Former Flock Employee Speaks Out: Says He Was ‘Lied To’

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0:33And throughout the whole time, the company line was, we don't work with ICE. I didn't know that there were these mechanisms inside the company that were essentially fighting to get this pilot to happen.

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1:26Subscribe at youtube.com slash at 404mediaco. This week, I'm speaking to Jonathan Pass. As you'll hear, he is a former FLOC employee and now a candidate for Congress in Massachusetts 5th District. Obviously, it is very, very interesting to hear from somebody who worked inside FLOC. there is this nationwide debate about these automatic license plate reader cameras, which comes in large part after our coverage about how ICE was having local cops perform lookups on their behalf, how a woman who self-administered an abortion was tracked with the technology. But it's really become something else now with it being all over social media, mainstream media outlets doing articles on this constantly.

2:14There was just a CNN one recently, for example, this movement to destroy flock cameras in lots of cases, and these constant city council meetings where individual communities are deciding, do we want these cameras in our neighborhood or not? Some say yes, and some say no, but that is really developing across the entirety of the United States. I've spoken to a lot of current and former Flock employees during our reporting. I would point back to some of the earlier stuff we did about Nova, which is a Flock product, which was going to bring together all sorts of different data sets, including hacked data from the dark web to let police jump from license plate reader data to who's actually driving the vehicle.

3:01When we did that coverage and after internal pressure, Flock decided to not go ahead with that hacked data integration. But it's very unusual to have a former Flock employee speak on the record about their experience in the company. So you'll hear about that now, and I'll throw to the conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Hey, it's me again. Given that this episode was mostly about a company rather than a chat just between two people like these episodes often are, I did ping Flock for a statement. I'm just going to read some of that now, especially as Jonathan has a specific role in the company. I asked Flock, well, what do people in that role usually do?

3:44And here's part of the statement that Flock replied with. Flock's public affairs team works with city leaders, law enforcement agencies, and community stakeholders who are weighing whether or how to adopt public safety technology. In practice, that means participating in public forums, appearing at hundreds of council meetings and town halls, answering questions directly from residents, and sharing best practices around accountability, oversight, and policy controls. We also engage directly with civil society, grassroots advocates, and other partners to elevate the voices of people impacted by crime.

4:19We are proud to participate in the public process and to advocate for technology that helps communities solve crimes, locate missing people, and improve public safety.

4:36Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on the show and for speaking with us. I really, really appreciate it. It is an absolute honor to be here with you, Joseph. So I think the best place to start quite simply is could you explain for people what your job at Flock was? And I mean, literally the title and maybe how that title changed, but then also just that role specifically. What were you literally doing at Flock like day to day? Yeah, so I was a government affairs manager at Flock. So at the time, I helped represent the company to municipalities, to local officials, and other conferences where you're basically meeting with potential customers and decision makers.

5:21So we were very much in the mix of everything between what's cutting edge in terms of technology, but what's also going on in terms of the market and what's going on in terms of regulatory affairs, updates, lawsuits, everything. So we were very much at the forefront of everything happening at Flock. And my job was to make sure that we were not only defending the company, but also representing the product as best as possible and making sure that we can get approved at council. If I had to summarize it, I would represent the company during these public hearings, during deliberations from local elected boards.

6:00What does the process of trying to get Flock sold to a city and installed look like? Is it Flock maybe approaches a city and says, Hey, we have this product that we think would be really useful. Then you explain the use cases and then the process goes on and on. What does the process of Flock pitching its products to a city, then a city actually getting the product? What does that look like? Yeah, so there's a sales team, right? And their job is to go out there and they're going after smaller accounts, bigger accounts. And what that means is smaller cities to bigger cities. There's a difference between some town in Ohio and the city of San Francisco.

6:44And these could be from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of product being sold. And so part of what it looked like was police departments approaching us because police departments are honestly the best people to sell the product. You know, one police department says, hey, I have this new gadget and I would love for you to be a part of it so we can better go after criminals together. There's a lot of socialization that happens across law enforcement agencies. So many times our salespeople would already be in touch with someone. Sometimes they would go onto the field and pitch people, but a lot of times businesses would come to us and business would come to us as local police departments who want in.

7:26So how did you get involved in the first place? How did you sort of get that role to begin? It's really ironic because I have more of a career in social justice work from being like an activist, a union organizer, a local elected official in my city in Waltham, Massachusetts. I was the second youngest ever to get elected. So I started getting really involved with municipal broadband. And I really was thinking at the time, it was this techno-optimism that maybe technology can be the answer to some of these existential crises of our time. It doesn't just have to be this bad thing. So I kind of came out of an election where I was running for mayor at the time.

