An Open Letter to Flock | Reclusive Libertarian

To the people who build and sell Flock Safety,

We just spent a weekend marking the Fourth of July, the day a group of men pledged their lives against a government that claimed the power to search anyone, anytime, for any reason. I want to talk to you about what you have built, plainly, the way one citizen talks to another, because I do not think you are stupid and I do not think you are cartoon villains. I think you are Americans who have convinced yourselves you are the heroes of this story. You have earned the examination.

You believe you are fighting crime. You believe the cameras find the missing kid, the stolen car, the killer, and that the people objecting are sentimental fools who have never had to meet a victim. Hold onto that belief, because it is the belief every architect of every surveillance state has held about himself. The secret policeman is always certain he is the one keeping the children safe. Good intentions are the standard equipment of the thing you have become. They are not an alibi.

Crime-solving is the first answer your press office hands out every time the reporting turns bad. Of course you solve crime. So did the general warrant. The British officers who could search any colonial home without cause also turned up real smugglers and real contraband, and that is why the power was tempting and why this country was founded to abolish it anyway. A tool that finds the guilty by watching everyone is condemned by the everyone it watches. We settled this argument in 1776. You are on the losing side of it.

Then the thirty days. You offer deletion as if it were a mercy. Thirty days of the recorded movements of every innocent person in a town is the dragnet itself, and the number is a default that any customer can dial upward whenever it suits them. You are telling me how long you hold the rope, and asking for applause for the length.

You photograph cars, not faces, as though that were the line. You do not need anyone’s face. The car is the tracker. The plate is the name. Following where a vehicle goes, day after day, year after year, is following where a person goes, and you know it, which is why the distinction lives in your marketing and nowhere in the actual harm.

Be careful with “we do not sell the data.” Your own paperwork keeps disagreeing with you. Your marketing still promises that Flock will never share, sell, or touch what your cameras collect. Your contract used to say the same thing, plainly, and then one revision at a time you took the promise out, until the version cities sign today no longer carries it. The wording is not the point. You have rewritten it too many times for it to be the point. The rewriting is the point. A company that quietly loosens its own promises every few months, always in its own favor, is backing away from a commitment it has decided it no longer wants to keep, slowly enough to hope no one is watching. You do not edit the same clause over and over because you are proud of where it stands. You do it because you know where it is going, and because you suspect that if you announced the destination in one honest sentence, the people signing would refuse. That is how a company behaves when it knows what it is doing and has chosen to do it where the light is poor.

The agency owns the data and not you. That is the laundering of responsibility, and the same shifting paperwork gives it away, because it keeps finding ways to let you use that data after the contract is over and to keep you in control of who reaches it and how. A neighborhood owns one hundred percent of nothing it cannot control. You built the machine, you raised the cameras, you wrote the software that turns a million innocent movements into a searchable map, and then you handed the keys to whoever signed the contract and called what they do with it no concern of yours. “I only built the database, the officer ran the search” is a confession with one verb changed.

Every search is logged and requires a reason. You hold up the audit trail like a virtue. An audit log is a record of the abuse. It is written after an officer has already pulled up everywhere his ex has driven this month, after the system has already been run to settle a private grudge that has nothing to do with any crime. The reason field is a formality a determined user fills in without slowing down. You have built a very thorough account of the crash, and you are proud of how complete it is.

Misuse is a policy violation, not a flaw in the product. This is the worst of them, because it is the one where you look directly at the harm and step over it. When an officer used your network to track a woman he was personally fixated on, that happened on your cameras. When it was run to keep tabs on someone a man with a badge simply held a grudge against, that happened on your network. You built a thing whose misuse was not a risk but a certainty, sold it into thousands of jurisdictions, and then, each time the certainty arrived on schedule, expressed disappointment and shipped a new setting. You do not get to build the instrument of tyranny and disown the tyranny. The instrument is the point. Everything else is the brochure.

I am going to assume you mean it when you wrap the company in the flag, that somewhere in you there is a real love of this country and not only a sales theme. If that is true, then you owe yourselves one honest look at what you have made, measured against what this country is. We were founded, specifically and at the cost of blood, against the general warrant, the power to search the innocent in advance on the chance of catching the guilty later. That is the plain history of the Fourth Amendment. And you have rebuilt that power, automated it, made it permanent and national, and leased it back to the state by the month.

Hear this without the cushion. You are not the shield against the threat. You are the threat. You are the thing the men you quote every Fourth of July pledged their lives to destroy. Not as a metaphor, not someday. Now. You are the tyrant, in the original American sense of the word, and the flag in your lobby does not soften it. It makes it worse, because a tyrant who has read the Declaration and built the dragnet anyway has run clean out of excuses.

One thing would tell me your patriotism was ever real, and it is not a better audit log, a shorter retention window, or a thoughtful post about responsible innovation. It is the only thing a patriot does when he discovers he has built a weapon against his own country. He takes it apart. Everything short of that is you, knowing what you are, and choosing it again.

A citizen of the country you are surveilling.

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