combinator in 2017 and was later scaled by venture capital money from arch-Technocrats like Thiel and Andreessen. The Flock founders were studio operators, not police. The 2022 patent describes object-based query and, in its own scenario, a search by face-recognition data points. The public line said the tech cannot identify individuals. The 2025 CEO called citizens who mapped his public cameras a terroristic organization closer to Antifa, then apologized once cities canceled. The product photographs every car. The Constitution is not a setting the customer, the police, or Flock can switch off.
As I said above, no court has held that Flock broke the Fourth Amendment, but that is not a clean bill of health; it is a gap in the case law. The facts are already enough for a city council to press charges.
This is local work demanding local action. Ask your council whether it bought the cameras, who can query them, who they share them with, and whether a case number is required. If the contract is up, vote it down; if it is not up, do not renew it. Use the public-records process he called a weapon, and speak in the open. No guns. No knives. No blunt instruments. Mapping and protesting a public pole is Free Speech. Sawing one down will get you arrested, but many are willing to go to jail to stop the surveillance.
Fifty-four cities and counties have already said no, meaning that your city or town can say no, too.
References
Josh Constine, Ryan Lawler, John Mannes, and Lucas Matney, “All 50 startups from Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 Demo Day 1,” TechCrunch, August 21, 2017. https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/21/y-combinator-summer-2017/
Dave Lee, “Sensor tracks who is driving in your neighbourhood,” BBC, August 22, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41008141
Patrick M. Wood, Technocracy Rising (2015), Chapter 9, “The Total Surveillance Society.” Fusion centers; “no such thing as too much data.”
Patrick M. Wood, Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order (2018), Chapter 5, “The Smart City Steamroller,” and Chapter 9, “Living in a Fishbowl.” Plate readers in the smart-city stack; “living in a fishbowl.”
Patrick M. Wood, The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism (2022). Rekor as the “vehicle panopticon.”
Patrick M. Wood and Courtenay Turner, The Final Betrayal (2025); restated in The New Economics of Technocracy (2026). “What can be surveilled can be controlled.” No Wood book names Flock in the body. Sole book string: The Final Betrayal Chapter 9 bibliography (ACLU 2025 title).
SEC Form D, Flock Group Inc., filed August 29, 2018. Accession 0001751333-18-000001. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1751333/0001751333-18-000001.txt
Y Combinator company profile, Flock Safety, Summer 2017 (fetched August 21, 2026). https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety ; April 19, 2021 archive (no Primary Partner field): https://web.archive.org/web/20210419212227/https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
Holly Beilin, “This Security-As-A-Service Startup Is Catching Criminals With Its Affordable Solar-Powered Cameras,” Hypepotamus, April 18, 2018. https://hypepotamus.com/companies/flock-safety/
Scheller College of Business, “The Entrepreneurs of Scheller: How Paige Todd Went From Yellow Jacket to Flock Safety Founder,” December 15, 2025. https://www.scheller.gatech.edu/news/2025/entrepreneurs-of-scheller-paige-todd.html
Georgia Tech College of Engineering, Kathrin Havrilla-Sanchez, “Force Multiplying Security through Technology,” November 13, 2019. https://www.coe.gatech.edu/news/2019/11/force-multiplying-security-through-technology
American Banker / Qualcomm, “Qualcomm to Acquire Mobile Banking Leader Firethorn,” November 2007. https://www.americanbanker.com/news/qualcomm-to-acquire-mobile-banking-leader-firethorn
Russell Grantham, “Cox Enterprises buys ticket technology start-up firm,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 18, 2014. https://www.ajc.com/business/cox-enterprises-buys-ticket-technology-start-firm/A3htv36KRCrlsMlGNLhrVP/
Cox Automotive / PR Newswire, “Cox Automotive Establishes Mobility Solutions Group; Accelerates Effort with Acquisition of Clutch Technologies,” August 13, 2018. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cox-automotive-establishes-mobility-solutions-group-accelerates-effort-with-acquisition-of-clutch-technologies-300695877.html
Elliott Brack, Gwinnett Forum, April 5, 2022 (Langley from Atlanta; Feury from Marietta). https://www.gwinnettforum.com/2022/04/brack-flock-camera-system-reducing-crime-in-gwinnett/ ; Feury employment dates (OpenStudy; Experience Nov 2012–Apr 2017): Fundraising Fox LinkedIn scrape, https://fundraisingfox.com/people/matt-feury
Silicon Valley / Bay Area News Group, “Early stage: This surveillance startup wants to put cameras in your neighborhood,” September 3, 2017. https://www.siliconvalley.com/2017/09/03/early-stage-this-surveillance-tartup-wants-put-cameras-your-neighborhood/
Jason D. Rowley, “Neighborhood Surveillance Startup Flock Safety Raises $9.6M,” Crunchbase News, August 30, 2018. https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/neighborhood-surveillance-startup-flock-safety-raises-9-6m/