8:10I was a two-time elected city councilor. We didn't quite win the mayoral run. We got very close, but I came out of that. And I remember going to this conference in Atlanta. and my friend at the time who was also city councilor, it was the National League of Cities. And it's not my first time as an elected official to go to these conferences where you go network and meet with other people. But that's basically where I was kind of pitched the opportunity to join the company. And I want to speak to this more later, but it was during this moment that I was like, oh, they sell cameras. And I just remember thinking like, oh, they're helping find missing people.

8:46Right. That to me was like, that makes sense. We're using the same cameras in the highways that I'm used to paying tolls to help find missing people. And we are basically hand-in-hand partners with the people with the milk carton, like missing person. Right, right, right. So to me, it was this kind of naivete to think that this wasn't part of a broader surveillance apparatus. So when I joined the company, I came in with this optimism that this was a different company. This wasn't like Palantir, right? This was a very specific company that had a deep respect for civil rights and liberties and that we wanted to make sure that we were sensitive and catering to the values of whatever municipality we were working with, whatever police department, whatever their policy was.

9:32So there was always this thing, in my view, at least really throughout my career there, that we were honoring and respecting the wishes of the people. And then on top of that, we were better than the competition. Because there were other competitors like Axon and Recor and all these other in the industry that didn't quite have our ethical standards in a tech industry that is only growing. So that was kind of like the blinders that I had on. And when you're in the company like this one, and everyone's working remotely, you're not exactly able to see some of the fires being put out. Part of my job was putting out fires, but it was in this very public domain arena.

10:17And I wasn't privy to how our technology was doing damage and how it was being abused and all these other things. I was just aware about concerns that the communities had, that legislators had. And my job was to make sure that we assuage those concerns and that we were able to, at the end of the day, be part of some city budget and be part of the operational budget. So then, you know, it's just a reoccurring expense. And we're part of the everyday practice of law enforcement at the local level. When you first joined the company, as you say, where the company presents itself as finding missing people and this kind of narrow technology, when you first joined Flock then, what's it like working at the company?

10:57What's the culture? It's a very fast-paced environment. It's startup culture. You're moving fast. Things are moving fast. Everyone's out to... Not everyone, but most people are trying to make a name for themselves. People are clearly making a lot of money. So it's pretty cutthroat across departments. And you're working with brilliant people, right? And sometimes you're able to solve real issues. We were in the news constantly helping solve crime, you know? So there's this overemphasis of, look at the remarkable work that we're doing, and we would dramatize these things. It's a missing person. It was someone who was kidnapped.

11:32Even T-Pain, you know, had his car, I think, swiped at some point, and a camera helped track that down. County man facing charges accused of rear-ending artist T-Pain not far from his Roswell home. The Roswell police say that they use an eyewitness as well as slot cameras to quickly track down this driver. So T-Pain was like, you know, singing our praises, you know, and it's that kind of environment where everyone's kind of sipping the Kool-Aid, you know, because the deal is so good. People are getting paid probably a lot more in an economy, even at that time, that isn't very friendly to young people.

12:08that isn't very inclusive of people of color, like myself and some of the other people that were in the company. So there's this real entrepreneurial spirit. And there's also this real like, we are at the next Microsoft. We are at the next Facebook. We are at the forefront of this amazing thing. And we're about to become the dominant name in this industry. Yeah. And obviously, I've spoken to many current and former flock employees. And one thing that stood out to me is that a lot of people really enjoy the engineering environment there. They feel that just on a purely personal, selfish motivation, there's interesting computational problems where these engineers have to work on that sort of thing.

12:53And then you combine that with... It feels like we're working towards a very good mission and we are helping people and that sort of thing. You can see why people would like to work somewhere like this. And as you say, the pay is presumably much better than some other places as well. And then to move to the work you were doing a bit more specifically, you were mentioning that you were putting out these fires publicly. I mean, can you give us some examples? What do you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, I remember there was this city, I would get flown out to different cities, I would get flown out to different towns.

13:28And sometimes I was the, you know, in case of emergency button. So we had a deal, a multimillion dollar deal in the city in Florida. And because the sheriff was presenting it, the county board wouldn't question it a lot. But in case they had questions, that was my role to jump in. And if there were like these civil rights questions, these privacy questions, legal questions, it was my role to jump in there and help, you know, calm those concerns and make sure that we had a win. You know, I remember going to a board where the people of color in the board were the ones, the legislators, the city councilors in that board were the ones raising the alarm saying, hey, these cameras are going to be installed in predominantly communities of color.

