Benn Jordan on Flock, privacy, and the new surveillance backlash

Today, I’m talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist.

You might know Benn from those first two titles — he’s got a prolific discography of experimental music dating back decades.

But in the last couple of years, he’s become a high-profile face in the creator and media spaces for his work investigating Flock Safety, the maker of automatic license plate readers and the software that powers them.

Benn recently testified in front of Congress , at a hearing the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held, dedicated to Flock and other ALPR systems.

This hearing felt like the culmination of months and months of growing criticism and bipartisan backlash against Flock — all of which is taking a shape similar to the pushback against AI data centers.

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This has led to major fallout for Flock.

Hundreds of cities, counties, and other local governments have begun canceling contracts , and Flock is now under investigation by Republican Sen.

Josh Hawley.

Last week, Reuters reported that Flock plans to cut about 18 percent of its workforce.

So of course I wanted to dig into all of that with Benn, not just because he played a role in that, but because he’s also become in some ways the face of a new front in the broader debate about surveillance and privacy.

A point you’ll hear Benn make is that he doesn’t actually hate Flock as a company — he thinks its posture toward critics has been a colossal PR failure that made it low-hanging fruit, while competitors like Axon and Motorola quietly build the same kind of networks.