Flock Safety: Peter Thiel’s Golden Ticket To Mass Surveillance
What happens when tech billionaires can buy their way around the Fourth Amendment?
As I turn into the only entrance and exit to my neighborhood,
I pass a tall black pole hoisting a solar panel and camera far above the street, staring down at the intersection.
These cameras appeared overnight last year throughout our city, with little announcement or fanfare to the general public about their purpose and how the data collected would be stored and shared.
As I began to research what these cameras were, I opened what felt like a wormhole into the darkest corners of the surveillance tech world and its seedy underbelly: AI, warrantless federal surveillance, and private data sharing that make Minority Report look like a kids’ show.
The future is here, it is now, and it’s moving so quickly that we will be in a full police surveillance state before we even know what hit us.
From Flock Safety, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk to Palantir, Fedex, Kaiser Permanente… all the way to the U.S. government: a tech revolution is brewing that will topple any semblance of freedoms Americans believed we possessed.
Buckle up. We’re diving in.
I’m taking you on a little mental trip, so go with me. We’re in downtown Atlanta, GA, at a hot mixed-use development comprised of luxury apartments, couture clothing and home brands, high-end restaurants, and a discreet suite of offices that houses one of the most explosive startups in the world today.
Flock Safety, Inc. was born in the ‘labs’ of Y Combinator, an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm briefly connected to billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Thiel joined as an advisor in its “part-time partner” program, but was not asked to continue on as a full-time advisor in 2017. But by the summer of 2017, Flock Safety had secured their place in the Y Combinator, putting them squarely on Thiel’s radar.1
The founders of Flock are quoted as describing the energy of Y Combinator with their product as such: “YC set the tone for scaling Flock doggedly, purposefully, and with constant velocity, for years to come.”2
Their product?
Surveillance. This kind of hype over surveillance cameras seems a bit curious until you dig into their model and the software involved.
Flock’s goal is this: to work with law enforcement agencies to protect our streets and neighborhoods from crime, a mission as squeaky clean and innocent in appearance as their founders, Garrett Langley and Matt Feury. We all want safer streets, right?
Flock’s surveillance cameras surpass the competition because they have embedded license plate tracking software, as well as other AI-driven data collection capabilities (I’ll pause here to remind you that over 5,000 cities at the time of writing this have installed Flock Safety cameras- is one yours?). This data is fed into a dashboard of sorts that combines all data points available to draw up a ‘profile’ of a suspect or individual, all to assist law enforcement in catching bad guys, of course. Founder Matt Feury even shared an anecdote about being motivated to design better surveillance software after a rash of property thefts in his neighborhood in Atlanta, GA.
Surveillance holds an entirely different place, however, in the hearts and minds of tech moguls, venture capitalists, and authoritarian regimes.
Flock Safety, Inc. hit a market absolutely red-hot with tech ventures in the specific niche of market crossover that is surveillance, AI, and data collection, interpretation, and sharing. One company had already been leading the pack with their intelligence gathering and producing capabilities: Palantir Technologies, Inc.
Palantir is an American publicly-traded company that specializes in software platforms for big data analytics. Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Alex Karp, and Joe Lonsdale, Palantir was awarded $113 million in new or renewed federal contracts, including a $75M deal under the Army’s Maven Smart System Program, between 2023 and 2025 alone.3
This is very on-brand for Thiel, who recognized early-on the value of government contracts. He began the Founder’s Fund in 2005 with cofounders Ken Howery and Luke Nosek seeking to focus specifically on technology startups whose only customers were the US government4 (they later opened their funding to include the promising social networking site Facebook). The first two investment projects are now basically household names: Space X and Palantir, which quickly became one of the foremost suppliers of data to the CIA, US Department of Defense, and ICE. In fact, for years, Palantir’s only customer was In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, before it branched out into contracts with, among others, the NYPD and the state of Israel.
Palantir focuses on four primary projects: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry, Palantir Apollo, and Palantir AIP.
Palantir Gotham offers AI-powered targeting, sensor tasking, and mixed reality capabilities for soldiers, operators, and commanders.
“It’s a COTS [Commercial Off The Shelf] platform for AI-enabled defense, intelligence, and law enforcement operations. It integrates and analyzes data, enables secure collaboration, and supports intelligence collection and production, investigative network analysis at scale, mission planning, targeting, execution, and after-action analysis,” boasts a service document describing the software.
But end users describe the powerful software a bit more strongly: “This isn't your typical data platform—it's built to handle the kind of massive, disparate datasets that government agencies deal with daily, ranging from satellite imagery to text documents to social media chatter. Gotham's primary value is in data fusion, meaning it's a pro at taking a zillion sources of unstructured data and turning it into something coherent, often to identify threats, track targets, or uncover shady networks.
