During the past week, something that had been bubbling beneath the surface for several years finally broke into full public view: The normies discovered Flock.
All across the social media world—from Facebook grandmas to the nostalgia traffickers—Flock is going to go mainstream.
These normies have suddenly discovered the specifics of those strange black boxes on the roadside: that the tentacles of an Orwellian, AI-powered surveillance network have already been planted throughout the nation—one camera, one community at a time.
Known by the brand name Flock, the technology photographs passing vehicles, records the time and location, and catalogs the make, model, color, and other distinguishing characteristics into what the company itself calls its “Vehicle Fingerprint” technology.
The resulting data is stored for 30 days. With a few keystrokes, thousands of governmental flock users from all across the nation can search across time and location and reconstruct the comings and goings of a particular vehicle across a vast, interconnected network.
The system also allows city public safety officials to add a vehicle to a customized “hot list,” generating a real-time notification whenever that vehicle passes one of the cameras. There is no warrant built into that process. For whatever reason, if a city official wants to track you and receive real-time notifications about your movements, they can. No warrant required.
In one instance described to this writer by a local whistleblower, an Oklahoma City-area department reportedly used this feature to receive a notification whenever a particular individual entered its city limits.
That is the future—except it is already here: real-time notification to a human today and perhaps an artificial general intelligence (AGI) tomorrow, of an individual’s every movement.
If this tickles the reader’s constitutional sensibilities, they are not alone. All across the nation, the public is waking up to the fact that the tentacles of a multifaceted, potentially omnipresent system have already been deeply embedded within their communities, and its potential for misuse has only begun to sink in—as witnessed by an array of ever-emerging online viral media, such as instances where an innocent person has been tracked by a system user for nefarious reasons, or effectively accused of a crime not by a human officer but by the Flock system, forcing them into a nightmare of trying to prove their innocence.
In one prominent online example, an innocent person was forced to prove her innocence after being cited as a porch pirate, relying solely on her Rivian’s recordings of her travels—without which she might very well have been convicted simply because Flock placed her in the area of the crime.
And, as often happens when individuals feel helpless, the result has been a type of vigilantism trending on social media, where the devices themselves have come under attack from a public eager to cut down the tentacles of the AI.
But there is one Oklahoma community where no such vigilantism is going to occur.
Logan County residents don’t need a saw, a can of spray paint, a laser pointer, a special license plate modifier or a midnight raid.
That’s because they have Marven Goodman.
Goodman lives in County One: Oklahoma’s officially recognized first county dating back to the organization of Oklahoma territory’s counties in 1890. Now it appears to have earned another distinction: It may be the first Oklahoma county to rid itself of government-operated Flock surveillance after the technology had gained a foothold within its borders.
But that was not the original plan.
When Guthrie, the county seat, became an early Oklahoma adopter of Flock, the company’s ambitions did not stop at the city limits. Records later obtained by Goodman from Guthrie City Hall revealed a much larger vision: the pushy Flock salesman proposed that Guthrie would work with other Logan County communities to create a countywide network of surveillance devices and blanket Logan County.
The person who uncovered that plan, Marven Goodman, is the former Logan County commissioner now turned publisher of The Sooner Sentinel, a substack publication that’s had a dramatic impact on public policy.
Guthrie signed a 24-month agreement with Flock in February 2023. A federal Department of Justice grant paid for the system, which initially called for 12 cameras.
The fast-moving big tech company, Flock, quickly benefited from Guthrie’s early adoption as the city’s public safety officials immediately became enthusiastic advocates for the technology, drawing fawning media coverage from the Oklahoma City corporate media, where Guthrie’s status as one of the first towns to adopt the cameras put it on the cutting edge of promoting it to the wider public.
The plan appeared unstoppable.
Then Goodman started asking questions.
He noticed something unusual along State Highway 33, the primary highway leading into Guthrie from the west. The city had placed mobile radar-feedback signs along the route—the familiar trailers that flash a vehicle’s speed as the motorist approaches.
But Goodman noticed something else; something very tricky. Mounted on the backs of two of those trailers were Flock cameras, positioned to scan the vehicles entering and leaving town.
Because of his experience as a county commissioner and his familiarity with transportation policy, Goodman could immediately recognized the problem: The devices were sitting on the state highway right-of-way.
Oklahoma law authorizes automated license-plate readers on state highway rights-of-way for a specific purpose: verifying vehicle insurance. ODOT’s position has been that general law-enforcement surveillance is not an authorized use.
The apparent workaround was clever. Because the Flock devices were attached to temporary trailers instead of permanent poles, perhaps no ODOT permit would be required.
Goodman did not accept that logic. He contacted ODOT, kept digging, and forced the question into the open.
