Flock Safety, the company behind a vast network of license plate-reading cameras, is in the midst of what one analyst calls a “spectacular PR collapse.” But according to a sharp critique published by the Daily Wire, the company’s troubles aren’t really about messaging. They’re about legitimacy.
“This was never a communications problem. It’s a legitimacy problem,” writes Riley Blanton, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer and author, in a piece republished with permission from his Substack, Watchtower Intel.
Blanton draws an extended analogy to J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium, comparing Flock’s camera network to the Palantír — the seeing stones that allowed Sauron to extend his influence and corrupt allies like Saruman. The power, he notes, wasn’t in any single stone, but in the network itself: each node feeding information back to a central force.
“This is, functionally, what Flock Safety built,” Blanton writes. Flock doesn’t need to install cameras everywhere itself. It just needs neighborhoods — HOAs, for instance — to opt in. Once one does, the camera at the end of a cul-de-sac becomes part of a national database of more than 120,000 nodes, accessible to over 6,000 law enforcement agencies.
Flock has told Congress that 75% of its law enforcement customers are enrolled in the nationwide lookup tool. The company’s entire incentive structure, Blanton argues, pushes customers toward that opt-in.
Over the past year, Flock CEO Garrett Langley has “cycled through every available move in the crisis communications PR playbook,” Blanton writes. But because the problem is legitimacy, not communications, none of the moves appear to have worked.
Move One: Call Critics Terrorists
The first move, Blanton says, was to label critics as terrorists. That’s a common defensive tactic, but it often backfires — especially when the criticism is substantive and the public is already uneasy about surveillance.
Move Two: Deny Using the Accusation’s Vocabulary
The second move, per Blanton, was to deny the accusation by using the accusers’ exact language — a rhetorical trick that often ends up reinforcing the original charge in the public mind. It’s a strategy designed to sound like a rebuttal while actually conceding the frame.
Move Three: Apologize for the Wrong Thing
The third move: apologize, but only for the wrong thing. Apologizing for a minor misstep while avoiding the core concern can come across as evasive, Blanton suggests. It addresses the symptom while ignoring the disease.
None of these tactics have moved the needle. “Garrett Langley keeps looking for the right PR strategy to make the story go his way,” Blanton writes. “The American public knows it is a modern-day Palantír.”
Flock Safety has not responded publicly to the latest round of criticism. The company’s defenders argue that license plate readers are a proven crime-fighting tool, helping police recover stolen vehicles and solve serious offenses. But Blanton’s critique taps into a deeper anxiety: not about any single camera, but about the aggregation of data across a nationwide network with minimal oversight.
The Daily Wire piece ends with a brief disclaimer: “Views are Riley’s own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense.”
The piece is part of a growing chorus of concern about Flock’s business model, which some civil liberties advocates say amounts to mass surveillance by another name. The company’s growth has been explosive, with municipalities and private communities across the country signing up for its services. But with that growth has come scrutiny.
Critics point to several concerns: the scope of the database (120,000 cameras is not trivial), the number of law enforcement agencies with access (over 6,000), and the fact that most residents never voted on whether their neighborhood would participate. HOA boards or city councils often make the decision, and the default is to share data nationally rather than keep it local.
Flock has made some moves to address privacy concerns in the past, such as offering data retention limits and anonymization features. But critics argue those are voluntary and don’t address the network effect that makes the system powerful.
Blanton’s framing — comparing Flock to Sauron’s Palantír network — is deliberately provocative. But his central point is more measured: that no amount of smart PR will fix a fundamental problem of public trust. When people believe the system is illegitimate, no message will change their mind.
In the world of crisis communications, this is known as the difference between a “communication problem” and a “legitimacy problem.” A communication problem can be solved with better messaging. A legitimacy problem requires changing the thing itself — the product, the behavior, or the mission.
For Flock, that would mean either scaling back the network, making participation more transparent, or giving communities genuine control over their data. None of those are easy for a company whose entire value proposition is built on networked data.
The Daily Wire piece, republished from Blanton’s newsletter, has reignited debate about Flock’s role in American policing. It’s unclear whether the company will respond with another round of PR moves — or whether it will finally address the underlying questions about its legitimacy.
As Blanton concludes: The public already knows what Flock built. The question is whether the company will change course before it loses what’s left of its reputation.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-spectacular-pr-collapse-of-flock-safety