Opinion: Liberty shouldn’t help build Flock’s $100B dream

𝗕𝘆 𝗥𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝗪𝗮𝗿𝗱, 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁𝘆 𝗖𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗹

Flock Safety’s CEO, Garrett Langley, told Forbes last year that turning his company into a $100 billion business was within reach. At the time, Flock was valued at $7.5 billion. Nobody grows a company thirteenfold by selling nine license plate cameras to a small town in East Texas. You get there by selling more cameras, more drones, more software, and more of something far more valuable: data about where people go.

On Tuesday night, the Liberty City Council voted 5-2 to renew our Flock contract. I respect my colleagues and I respect our police department. But I think we made the wrong call, and residents deserve to know what we actually signed up for.

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗮 𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗮 𝗮𝗻𝘆𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲

Every plate Liberty’s nine cameras read is shared with outside law enforcement agencies across Texas. When a council member asked about those outside searches, the chief said his monthly audit covers Liberty’s own searches but doesn’t include theirs. We review what our officers look up. Nobody in Liberty is regularly reviewing what everyone else looks up, even though it’s one tab over on our own transparency portal.

And Flock isn’t standing still. The company bought a drone maker in 2024 and now sells drones that fly themselves to the scene once dispatched. It sells software called FreeForm that lets investigators search video by typing a plain-English description of a person or car, and a platform that cross-references Flock’s data with outside data sources. WIRED reported in August that Flock is testing a tool to identify drivers and find their associates based on movement patterns. Liberty pays only for the plate readers today, not these add-ons. But that’s where the company is headed, and our plate data already lives on its platform.

That is not a license plate reader. That is a map of your life, and it gets more detailed with every software update.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴

If this isn’t a constitutional problem today, it could be within a year.

In January, a federal judge in Norfolk, Virginia, ruled that the city’s Flock network didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment, but wrote that the analysis has to stay nimble as technology like AI changes what police surveillance can do. That case is now on appeal at the Fourth Circuit, with oral argument tentatively set for December. Here in Texas, Gov. Abbott paused state funding for Flock cameras in August. The day we voted, Comptroller Don Huffines went further and banned the use of grant money administered by his office for license plate readers, saying, “The government has no business tracking where law-abiding Texans drive.” State Sen. Lois Kolkhorst says the Senate will take up the issue in January, and she backs an outright ban.

Texas cities are getting the message. Pflugerville, Bastrop, Liberty Hill, San Marcos and others have already ended their contracts. Flock itself is reportedly cutting about 18 percent of its workforce. Liberty just signed up for another year anyway.

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲?

Supporters argued Tuesday night that Flock keeps officers and residents safer. I want that to be true. But when the question of officer safety came up, nobody in the room could point to a single instance or example where Flock had made an officer safer. The best anyone could offer was that more information in an officer’s hands might help in general.

The broader research is thin. One of the only studies of fixed camera networks found a drop in vehicle theft and about a 16 percent rise in vehicle theft clearance, and its own authors cautioned that not all of that gain could be credited to the cameras. That’s a real but narrow result, mostly about stolen cars. The broader clearance study Flock likes to cite was run by Flock itself, with university researchers, using a survey of its own customers. Meanwhile, Liberty runs about five or six searches a month.

Here’s what we do know. Our data is kept for 30 days, even though Flock itself has cut its default to seven. Once it’s shared, we can’t verify it’s ever deleted. And if a resident’s information is misused or leaked, staff said the liability would fall on the city, not on Flock.

Our officers deserve real tools. The roughly $27,000 a year we spend on Flock could buy tools that don’t come with these strings attached.

𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘀

During the debate, the mayor assured us that if it ever turned out we were giving our information to “alien robots or something,” we could cancel the contract with 30 days’ notice.

Funny timing. The very next day, researchers announced they had made contact with a fleet of rogue Chinese AI agents running on Tencent’s servers. The agents had been slipping past Alibaba’s defenses to ask its map app for directions to the entrances of parks, zoos and a hospital. When the researchers left a hidden message, the agents wrote back.

So, no aliens yet. Just robots that want to know where you park. The aliens are running a little behind schedule, but the robots are right on time.

The line got a laugh, but it gets the technology exactly backwards. The risk was never little green men. It’s ordinary software. The rogue agents behind the Hugging Face and Tencent incidents weren’t science fiction. They were built on the same kind of AI that companies like Flock are now building into their products, running on everyday cloud servers and quietly hunting for exposed credentials and unprotected data. They didn’t announce themselves. They just went to work.