Sam Altman, “YC Changes,” Y Combinator, September 13, 2016. https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/yc-changes ; Sam Altman, “2017 YC Annual Letter,” February 16, 2017. https://blog.samaltman.com/2017-yc-annual-letter
TechCrunch, “Garry Tan Says Goodbye to Y Combinator,” November 6, 2015. https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/garry-tan-says-goodbye-to-y-combinator/ ; TechCrunch, “Garry Tan is the next president and CEO of Y Combinator,” August 29, 2022. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/29/garry-tan-is-the-next-president-and-ceo-of-y-combinator/
Flock Safety blog, July 2, 2019. https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/reddit-co-founder-alexis-ohanian-visits-flock-safety
Bedrock, Flock Safety Series A-1, December 10, 2018. https://bedrockcap.com/news/flock-safety-series-a ; Bedrock journey post, March 13, 2025. https://bedrockcap.com/news/flockandbedrock
Axon, “Axon Partners with Flock Safety to Enhance Security for Cities and Neighborhoods,” April 2, 2020. https://investor.axon.com/2020-04-02-Axon-Partners-with-Flock-Safety-to-Enhance-Security-for-Cities-and-Neighborhoods
Flock Safety blog, Series C, November 2, 2020. https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/everything-has-changed-and-nothing-has-changed-flock-safety-raised-47m-to-solve-more-crime-and-protect-privacy
David Ulevitch and David George, “Investing in Flock Safety,” Andreessen Horowitz, July 13, 2021. https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-flock-safety/ ; GlobeNewswire, July 13, 2021. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/07/13/2262009/0/en/FLOCK-SAFETY-RAISES-150M-IN-SERIES-D-FUNDING-LED-BY-ANDREESSEN-HOROWITZ-TO-REDUCE-CRIME-IN-AMERICA-BY-25-IN-THE-NEXT-THREE-YEARS.html
Flock Safety blog, Series E announcement, February 15, 2022. https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/series-e-announcement
Flock Safety blog, “Flock Safety Secures Major Funding,” March 13, 2025. https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-funding ; TechCrunch, March 13, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/y-combinators-police-surveillance-darling-flock-safety-raises-275m-at-7-5b-valuation/ ; Forge Class F/G rows and Franklin/Sands amounts: https://forgeglobal.com/flock-safety_ipo/
Forge Global, Flock Safety IPO page (updated August 20, 2026). Class I, $207.92 million, $8.25 billion, March 2026. https://forgeglobal.com/flock-safety_ipo/ ; The Information / Inc. press figure $8.4 billion.
Police1, “Joe Rogan, Marc Andreessen discuss Austin shooting spree, Flock cameras and policing tech debate,” May 22, 2026. https://www.police1.com/technology/joe-rogan-marc-andreessen-discuss-austin-shooting-spree-flock-cameras-and-policing-tech-debate
Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron, “Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code,” Wired, August 19, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/
Rahaan Mazumder, Motor Biscuit, August 10, 2026. https://www.motorbiscuit.com/flock-safety-ceo-calls-citizens-mapping-his-cameras-terrorists-closely-resembling-antifa/
Thomas Brewster, Forbes, July 17, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/07/17/flock-ceo-sorry-for-labelling-activists-terrorists/
Joe Wilkins via Futurism, “Flock Is Losing Dozens Of Contracts As Citizens Push Back,” Technocracy.news, August 7, 2026 (Washington Examiner data: at least 54 U.S. cities in 23 states). https://www.technocracy.news/flock-is-losing-dozens-of-contracts-as-citizens-push-back/
Jay Stanley, “Flock CEO Goes Ballistic on Critics,” ACLU, January 16, 2026 (page updated June 18, 2026). https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-cameras/flock-ceo-goes-ballistic
Flock Safety blog / TED2026 recap. https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-ceo-garrett-langley-ted2026
Connor Boyack, “Flock’s CEO Said the Quiet Part Out Loud,” July 13, 2026. https://selfevident.connorboyack.com/p/safety-is-the-tyrants-sales-pitch
U.S. Patent US11416545B1, “System and method for object based query of video content captured by a dynamic surveillance network,” inventors Garrett Langley and Matt Feury, assignee Flock Group Inc., priority May 1, 2018, filed October 4, 2020, granted August 16, 2022. Google Patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11416545B1/en
“Flock Safety CEO urges compromise on license plate reader privacy,” Fox News, August 22, 2026. Garrett Langley on “Saturday in America” with Kayleigh McEnany. https://www.foxnews.com/media/flock-safety-ceo-calls-national-compromise-amid-camera-sabotage-public-revolt
Leo Hohmann, “Flock ‘Safety’? That’s Not What U.S. Patent Papers Say,” Technocracy.news, August 25, 2026 (Jon Padfield / Business Reform interview, Atlanta; legal name Flock Group Inc.; patent contradiction). https://www.technocracy.news/flock-safety-thats-not-what-u-s-patent-papers-say/
Bloomberg, company profile, “Flock Group Inc, doing business as Flock Safety.” https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/1843581D:US
Since nothing kills the momentum of a trend like the negative connotation associated with a pejorative slogan, like "Go Woke, Go Broke" or "Disco Sucks," at every opportunity everyone should tell them to just go "Flock Off."
Under totalitarianism you are in compliance or you are an anarchist