“Everybody paid [the social media posts and] stopped paying for it,” Langley reported. “Social media chatter on Flock is down about 95 percent from July. It dropped by 50 percent last week when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Literally 50 percent overnight. And so look, I’m the last person, my wife too, she’s like, ‘This is crazy, these people are being paid to say these things’.
Apparently hoping to reassure police facing protests in their own communities, Langley insisted that “it’s anonymous bots, and so it’s not real. Inorganic activity has led to organic activity, but when I look at protests across the country, it’s the same people with the same signs and the same message. That’s not normal. That’s not organic at all.
Flock’s line to police ignores that the ACLU has created a toolkit to help communities “deFlock,” citing genuine concerns that “creepy cameras make it possible to track anyone’s movements” without a warrant. On the day 404 Media leaked Langley’s statements, the ACLU updated its resource offering instructions on how to “get the Flock out,” while warning about the lack of oversight for Flock’s enormous camera database.
Flock struggles to hide 100,000 cameras
For Flock protesters, cases like the one in Florida are troubling, because Flock seems to take great pains to hide who owns the cameras, where and how big its camera network is. Speaking to the Texas Tribune in August, Flock estimated that there are about 120,000 cameras used by law enforcement across the country, but cybersecurity researcher Joshua Michael recently discovered that the network is almost twice as large and has since faced legal threats from Flock for publicly sharing his findings.
In a research paper this September, Michael explained how he found a Flock access token that allows him to retrieve device locations without logging in. Analyzing this map, Matt Busel, founder of a software studio called Tensorust, noted that Michael exposed a network of 214,073 devices, not 120,000. Presumably the nearly 100,000 difference represents Flock’s private camera network, which Busel warns operates without regulatory oversight.