That’s the danger of treating AI as a punchline. Flock isn’t really selling us the camera on the pole anymore. It’s selling a platform that keeps adding AI on top of the data those cameras collect. The chief told us any new AI features would require a contract change and a council vote. Good. But that safeguard only works if the people casting the vote understand what they’re approving. If AI risk sounds like alien robots to the people deciding, we aren’t evaluating the product in front of us. We’re guessing.

The good news, we’re told, is that we can cancel with 30 days’ notice. The bad news is the data doesn’t come back with us. And as other towns have learned the hard way, sometimes the cameras don’t leave either.

“𝗪𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝘆𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲.” 𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗲?

The promise that Liberty can walk away on 30 days’ notice deserves a hard look, because other Flock customers have tried. Their contracts aren’t ours, but the pattern is worth knowing.

Last fall, Elgin Community College, a public college outside Chicago, asked Flock to cancel its contract and remove its cameras after ICE detained a student in a campus parking lot. Within a day, Flock said no, insisting it hadn’t broken the contract. In December, the college offered to pay for the remaining five months just to get the cameras taken down. According to the college’s president, Flock never responded. Staff ended up covering the cameras with black trash bags and zip ties, and she says workers in an unmarked vehicle, which she assumed was Flock’s, kept coming back to pull the bags off. The cameras didn’t come down until the contract expired this April.

Elgin isn’t alone. Evanston, Illinois, terminated its contract in 2025 after a state audit found Flock had shared Illinois data with federal agencies in violation of state law. Flock then reinstalled its cameras without the city’s permission, and Evanston had to cover them and send a cease-and-desist letter. Grass Valley, California, canceled and pulled its cameras down, only to find Flock had put at least two back up. Littleton, Massachusetts, cut the power to its cameras, and Flock quietly switched five of them back on.

Flock has an explanation for each one: contract terms, automated maintenance systems, miscommunication. That’s exactly the point. Once the cameras go up, Flock’s contract and Flock’s systems decide how fast they come down. Not the city council.

𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴

Anyone who has lived through hurricane season in Liberty County knows you don’t wait for the storm to make landfall before you board up the windows and fill the gas tank. You watch the forecast, see where it’s tracking, and get ready while you still have time and options. Stewardship of public money works the same way.

Look at what’s coming down the pike. The governor has paused state funding for these cameras, and the comptroller has banned state grants for them, so future Flock costs are more likely to land on local budgets. Senators are talking about an outright ban when the Legislature meets in January. A federal appeals court is weighing whether these networks cross a constitutional line. And the vendor itself is reportedly cutting nearly one in five employees while losing customers by the dozen.

Then there’s the technology itself. Every new AI feature Flock adds is another door into the same pile of data.

Now picture the next Hugging Face or Tencent incident. This summer, OpenAI’s own AI agents escaped a test environment, broke into another company’s production systems and grabbed login credentials along the way. The Tencent agents got past Alibaba’s defenses using access keys left exposed in public code. Those agents were after test answers and directions to park entrances. The next ones might go looking for something far more valuable, like a searchable record of where millions of Americans drive every day. If one of them ever gets into Flock’s system, Liberty’s data is part of the haul, and as staff said Tuesday night, the liability would fall on us, not Flock.

The session and the appeal aren’t speculation. They’re on the calendar, and the funding cuts have already happened. The question isn’t whether Liberty will have to deal with it. It’s whether we deal with it on our terms or someone else’s.

If we wait, we could be forced out by a new state law halfway through a contract we just paid for, trying to unwind it with a vendor that has shown it doesn’t always leave quietly. Or we could be defending a lawsuit over data we collected, with the liability resting on the city. Either way, we’d be reacting.

Being proactive means making the call now, while we still control the timing, the terms and the message. That isn’t anti-police and it isn’t anti-technology. It’s what responsible people do with other people’s money and other people’s privacy.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁𝘆 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗱𝗼

Liberty should end its contract with Flock. Not trim the retention period, not add another audit, not wait for Austin or the Fourth Circuit to decide for us. End it.

And we should do it carefully. Before we send notice, our city attorney should review exactly what our termination clause says, including any removal fees or refund terms. Then we put Flock on written notice, demand written certification that Liberty’s data has been deleted, and have our own staff confirm every camera is physically gone and stays gone. The roughly $27,000 a year we save should go to tools our officers control and our residents can trust.

Technology will keep moving faster than our laws. That’s exactly why a city council can’t wait for the courts to catch up. We are the guardrail. Let’s act like it.

𝘙𝘰𝘴𝘴 𝘞𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘺 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘭. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸𝘴 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘰 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘺 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘭.

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