The Demo Partner Program

The thing to understand about the Flock Safety story out of Dunwoody, Georgia — the story reported by Jason Koebler at 404 Media on April 30 and amplified to the front page of Hacker News shortly afterward, where it accumulated 459 points and 122 comments — is that the camera in the children's gymnastics room is the part that lands in the headline, but it is not the part that organizes the story.

The part that organizes the story is the phrase demo partner program.

The phrase was supplied by Flock itself, in a statement to 404 Media, after a Dunwoody resident named Jason Hunyar filed a public records request for the city's Flock access logs and discovered what those logs contained. Hunyar published his findings on his Substack on April 8, in a post titled — and one is forced to admire the lack of editorial subtlety here — "Why Are Flock Employees Watching Our Children?" The records he obtained showed Flock sales and business-development employees accessing live cameras inside a Jewish community center pool, a children's gymnastics room, several fitness studios, a playground, and a school. The cameras had been folded into Flock's network by the city. The network had been folded into Flock's sales pipeline by Flock.

Flock's framing — "the city of Dunwoody is one city in our demo partner program," per the spokesperson quoted in 404 Media — is technically accurate, contractually defensible, and, as a description of what was actually happening, almost perfectly inverted from how the relationship would have been described to anyone whose camera was being demonstrated.

The agreement that wasn't

There is, in the HN thread, a comment that quotes from Hunyar's reporting and reproduces a piece of context that 404 Media's article — running short on space and probably also on the patience of subscribers who arrived for the gymnastics-room hook — does not surface. In September 2024, a Dunwoody PD major named Patrick Krieg approached the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta and asked for access to its private security cameras. The MJCCA pushed back, the way an organization that runs a children's gymnastics program ought to push back, and asked what the access would be used for. Per Hunyar's reproduction of the request: "This is solely for real-time critical incident response."

The MJCCA agreed to share the cameras — including the gymnastics rooms, the pools, the fitness studios — for emergencies. The natural reading of real-time critical incident response, in 2024 in the United States, is active-shooter scenarios. It is the mental model under which a Jewish community center, of all institutions, hands over the keys to its surveillance infrastructure. The agreement is structured around a category of event whose probability is nonzero and whose consequences, when one materializes, are total.

What the access logs Hunyar obtained showed is that the cameras were not, in operational fact, restricted to that category of event. They were a general-purpose resource that had been integrated into Flock's network, surfaced through Flock's product UI, and accessed by Flock's own sales-side staff — in the course of demoing the product to other police departments — with no apparent triggering incident. The agreement that the JCC believed it had signed and the agreement that was being executed against its cameras were two different agreements. Neither party had to be acting in bad faith for that gap to exist. It is a structural feature of how surveillance infrastructure now propagates: the contract is signed for one purpose; the technical capabilities accommodate many; and the gap between the two becomes, with time, indistinguishable from the system's actual behavior.

Radical transparency

Flock's response to the disclosures, both on its blog and in its statement to 404 Media, deserves to be read closely, because it is a small masterpiece of the genre. The response has three legs.

The first leg is the demo partner program leg: the cameras were accessed under a contractually authorized program, the cities involved gave permission, and "select Flock employees" are the ones with access. This is true in the sense that the boilerplate permits it. It is also the version of the relationship under which a Flock VP looking at the gymnastics-room camera as part of a sales demonstration is a sentence describing ordinary commercial activity rather than a story.

The second leg is what one might call the transparency-by-existence defense. Flock, the company argues, is more transparent than other surveillance vendors because access logs of this kind exist at all and can be obtained via public-records request. The corporate spokesperson's statement to 404 Media phrased it as: "I must state the irony of the situation. We're one of the few technology companies in this space dedicated to radical transparency." The structure of the argument is that the bad behavior would not have surfaced were Flock not so committed to documentation. There is a real point buried inside it, which is that surveillance systems without auditable logs are categorically worse than ones with auditable logs. There is also a slightly stranger point sitting on top of it, which is that the existence of the audit trail is being offered as a defense of the conduct the audit trail revealed. Citizens who file public-records requests are framed as participants in Flock's transparency mission rather than as people forced to litigate, and Hunyar — who is, after all, the person whose work made this story possible — is described in the spokesperson's statement as "the resident," whose specific allegation about Flock employees spying on children is denied separately, and whose broader concern about Flock conduct is described as "unequivocally false."

The third leg is the policy adjustment. Flock has "determined that employees will be trained to only conduct demos in more public locations, like retail parking lots." The training is forward-looking. The Dunwoody contract was renewed.

The thing being demonstrated

The persistent question in the HN thread — the one that the more analytical commenters returned to repeatedly — was why the demos required live cameras at sensitive private locations at all. Several proposed alternatives that have been deployed by approximately every other piece of B2B software ever made: a dedicated demo environment, a fish tank in the lobby of Flock HQ, a camera pointed at the parking lot. One commenter who said he had attended "dozens of these types of demos" observed that demos always seem to use live footage from a semi-public place, because "it's much easier to just show live footage rather than rig up canned looping footage," and that none of the police staff who attended the demos with him asked the obvious follow-up — "Hey, will you just be able to do this with our video if we buy from you?"

