Smear Campaign Says Anti-Flock Movement Is Chinese Propaganda

Over the weekend, more than a dozen local TV news stations ran a video report called “Far-left network behind ‘No Kings’ protests targeting AI data centers, Flock cams.” The report paints those opposing Flock not as a diverse, decentralized, bipartisan group of ordinary citizens who oppose mass surveillance, but as well-funded radical leftists who are spreading propaganda at the behest of China and rich billionaires. The opposite is true, of course: The entities defending Flock and painting their opponents as cynical, paid influencers have a specific agenda, have deep pockets, and are connected to some of the most powerful people in the world.

Many of the most vocal defenders of Flock are attempting a strategy that Flock itself tried soon after evidence of the abuse of its automated license plate reader camera systems was reported by 404 Media and other local news outlets: They are suggesting that anyone who opposes this technology or points out its shortcomings must be part of a coordinated group of people who hate the police and want the United States to fail by picking out a few generally inconsequential social media posts by people on the fringes. Some of Flock’s defenders—a mix of people who work for billionaire-funded think tanks or have direct financial investments in Flock—have suggested that the people who oppose Flock are being quietly funded by billionaires or shadowy organizations to do so.

Last year, Flock CEO Garrett Langley told Forbes that DeFlock, an open-source, crowdsourced map of ALPR cameras, was a “terroristic organization whose primary motivation is chaos, they are closer to ANTIFA than anything else.” In December, emails obtained via a public records request and shared with 404 Media showed Langley told the police chief of Staunton, Virginia, which was considering canceling its Flock contract, that “Flock and the law enforcement agencies we partner with are under coordinated attack from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.”

The strategy to paint ordinary citizens opposing Flock and the journalists who report factual information about how Flock has been used as radicals did not work out well for Langley, who recently apologized for his remarks. But parts of the conservative media, several well-funded think tanks, the former head of the National Security Agency, and Flock’s investors are trying to run the playbook back.

Last week, a lobbying group called Consumer Action for a Strong Economy published a report called “The Compute War At Home.” The report itself features a cover with obvious AI-generated imagery, and the AI writing detector Pangram detected nearly everything except the end citations of the report as being likely written by AI. The foreword of the report was written by Rob Joyce, the former head of the NSA. This report suggests that opposition to Flock (and to data centers) is being driven by “China-linked activists networks and aligned organizations connecting opposition to data centers with surveillance, policing, and immigration.” The report suggests that opposition to data centers and to Flock is partly being driven by groups it says have received funding from Neville Roy Singham, an American tech billionaire who now lives in China and who has become a George Soros-like figure in conservative media (a recent Fox News headline, for example, has the headline “DOJ launches grand jury probe into Marxist mogul Neville Roy Singham’s funding of leftist groups.”)

Opposition to Flock, the report says, is the result of “socialist organizers” being partially driven by the People’s Republic of China who found an issue that people on the right could agree with them on as a “wedge issue” they could use to “discredit the broader technologies, companies, and infrastructure underpinning America’s AI expansion.” As evidence of this, it points to the fact that Breakthrough News, an organization that has gotten money from Singham, who happens to live in China, wrote an article about Flock last year. This article was not particularly popular judging by its performance on social media, was one in a sea of thousands of articles about Flock, and is one I have not seen cited in any meaningful way. It also notes that members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a leftist political party funded by Singham, have posted about Flock on social media and have held information sessions on it. It is literally true that these groups have received funding from Singham and that they have posted about Flock or AI data centers, but there is nothing to suggest that their posts are particularly influential in a sea of millions of social media posts and thousands of deeply reported articles about Flock and the ways it has been abused.

The report is difficult to follow but basically attempts to suggest that far left socialist organizers have manipulated conservatives into opposing Flock and data centers. The report says that conservatives now make up the bulk of the online opposition to Flock: “81 percent of politically classifiable fused Flock-data center posts came from right-wing/conservative or libertarian accounts,” even though, it says, opposing Flock is a viewpoint that originated with far-left interests that align with China. This mechanism, where the left has supposedly incepted the right into agreeing with them, is “strategically important.”

“An argument introduced through left-wing organizing channels was able to travel through a much larger conservative audience once packaged around privacy, surveillance, and distrust of government technology,” the report says.

“A conservative does not need to share PSL’s [Party for Socialism and Liberation’s] socialism, CODEPINK’s worldview or Beijing’s strategic interests to advance an outcome all three can welcome. He only needs to accept the surveillance-state frame and repeat it,” the report adds.

