A former Flock employee has quit the company in disgust, saying it lied to workers about how its surveillance cameras were used and that it used dirty tricks to silence its critics.
The employee, Jonathan Paz, joined the company as a government affairs manager two years ago. Nominally, his job was to represent Flock’s “product as best as possible making sure that we can get approved at council,” he told 404 Media in a new interview. Or in other words, his gig was to convince cities to buy and deploy its AI-powered cameras.
Paz maintains that he earnestly believed at the time that its license-plating scanning cameras would help find missing persons, not to conduct mass surveillance. As part of his job, he flew out to towns and cities to help Flock get approved by local lawmakers.
But his belief in the company’s vision was shattered when he was confronted by locals who strongly opposed Flock cameras being set up in their communities. That’s when he realized his job was, in reality, to “make sure that this resistance doesn’t become a vote reflected in the vote of the council.”
“That’s kind of what started unraveling for me very quickly: this facade that we were helping these democratically elected boards” represent their constituents, he added.
According to Paz, Flock repeatedly insisted that it wasn’t collaborating with agencies like ICE, a possibility he was deeply concerned with as the son of immigrants. The view of his colleagues, and the company’s ostensible mission, was that it was helping solve crime.
Flock’s stance, he says, turned out to be a lie. Multiple outlets reported that ICE as well as Customs and Border Protection could tap into Flock’s cameras, and Flock eventually admitted to giving these agencies access to its surveillance network as part of a pilot program.
“That was what I was sold and lied to about,” Paz told 404. “I didn’t know that there were these mechanisms inside the company that were essentially fighting to get this pilot to happen.”
Before joining Flock, Paz had worked as an activist, a union organizer, and an elected city councillor. Given his background, it seems either staggeringly naive or willfully ignorant on his part to think that Flock, a company aiming to deploy AI-powered video cameras across the country, “had a deep respect for civil rights and liberties,” as he once believed, and wouldn’t be wielding it as a giant surveillance drag net.
To his credit, he quit in July 2025, saying he rejected a juicy severance package, and went on to found an organization providing help to help to people affected by ICE’s mass deportations. He’s now running for Congress in Massachusetts’ 5th District.
More on surveillance: Flock Cameras Screw Up, Swarm Innocent Man With Armed Police
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