What the flock is happening?
For a while now I’ve been working on a longer blog series about what I’m calling techno feudalism — the slow, deliberate dismantling of digital autonomy. How big tech and government have made it increasingly difficult to self-host, stay private, avoid surveillance, or opt out of systems you never agreed to join in the first place.
I’ve been researching it through news, through local and national politics, and through hands-on experimentation with my own equipment. It’s a fun topic if you enjoy being mildly furious on a Tuesday afternoon.
And over and over again, one story kept showing up: Flock Safety.
If you haven’t heard of them, Flock Safety is a company that sells license plate reader cameras to police departments, HOAs, and private businesses. They’ve built the largest public-private surveillance network in the country — over 20 billion vehicle scans per month, operating in thousands of communities across 49 states. Grand Rapids included. The pitch is crime prevention. The reality is considerably more complicated.
What caught my attention wasn’t just the cameras. It was the reaction to the cameras. Or the lack of one. There’s pushback — from the ACLU, the EFF, from privacy researchers — but it’s quieter than you’d expect for a technology that logs every vehicle that passes a camera and feeds it into a searchable national database accessible to law enforcement agencies across the country. And when communities do push back, city governments often just… proceed anyway.
I wanted to understand why that is. Who’s making these decisions. What exactly they’re buying. And what it actually means for the people living underneath the cameras.
So that became its own project.
Block Flock GR is going to use Grand Rapids as the case study. Here’s what I’m planning to dig into:
The city itself — who makes these decisions, how the political structure works, where the money comes from, and why surveillance contracts tend to sail through with minimal scrutiny.
Flock as a company — what they advertise versus what they quietly do. The capabilities they lead with versus the ones buried in the fine print. The security track record. The data broker integrations. The AI tools. The national network effect that turns a local camera purchase into a node in a nationwide tracking system.
The Palantir connection — because Flock doesn’t exist in isolation. It plugs into larger data platforms, and that’s where this story connects to something much bigger than license plates. Government data aggregation, predictive policing, the infrastructure of algorithmic suspicion.
The bigger picture — how surveillance pays for itself twice. You pay taxes to buy the cameras. The cameras collect data on you. That data enriches profiles that can be used to manipulate, predict, and in worst cases, coerce. You funded your own extraction. Congratulations.
And then — because none of this has to be grim — there’s the other part of the plan.
I want to organize the least threatening protests in Grand Rapids history. Lawn chairs. Signs. Coffee and donuts. Maybe costumes. Parked next to Flock cameras in broad daylight, being aggressively friendly and mildly absurd, because sometimes the best way to make a point is to make people laugh first and think second.
There will be a merch store. There will be slogans. “Flock Around and Find Out” is already in contention for a yard sign.
The website for all of this is still being built. For now this is living on my personal blog. When it’s ready, it’ll have the full deep dives, a local news tracker, a way to get involved, and yes, the store.
If this sounds like something you want to follow, sign up for the newsletter. I’ll send updates when there’s something worth reading — no filler, no spam, just the story as it develops.
More soon. But check out the separate page for "The Larger Picture" for your informational pleasure:
Aurion Black
Block Flock GR is an independent local civic project in the making. No funding, no national affiliation, no agenda beyond asking questions and eating donuts near cameras.