The cameras quickly came off the trailers and Goodman then became a key figure in exposing the abuse at the state level, speaking to legislators as part of State Representative Tom Gann’s interim study and highlighting what had been taking place.
The removal of those two cameras mattered. Without the ability to place scanners on the state highway approaches, Flock could no longer so easily ring the city and capture the traffic moving through its most important corridors.
Unlike Edmond to the south, Guthrie did not keep testing ODOT’s willingness to enforce its position. And, when the federal grant expired, the city declined to pick up the cost of continuing the system.
The official explanation was funding. But, it would be a mistake to treat Guthrie’s withdrawal as budgetary.
It was clear that Goodman’s reporting and open records request built on what locals already distrusted, including at least one prominent city councilman. Goodman’s reporting was key. It exposed the larger countywide plan, brought public attention to the Highway 33 cameras, and raised serious questions about the process by which the city had entered into its sole-source arrangement with Flock, not ever appearing to have voted for the actual contract, simply the grant that funded it.
The grant’s expiration gave the city an exit ramp, and the city took it.
To Guthrie’s credit, officials did not replace the lost grant funding with local tax dollars. Nor did they accept a reported Flock proposal for new technology that could scan state-highway traffic from a distance while sitting outside the ODOT right-of-way.
The city did not bite.
It asked Flock to remove the cameras. The company took its time. City records later obtained by Goodman showed that Guthrie canceled the contract effective February 18, 2025, but Flock did not schedule the final uninstall until July 21—potentially giving the city months of additional service at no charge.
Eventually, however, the cameras came down.
And the impact extended well beyond Guthrie.
At one point, the effort had begun within county government to authorize the devices along county roads. That would have been especially consequential in Logan County, where the unincorporated population far outnumbers the population living inside any one city.
But by the time that push began, Goodman’s reporting—and the resulting public fallout—was well underway. The county commissioners demurred. They did not even agree to place the proposal on their agenda for consideration.
The plan to blanket Logan County had collapsed.
Now, as communities across America are only beginning to understand what has been placed in their midst, Oklahoma’s first county has been proven far ahead of the curve.
Logan County rejected both the technology and the questionable process by which it was being advanced—well before the national backlash.
And that provides yet another example of how much difference one individual can still make in public policy, especially at the local level of government.
Regular readers of these updates will know that I often focus on the difference an individual can make simply by running for office. Goodman’s story contains that lesson, too. He ran for county commissioner against long odds, won, and served for eight years.
But his example did not end when he left office.
Using the institutional knowledge he gained in government, the leverage provided by the Substack platform, and a natural curiosity about the specific actions of local officials, Goodman filled a void left by local media that all too often becomes too close to, too financially dependent upon, and much too deferential toward the very government institutions it is supposed to monitor.
Goodman has answered both calls: first, to run for office and make a difference from within; and then, after leaving office, to use independent publishing to hold government accountable from without.
His reporting brought public awareness to an area of policy that badly needed it. More importantly, it helped produce an actual policy outcome—one that has kept an entire county free from a government-operated, AI-driven surveillance network at a time when so many other communities are only now confronting its dangers.
Goodman can also point to his time in public office as the reason Logan County did not adopt a tax increment finance district during his eight-year tenure. TIF districts are a favored tool of the corporate-welfare crowd: They confer a government-created financial advantage unavailable to the average member of the public, and they are spreading across Oklahoma.
That Oklahoma’s first county has remained free of both this particular corporate-welfare tool and the Flock surveillance network is a powerful—and encouraging—example of what one person can accomplish by possessing curiosity, determination, and the willingness to try.
So many people see these wrongs, but then they simply go on with life, convinced that nothing can be done.
Goodman actually did something.
If this story inspires you, stay tuned. There are more like it on the OSC whiteboard—examples of ordinary citizens who like Goodman refused to accept that nothing could be done, and then proved otherwise.
Those stories matter.
Because the public does not merely need to be warned about what is going wrong. It needs to be reminded, through real examples, that one determined person can still make it right.
COMING NEXT FROM OSC: Did Democrats Invade Oklahoma’s Republican Primary?
Robert Franklin and Gentner Drummond both finished first. Were they carried there by an army of Democrats who quietly changed their registrations and entered the 2026 Republican primary?
The next OSC election analysis follows the party switchers right down to the precinct level to determine whether the rumored Democratic invasion really occurred.
Can’t wait for the answer? Paid subscribers don’t have to. Visit the OSC Article Preview Page and read the complete analysis now—one of the special benefits available to paid subscribers.
The Man Who Kept Oklahoma’s First County Free From the AI Surveillance State
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog
July 15, 2026 at 08:40AM - J Murphey
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