When residents of Knox County, Tennessee, began pushing back against the installation of Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader cameras this past July, something unusual arrived in their text messages: an invitation from a little-known nonprofit called Neighbors for Strong Communities, offering to use artificial intelligence to help them draft supportive emails to local officials — but only if they first indicated they were in favor of the cameras.

That condition, noticed by one stay-at-home mother of four named Ashley Smith, set off a chain of events that has since cast a harsh spotlight on the influence tactics being used to prop up one of the country’s most controversial surveillance technologies. Rather than use the AI drafting tool, Smith wrote her own email — to elected officials and a local blog — describing what she characterized as a deceptive public relations campaign hiding behind the language of community engagement.

The Mechanics of Manufactured Consent

The organization behind the outreach, Neighbors for Strong Communities, was newly created at the time of the Knox County campaign and had previously employed similar tactics in a separate, high-profile context: rallying public support for the proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. Critics of that campaign had already labeled the nonprofit’s work corporate “astroturf” — a term describing the artificial simulation of grassroots public sentiment on behalf of a paying interest.

According to reporting by The Intercept, the Knox County campaign was the product of a formal “partnership” between Flock Safety and Neighbors for Strong Communities. On its own website, the nonprofit acknowledged its role, stating: “Flock Safety brought experience with public safety technology. Neighbors independently designed and managed the resident-engagement campaign, helping Knox County residents share their experiences directly with local decision-makers.”

But Smith saw it differently. “If the interests beyond this surveillance technology will work this hard to deceive you to win a vote, what will they do with the database of our every movement?” she wrote. “A company that manipulates and manufactures fake neighbors is not a company that will honor our data policies, audit logs, or the privacy of the people of Knox County.”

The campaign did not achieve its intended outcome. Knox County’s commission voted last month to cancel its Flock Safety contract, becoming the latest municipal body to do so.

A Pattern of Corporate Astroturfing

Craig Aaron, co-CEO of Free Press — a nonprofit that has been critical of both the Paramount merger and Flock’s surveillance network — was direct in his assessment of Neighbors for Strong Communities. “This is very much an astroturf project. I mean, there are no neighbors and there are no communities,” he told The Intercept. “What makes it astroturf is the fake grassroots nature of it.”

Aaron also placed Flock’s public image problem in context: “You’re talking about literally one of the most unpopular technologies, that has people taking chainsaws to light poles because they don’t like being spied on.”

That description is not mere hyperbole. According to reporting by the BBC, cameras in Houston’s historic Old Braeswood neighborhood were attacked and cut down in the middle of the night, their poles severed, with red “Notice: 24/7 video recording” signs placed on the downed equipment. Similar vandalism incidents have been reported in Minnesota, California, and Georgia.

What Flock’s Network Actually Collects

Understanding why communities have reacted so strongly requires understanding the scale of what Flock Safety has built. Founded in 2017, the company now claims to work with more than 7,000 communities nationwide, with approximately 100,000 cameras deployed. Its license plate reader cameras capture images of the rear of every passing vehicle, and footage is retained for a specified period.

Crucially, Flock is not merely selling individual cameras — it is selling access to a national database. Records obtained by the BBC from Houston reveal the scope: the city’s Metro Transit Authority owns 35 cameras but has access to approximately 20,000 devices across the Flock network, including some in Albany County, New York. In the Cypress-Fairbanks independent school district, a typical license plate lookup in April 2026 was conducted across more than 6,000 networks — up from roughly 270 networks in April 2024.

Christopher Rivera of the Texas Civil Rights Project told the BBC that this national aggregation is the core concern: authorities could use “these databases to search our everyday routines, which ultimately scrapes out our routes to work, where our children go to school, and where we worship — and that’s very problematic.”

Documented cases of misuse have added urgency to those concerns. A police officer in Kentucky was recently charged after using the Flock system to track his ex-girlfriend — who had filed a protection order against him — more than 2,000 times. He was caught by Flock’s own AI-powered audit tool. In 2025, a detective in Johnson County, Texas, searched over 80,000 images in a single investigation.

Flock’s Response: New Safeguards, Same Network

In August 2026, Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley announced a series of privacy and accountability reforms. The company reduced its default data retention period from 30 days to 7 days and introduced an “Evidence Mode” allowing detectives to preserve specific data for active investigations. Flock also announced that its Audit Assistance tool — which flags abnormal user activity — would become mandatory for all law enforcement customers by the end of the year, along with required case codes for every search.

Additional measures include mandatory multi-factor authentication, an independent security review by cybersecurity firm Bishop Fox, and a new offense-filtering system allowing cities to restrict which types of cases can prompt other agencies to access their camera networks — for example, permitting searches for stolen vehicles or missing persons while blocking immigration enforcement queries.

Whether these reforms will be sufficient to rebuild trust in communities where the AI-assisted public relations campaign has already poisoned the well remains an open question. For Ashley Smith in Knox County, the issue was never purely technical.

The Consent Problem

At the core of the Knox County controversy is a question that transcends any single city’s vote: when a corporation uses AI to help craft public comments in favor of its own product, and only provides that assistance to people who already support the product, what kind of democratic process is being served?

Smith articulated the underlying logic clearly: “One of the concerns of the people with the Flock cameras is: Can we trust you? And this sort of manipulation of people’s desires already shows that they are secretive, and they are not willing to share the honest information.”

The combination of a national surveillance network gathering location data on millions of vehicles daily, a growing record of documented misuse by law enforcement, and now an AI-assisted campaign to manufacture the appearance of community support has given civil liberties advocates a unified narrative. The question local governments across the country are now being asked to answer is not simply whether Flock cameras reduce crime — but who gets to define what community consent actually looks like, and whether a company with a stake in the answer should be the one helping to draft it.

This article draws on reporting from The Intercept and BBC News, as well as public statements from Flock Safety.

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