14:12You know, how are you going to guarantee me that this isn't going to further criminalize our communities? Right. So it was part of my job to go there and say, hey, you know, we map these cameras out very thoughtfully. We go where we think that there's likely to be the entry points and exit points of a community. We go where there's a lot of traffic. But then at the same time, we can respect your wishes and have a really strong policy. So there was this kind of deliberative approach where I would go to these meetings. And if it was a legislator, we would have meetings with them, sometimes in advance, sometimes in the public realm.

14:46Or if it was a town hall and there was community pushback. In that very example that I'm talking about, there was a lot of community pushback. And I remember there was a vigil outside related to something completely else. And I was just taken aback. These people outside that I very much respect and probably resonate with probably hate what I'm representing. And I stood out there with them in this vigil. And I was there with them in this vigil. And it was really related to something else. But it was incredible to think that my job is to basically make sure that this resistance doesn't become a vote reflected in the vote of the council, right?

15:24So it's kind of like this dismantling of, you know, the public input. Yeah. And that's kind of what started unraveling for me very quickly, this facade, that we were helping these democratically elected boards represent, you know, number one, take care of their people, right? This is the number one marketing tool for Flock is that this is somehow going to improve public safety. But number two, it's that we are partners. We will go to the town hall and present this product. We will go there and meet with the people and address concerns. We'll make sure that your policies reflect your community's wishes.

15:58But what became clear to me over time is that real decision making isn't happening in the public process. The real decision making is happening between the company and some police department. and they're just trying to get to a win. They're trying to get to a check mark on the budget. And no matter what is said, they just want cameras out there, right? For one reason or another, their mode of operation is by any means necessary, we're gonna get cameras out there. And if it's working with the mayor or putting pressure differently and working around different constituencies that will put pressure on the mayor or the city council, we are there to really enforce the will of Flock.

16:38We're there to pay lip service, but we're really there to do the will of flock. These companies are a workaround. If it was just a public process where license plate readers are controlled by the public and they're regulated in the public domain and there's actual laws involved in how we regulate them, there would be a lot more scrutiny. And there would be a lot more legal scrutiny to justify. But because it's a public-private partnership, you know, these police departments have a workaround, not just state law, but also municipal law, but also like just basic public scrutiny. So, I mean, this is just so business as usual.

17:18It's so business as usual, right? It's to say these police departments, these law enforcement agencies are their own basic lobby. They are their own political force. They're not just public sector employees. They are their own political force. With a lot of leverage, a lot of power. And they know how to implement their leverage. They have relationships with elected officials. And this is nothing new to me. I was a city councillor at the time. But what really disturbed me was my own city. What happened in my own city, right? So I live in Waltham, Massachusetts. Towns around in Massachusetts, I was aware were getting cameras.

17:52When I was working at Flock, I had no idea. My own police department was having talks with Flock. And what's ironic is that our police department knew there would be public scrutiny around this. There would be a public outcry. So you know what they did? They have a forfeiture fund. And they basically went straight to the mayor and they said, we want to buy these cameras. And they basically bought them directly through the mayor and used these public forfeiture funds, which are only controlled by the police department. So they completely bypassed the city council. Yeah, no need for a vote, no need for it to be in a city budget, anything like that is just purely a police department purchase through the mayor to flock.

18:38Yeah. Yeah. And that was, to me, at the time I already left the company. But to me, it was kind of like this, like, you think you're onto something. And then I was like, I figured it out. And then it was like, just this over determination of what I figured out, which was they completely worked around the public process, public scrutiny, democratic processes. And they're like, here are flawed cameras. 16 cameras just appeared overnight. No policy in place, no ordinances in place, just people getting surveilled. No discussion. Yeah. Yeah. There was public outcry as soon as those cameras were in place.

19:14So then the city council went back and asked them, you know, how did you procure these? How did this happen? What happened? And he got corrected. I'm not going to say he lied. He was basically forced to backtrack and say, because he was like acting as if he didn't know. And then he said, no, no, we went through the normal process. And then the chairman of the committee had to tell him, you did not come to my committee. So he said, oh, no, we used our forfeiture fund. So now there's been a whole process to roll these back and push against these contracts. This very contract that's here, people want to take down these cameras.

19:46But again, what's remarkable is that we needed to organize. I organized with a city councilor at large to have a town hall to basically really get everyone on the same page to say, you know, this company is a leaky boat. The data is not well secured. And then on top of that, they just completely bypassed a democratic process, public procurement process, and they just installed cameras. So, you know, it's a slap in the face to, I think, a lot of the people.

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