Garrett Langley runs Flock Safety, a $8.4 billion company whose AI-enabled cameras, more than 100,000 of them, now line the roads of over 6,000 American communities. Will Freeman is a software engineer whose open-source project, DeFlock, maps the locations of publicly visible surveillance cameras so individuals can see where they are being watched. For this, Langley has called DeFlock a “terroristic organization” whose “primary motivation is chaos.” Sit with that inversion for a moment. A billion-dollar enterprise photographs most cars in America (regardless of whether their drivers are suspected of a crime), logs each vehicle’s movements into a searchable national database, and grants access to thousands of police agencies, no warrant required. A private citizen responds by noting, on a map, where the cameras sit in plain view atop public poles. And in the CEO’s telling, the man with the map is the menace. Consider how strange this standard is. Tens of millions of Americans open Waze every day, an app that lets drivers flag police cars and DWI checkpoints in real time. When the NYPD demanded Google shut the feature down, the company refused, noting that informed drivers make safer decisions, and nobody seriously calls Waze a terrorist network. Freeman's map does less than Waze. The ACLU (rightly) called Langley’s assertion “simplistic, juvenile, and ultimately authoritarian.” But even that seems charitable. When merely watching the watchers gets branded as terrorism, something foundational has flipped in the relationship between citizen and state. Fairness demands we grant Flock its strongest case, so what is that? (Continue reading, link in the thread…)