Who's using it? The U.S. Department of Defense, FBI, and various other global defense and law enforcement agencies are Gotham's biggest clients. For example, the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has used Gotham to improve decision-making on the battlefield by identifying patterns from intelligence data and using it to inform military operations. The platform's ability to link seemingly random pieces of information is why it's so loved by spooks and soldiers alike.”5
This article goes on to describe another Palantir project: Foundry. Here’s where things begin to get very interesting:
“While Gotham is the darling of government agencies, Foundry is Palantir's play in the commercial world. Foundry's pitch is simple: "Let's turn your messy, siloed corporate data into something useful." It helps businesses centralize all their data, clean it, and analyze it for insights that go beyond standard reporting.
Who's using it? Foundry is used by a wide range of industries, from airlines like Airbus to pharmaceutical companies like Merck, and even oil and gas firms. These companies often have vast amounts of operational data that's hard to make sense of, and Foundry's strength lies in integrating this data and allowing users to build and tweak machine learning models for better decision-making. ”
So Foundry is a software for civilian entities—businesses, particularly corporations, right?
Well, corporations definitely benefit from this type of robust, sophisticated data collection and analysis, but this particular tool took on a different potential with the signing of a certain Executive Order instructing several federal agencies to “eliminate information silos” and “authorize and facilitate both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records.”
After Elon Musk’s teams of teenage programmers burst into federal buildings and set up shop, Foundry has reportedly already been integrated within several federal agencies, including Department of Homeland Security, Department of Health and Human Services, and potentially the Social Security Administration [perhaps being installed as we speak] and the Internal Revenue Service. A reminder: three members of the DOGE team worked previously for Palantir.6
Whether we like it or not, all of our personal data contained in federal government databases is, as we speak, being funneled through Palantir software.
Peter Thiel’s software.
Who is Peter Thiel and why should I care?
If you haven’t heard of the mysterious billionaire circulating behind the scenes with such influential people as sitting Vice President J.D. Vance, and former Senior Presidential Advisor, fellow billionaire, and Space X founder Elon Musk, let’s catch you up.
Peter Thiel founded Thiel Capital back in 1996 and co-founded PayPal two years later with Luke Nosek and Max Levchin. After selling PayPal, his stored his founder’s shares in his Roth IRA and, after eBay acquired the company, his account suddenly became worth millions. Using those gains, he invested in Facebook and Palantir tax-free, cementing his foothold in the world of tech venture capital.7
Aside from a greasy slip through a tax loophole, what concerns have been raised about the man himself? Thiel has been known for his severe and controversial beliefs on government, governance, social welfare, corporate rights, and more.
In 1996, Thiel co-authored The Diversity Myth with current Trump-appointed “AI and Crypto Czar” David Sacks. Denouncing multiculturalism and “political correctness” at Stanford, Thiel supports gutting social welfare programs that buoy working-class families while opposing basically any restriction on the rights of corporations to profit from the labor of working people.
In 2009, Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Thiel speaks often at the National Conservative Conference, which is sponsored by right-wing think tanks like The Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute. One of the most regular attendees to the conference, and specifically Thiel’s addresses, was none other than Curtis Yarvin.
Without going down a separate rabbit hole, I will refer you to a link that describes Curtis Yarvin, and his beliefs, in more detail. This article also draws the connection between Yarvin’s radical essays and opinions and our sitting Vice President, J.D. Vance, who has admitted that Yarvin was influential in shaping his own thinking.8
In 2008, Thiel and fellow venture capitalist Evan Baehr began the Teneo Network. As Baehr stated, their goal was to create a network of conservative CEOs, bankers, politicians, media commentators, and more who would coordinate to, in the words of current chairman Leonard Leo, “crush liberal dominance.”
So Peter Thiel has been investing in military/defense tech, but his interest in Flock Safety, Inc. seems to be specifically in moving defense-level surveillance into the private sector. Into our driveways, even.
How?
In FedEx trucks.
FedEx, Among Others
Reading a caption on a random video that FedEx trucks now carried Flock cameras and shared their surveillance data with local and federal law enforcement, I thought I was reading fake news.
If only.
In 2024, shipping giant FedEx installed Flock Safety cameras on their trucks and agreed to share data, including not just license plate data but also auto make, model, and even color and damages like dents and scratches, with local and federal law enforcement.9
To make matters even worse, here’s a double whammy: 1) they’re not the only company doing this with Flock Safety; others include ULTA Beauty, Lowe’s, Simon Property Group (malls), and Kaiser Permanente [that’s right, the largest health insurer in the US has shared data from Flock’s license plate readers with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center10 (that we know of; more data sharing is likely).]
And the reason private companies are willing to provide surveillance for law enforcement and the federal government?
Because the data flows both ways.
That’s right, under these agreements, not only will law enforcement and/or the federal government get warrantless surveillance which completely circumvents the Fourth Amendment rights of every American, but the companies can also get any data the agency has on consumers… oops, I mean citizens.
Additionally, Flock Safety, Inc. has developed a type of ‘dashboard’ software called Nova. Users can access Nova and connect simultaneously to multiple sources of data, compiling all available data into a sort of ‘profile’, including video, photo, and text from multiple agencies.
