Smear Campaign Says Anti-Flock Movement Is Chinese Propaganda
404 Media Jason Koebler
A right-wing media push says Flock critics are Chinese-backed radicals. The claim looks shaky: the anti-surveillance crowd is broad, messy, and very real.
Based on reporting by 404 Media, Jason Koebler — read the original for the full story.
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A new conservative media drive is trying to recast the backlash against Flock as foreign-backed propaganda. Over the weekend, more than a dozen local TV stations ran a Sinclair-produced package claiming a “far-left network” was behind protests aimed at AI data centers and Flock cameras. The angle is simple: if you dislike Flock, you must be a paid activist, not an ordinary person worried about mass surveillance.
That story runs straight into the company’s own history. Flock CEO Garrett Langley has already played this game, telling Forbes last year that DeFlock, the open-source map of automated license plate reader cameras, was a “terroristic organization.” In December, he also told the police chief in Staunton, Virginia, that Flock and its police partners were under a coordinated attack from activist groups that wanted to defund police and normalize lawlessness. He later apologized, but the broader tactic clearly survived him.
The latest version comes wrapped in a lobbying report called The Compute War At Home from Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, or CASE. Rob Joyce, the former head of the NSA, wrote the foreword. The report leans hard on China, Neville Roy Singham, and a handful of left-wing groups that have indeed posted about Flock or data centers. But posting about an issue is not the same thing as steering a movement, and the evidence in the report sounds thin even by influence-operation standards. Pangram, an AI writing detector, also flagged nearly the whole thing as likely AI-written.
Fox News picked up the same framing, then Sinclair took it to local stations in at least 40 markets that 404 Media could identify. The result is a neat little media loop: a lobbying group makes a vague allegation, cable and local TV amplify it, and suddenly a broad, real, cross-partisan backlash to surveillance cameras gets filed under “foreign influence.” That is not analysis. It is a distraction with better graphics.
The source itself points to the obvious counterexample: opposition to Flock comes from conservatives and liberals, governors and senators, activists and random people who just do not want their movements vacuumed up by a private camera network. That is the part the smear campaigns keep trying to erase, because it is much harder to dismiss a genuine public revolt than a cartoon villain.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the oldest trick in surveillance politics: call the critics radicals, then hope nobody notices the camera. The tell is always the same, too — the loudest people insisting the backlash is artificial usually have the most to lose if anyone starts looking closely. It’s not subtle, just loud, and in modern media that often passes for evidence.
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