CASE, the group that published this study, is a lobbying organization that does not make the vast majority of its funding sources public, however, previous IRS records show it has taken money from big pharmaceutical and the telecom industries. The think tank’s interests are primarily around deregulation by “promoting consumer interests through the advancement of free-market principles.”

The anti Donald Trump “No Kings” protests are not actually mentioned in the CASE report, but the study still served as the basis of two major pieces of conservative media, the first being a report in Fox News called “No Kings protest network behind fight against AI data centers and Flock cameras: Pro-China communist groups funded by tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham expand protests against data centers to Flock cameras.”

“Organizations from the Singham network—including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, CodePink, the People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition and affiliated groups—appeared repeatedly across [the No Kings] movement, working with nonprofits more aligned with the Democratic Party, including Indivisible, a nonprofit network funded in part by billionaire Democratic megadonor George Soros,” the Fox News report reads. “The organizations deny any wrongdoing as agents of alleged foreign influence and say they are addressing legitimate community grievances.”

More insidiously, the CASE report was picked up by The National News Desk, which is a Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned news production team that runs on dozens of local news stations nationwide, is owned by a billionaire, and has a history of pushing Republican and conservative viewpoints.

The Sinclair-produced package is called “Report: Far-left network behind ‘No Kings’ protests targeting AI data centers, Flock cams.” Neither piece of coverage indicates how “No Kings” is involved, but both seem to imply that some of the groups that showed up at the No Kings protests have also posted about Flock. The package ran in at least 40 different local news markets that we were able to easily identify, which include:

• Birmingham, Alabama
• Mobile, Alabama
• Little Rock, Arkansas
• Bakersfield, California
• Chico, California
• Fresno, California
• Washington, D.C.
• West Palm Beach, Florida
• Boise, Idaho
• Cedar Rapids, Iowa
• South Bend, Indiana
• Flint, Michigan
• Montana
• Central Nebraska
• Las Vegas, Nevada
• Rochester, New York
• Winston-Salem, North Carolina
• Asheville, North Carolina
• Columbus, Ohio
• Cincinnati, Ohio
• Dayton, Ohio
• Steubenville, Ohio
• Tulsa, Oklahoma
• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Portland, Oregon
• Roseburg, Oregon
• Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
• Johnstown, Pennsylvania
• Charleston, South Carolina
• Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
• Chattanooga, Tennessee
• Bristol, Tennessee
• Austin, Texas
• San Antonio, Texas
• Abilene, Texas
• El Paso, Texas
• Salt Lake City, Utah
• Lynchburg, Virginia
• Green Bay, Wisconsin

It should be noted that the “No Kings” protests are definitively not a “far-left” movement, and that there have been numerous examples of Flock being used against No Kings protesters. It is true that groups on the left have been posting about Flock, just as groups on the right have been posting about Flock, because huge swaths of the internet are posting about Flock, because it has become a huge, controversial topic.

I have been covering Flock for years and the DeFlock movement for nearly two years. I have watched dozens of city council meetings in small towns, big cities, liberal enclaves and rural communities. The people showing up to protest against Flock (and against data centers) come from all backgrounds, all economic classes, and all political perspectives. The politicians now opposing Flock are also a diverse set, ranging from conservatives Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, and Thomas Massie (among others) to Democrats Josh Shapiro, Ron Wyden, and Ed Markey.

Many people who show up to city council meetings to oppose Flock are “organized” in that they are incredibly informed on the issue, share reporting about Flock, and are good at making social media content that resonates with people about the ways Flock has been abused. This movement is obviously not a leftist movement or a far right movement; it is an organic movement that has arisen out of legitimate concerns of mass surveillance and legitimate objections to how this technology has proliferated throughout America. Some of the people pointed out as being apparently bad actors are, essentially, random people who feel strongly about mass surveillance. DeFlock was created by a single 20-something programmer who opposed surveillance; HaveIBeenFlocked, a database of Flock lookups, was much the same (and has led directly to police being arrested for abusing the system).

The people who show up at city council meetings or who protest Flock are taking time away from their days, their jobs, their lives, in order to stand up for something they believe in. But the CASE report is part of a broader move to paint people who oppose Flock as being part of far-left movements who are potentially being paid to do so. They come alongside less specific claims that interest in Flock is not organic, and that social media influencers have only recently started to care about Flock (this is also a main claim of the CASE report—that the number of posts about Flock have skyrocketed in a suspicious way). These claims are being made almost exclusively by people who are being paid for their work or who do have a financial stake in it in some way (this includes people who are being paid in the broadest sense possible, like people who work for think tanks and take a salary from them to write about these issues, as well as people who directly work for Flock or are directly invested in it).

Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow for the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute associated with billionaire hedge fund manager and staunch conservative donor Paul Singer, tweeted Tuesday, for example, that an account called “Orwell Day” only began posting about Flock recently: “Trevor Lyman, who runs the Orwell Day website, appears to have launched this account in late May. That's also when he registered the site. Based on its YouTube and blog content it posted very briefly about non-Flock content, then pivoted almost entirely to posting clips and stories about Flock. Lyman used to be a politico. He was the small-dollar fundraiser who helped Ron Paul smash records in 2008 and 2012. It's not clear what he was doing between now and then,” Lehman posted. “So why did he resurface now and start running an anti-Flock brand? Where did that come from?”

It is impossible to know the motivations of every single person or account who posts on social media, and it is easy to point at the most extreme people posting online and use them to fashion a narrative to undermine legitimate concerns about that thing. The leftists who have posted about Flock are certainly not driving the conversation any more than any other group, and the same argument could be made about far right groups; government surveillance centers have warned that “the neo-Nazi accelerations group Private Aryan Resistance began recruiting members on neo-Nazi forum Fash Front to sabotage Flock cameras.” It would be equally possible and equally disingenuous to write an article saying that the anti-Flock movement is being driven by neo-Nazis.

It’s simply the case that lots of people are talking about Flock now, which is how the news and, notably, social media algorithms work. People learn about a thing, they post about it, people care about that thing and the algorithm amplifies it. More people begin posting about it and people who see success with that topic post about it more. This is a very simple phenomenon that has existed for many years; I would not impugn people who are using the internet in the way it is currently designed or question their motives, so it is interesting that Lehman and the Manhattan Institute is levying these accusations about other people’s interest in Flock considering that the Manhattan Institute had not mentioned Flock in any serious way until August, when the Institute’s Rafael Mangual wrote “These Cameras Save Lives, But Some Want Them Banned.” Lehman followed this up with a piece in The Atlantic called “In Defense of Flock” on August 10. Since then, Lehman has tweeted about Flock more than a hundred times, which includes posts accusing people of opposing Flock of being paid to do so: “Posts about Flock that used to get hundreds of angry responses are now mostly getting likes. Maybe the money stopped flowing!” a16z employees have also repeatedly made tweets defending Flock in recent weeks, and a16z venture capitalist David Ulevitch tweeted implying that 404 Media is funded by, or working with, the DSA and defund the police movements (we are funded by our individual subscribers; Ulevitch has since deleted his tweet).

I have no doubt that The Manhattan Institute’s fellows are genuinely interested in defending Flock, but this is not an affordance that they make to people they perceive as having the wrong opinion about Flock.

"What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes. These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders. ln short, it is democracy in action."

If Flock defenders want to point to coordination from financially-invested interests, they should look no further than what Flock itself does. The company regularly holds private meetings with police about how to defend the company, how to advocate for the company and ‘own the narrative’ at city council meetings, and how to handle (or avoid) meetings with journalists. It throws conferences specifically for police that it does not allow outside journalists into, and has repeatedly tried to publicly and privately question the motives of people who oppose it. Flock’s lobbying spending has also skyrocketed, according to a report in The Intercept. The government and its surveillance apparatus, meanwhile, surveils people who post negative things about Flock on social media.

In Joyce’s interview with Fox News, he says that a “foreign influence operation can simply identify an existing division, amplify the most combustible narratives, and it pushes Americans farther apart. It polarizes us.”

But opposition to Flock, and to data centers, is not an issue that “divides” Americans. These are some of the very few issues in American society that people across political, class, and regional lines actually agree with each other on. The people and entities trying to drive Americans against each other are the ones trying to paint normal American citizens as coordinated paid protesters and who themselves work for extremely well-funded, politically-slanted organizations or are directly affiliated with Flock itself.

Flock CEO Langley’s attempt to smear people who opposed Flock as propagandists and leftists to the police chief in Staunton, Virginia, didn’t work.

“As far as your assertion that we are currently under attack, I do not believe that this is so. I have dedicated the last 41 years of my life to serving the citizens of the City of Staunton as a police officer, the last 22 as the police chief,” he wrote. “What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes. These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders. ln short, it is democracy in action.”

There’s no indication that this broader campaign will work, either. But that hasn’t stopped Flock’s proponents from trying.