Suddenly Peter Thiel’s keen interest in Flock Safety, Inc. makes even more sense.
You see, his primary AI-driven technology and those of the businesses in which he invests, the powerful, beautiful, brilliantly-coded and designed software suites, have been hamstrung in government use by those pesky, dusty old restrictions: Constitutional rights.
Warrantless surveillance is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.11
But only for government entities.
Private companies are not subject to the Constitution.
So when FedEx pulls into your driveway to deliver that box to you, Flock Safety, Inc. doesn’t need a warrant to take, store, and sell your license plate information as well as any other identifying information they can, to any customer.
Including your local law enforcement and federal agencies.
Flock Safety, Inc., and particularly their partnerships with private corporations, provides that invaluable workaround that just may be Thiel’s, and Palantir’s, golden ticket to a national mesh network of unrestricted surveillance.
Now, imagine my surprise when I discover that one little bitty city is currently being sued, along with its police department, over the use of Flock Safety cameras without reasonable notice, and a nonexistent data storage and use plan for the data captured by said cameras, and that city is the very one in which I am currently sitting.
Two residents of Norfolk, VA, have sued the City of Norfolk and the Norfolk Police Department for their sudden, unannounced rollout of Flock Safety cameras throughout our city.
This lawsuit is well underway; a motion by the City for dismissal was denied back in March, propelling the case forward. The plaintiffs have already scored two major victories: the motion to dismiss being denied, and a last-minute request by Flock Safety, Inc. to join the suit as Defendants also being denied.
The rejection of Flock Safety’s late bid to join written by Chief Judge Mark S. David of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a 2008 Bush appointee, read like a classic Constitutional Law lesson… with a little sass.
“Flock made a conscious gamble to not show up to the platform on time; it is not this Court’s fault that the train has already left the station by the time Flock arrived.
The Fourth Amendment is designed to protect citizens from government intrusion; it does not protect against searches by private actors. While Flock makes and supports the technology that Plaintiffs allege is being used to violate the Fourth Amendment, such fact is insufficient to support Flock’s intervention. It follows then that Flock, a private actor, cannot violate the Fourth Amendment, cannot assert this defense, and therefore should not be permitted to intervene on this purported “common defense.””12
Score one win for the little guys.
Now this burgeoning tech startup, one recently valued at a jaw-dropping $7 billion a mere eight years from conception, must rely on the City of Norfolk, VA, to defend the use of their cameras in a case that may very well end up in the US Supreme Court as a defining moment in drawing boundaries for citizens’ privacy against surveillance by massive corporations and closing this loophole to truly secure our Fourth Amendment rights.
And this city can’t even pick up the recycling on time.
I hold out hope…
But even with the argument being taken up against giant corporations using high-tech, AI-powered cameras to watch you and sell your data to the government, Flock Safety cameras have caught the eye of another group of American citizens.
The neighborhood watchdogs, the thorn in the side of many a homeowner, Home Owners’ Associations, or HOAs, are proving to be surprise customers of this technology. If your HOA’s board approves a vote, your neighborhood can purchase its own Flock Safety cameras. Any appointed individual in the organization can view the video footage, and your HOA can share that data with law enforcement themselves.
Really takes turning in your neighbor to a whole other level, eh?
This incestual relationship between private corporations, or even private membership groups, and federal and local law enforcement is creating an inescapable “mesh network” of invasive, warrantless surveillance on the American people, technofascism that is skimming the Fourth Amendment by the skin of its teeth.
Where do our rights to privacy end and communal rights to surveillance for safety’s sake begin?
Perhaps… the skies?
Stay tuned for Part II, where we will dive into Flock’s recent acquisition of Aerodome and plans to build a 100,000 sq. foot facility to manufacture drones, what Anduril is and how it connects to mass surveillance, a program called Lattice, and how impactful a surveillance state like this would be…
I’m exhausted from doing a deep dive here, and there’s still so, so much more. The key takeaways here are that many, many cities have implemented these cameras without consulting their citizens, cameras which are being accessed by ICE, among other federal agencies, seemingly with impunity, and companies like FedEx are openly violating our privacy without much of a whisper from the legacy media.
I will keep digging and share with you more in Part II. I will say, as I was writing this today, June 9, a headline popped up in a news alert: “TeleTracking and Palantir partner for operational decision-making in healthcare,” meaning Palantir is only growing larger and more invasive. Every day brings us closer to that total surveillance state.
Thank you for your continued support,
My name is Melissa Corrigan, and I’m a freelance writer/thought sharer/philosopher in coastal Virginia. I am a mom, a wife, a veteran, and so much more. I deeply enjoy sharing my thoughts and receiving feedback that sparks genuine, respectful conversation.
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I think we need to all start using cash and paper ballots possibly forever
I read your article to my husband who is not on any type of social media and he said, “How do we get Melissa’s writing and research out there? Everyone needs to know this.”
Thank you for educating us with your in-depth research and clear writing. I will continue reading and working from my end to expose what seems to be the continued fight for our freedom and rights.