There is a specific commercial reason live demos work the way they do. The thing being demonstrated, in a Flock sales call to a police department considering its first contract, is not the hardware. The hardware is a small flat module on a fence post; everyone has seen one. The thing being demonstrated is the interface — the dashboard, the live-grid view, the saved-camera shortcuts, the cross-jurisdictional search, the experience of being inside the system. And the experience of being inside the system, as a buyer, is exactly the experience of clicking into a real city's real cameras and watching real people. The product is a feeling. The feeling does not survive a fish tank. It does survive — the access logs make this fairly clear — sustained periods of viewing the gymnastics-room camera. "They're appealing to entities that have surveillance and voyeuristic fetishes," one HN commenter put it, with more sharpness than the situation strictly required but not, on the available evidence, with any actual factual error.

A second commenter restated the point in language closer to standard software-engineering practice: "If a demo environment isn't tightly scoped and audited, it's production in practice. The demo label doesn't matter." This is the formulation worth keeping. The Dunwoody cameras were — for purposes of access, for purposes of demonstration, for purposes of whatever a Flock business-development employee felt like doing on a given Tuesday afternoon — production. The label demo was a contractual artifact that did not constrain the operational reality.

The YC angle

Flock Safety is a Y Combinator company — class of S17. Several HN commenters noted, with an exhaustion that has by now become its own subgenre on the site, that Garry Tan, the current YC president, has continued to publicly defend Flock through earlier versions of approximately this same controversy. The Garry-Tan-on-Flock subplot is its own, separate thing from the Dunwoody story; it does not change the access logs, and it does not change the fact that Hunyar's work would have produced the same story regardless of who occupied the YC corner office. But it is worth noting, as one HN commenter wryly proposed in the thread (suggesting that Flock-related HN headlines should always carry the (YC S17) tag), that Flock's incubator pedigree is a load-bearing fact in how the company is allowed to position itself in technology-press discourse. The implicit they're one of us permeates a non-trivial fraction of the coverage. The Dunwoody disclosures are one of the data points that test how much that residual goodwill can absorb.

The contract was renewed anyway

The detail in the 404 Media headline that requires the most attention — more, even, than the gymnastics room — is the comma-clause: renews contract anyway. The Dunwoody City Council, presented with the Hunyar disclosures, with the JCC's clearly stated original conditions, with the documented gap between the two, voted to renew its Flock contract. The renewal is the data point. It tells you what the political economy of municipal surveillance procurement actually looks like in 2026, which is roughly: nothing that gets disclosed is allowed to threaten the renewal, because the renewal is locked in by the sunk-cost momentum of the existing infrastructure, the political cost of being the council that reduced surveillance after a publicized incident, the budgetary friction of unwinding a vendor relationship, and — increasingly — the federated dependency on Flock's network from the dozens of neighboring jurisdictions that share data through it.

The audit-trail defense Flock offered presupposes a feedback loop that this story demonstrates does not, in fact, close: revelations from the access logs are supposed to produce changes in the deployment. In Dunwoody, what they produced was a brief news cycle, a Flock blog post about training, and a contract renewal. The transparency exists. The accountability does not arrive on the back of it.

No one is spying on children in parks

The Flock spokesperson's statement to 404 Media included the line: "No one is spying on children in parks, as the substack incorrectly asserts." It is worth lingering on this sentence, because it is the place the entire response strategy concentrates. The sentence is denying a specific framing — spying on children in parks — that is more emotive than what Hunyar's disclosures literally show. What Hunyar's disclosures literally show is that Flock business-development staff used the Dunwoody system to access cameras at the JCC pool, the JCC's children's gymnastics room, a community playground, a school, and several fitness studios, in some cases for sustained durations and with no apparent connection to incident response.

Whether the verb spying applies to that conduct is a question you can answer in two ways. You can answer it by reading the contractual permissions strictly — at which point Flock is right; this was authorized vendor access, not surveillance — or you can answer it by reading what the cameras actually saw and what the access pattern actually looked like, at which point the verb fits as well as any English verb fits any human conduct. The Flock response strategy chooses the first reading and treats the second as a category error.

The Substack post Hunyar wrote and the records he extracted choose the second reading. So, plainly, do the residents of Dunwoody who showed up to the city council meeting. So does the community center whose gymnastics-room camera ended up on the demo dashboard. The disagreement is about whether the relationship as contracted or the relationship as operated is the one that gets to be called real. The legal system is currently set up to recognize the first answer. Public records — when they exist, and when they are extracted through ordinary citizen labor of the kind Hunyar performed — periodically force the second answer into view. The interval between those forcings, and the trajectory of contract renewals through them, is roughly what the politics of municipal surveillance is now.

What's left after the demo

The thing the Dunwoody story leaves behind — after the rhetorical leg-work, after the YC-pedigree subplot, after the council vote — is the durable observation that demo partner program is now a phrase one needs to know. Not because Flock invented it; the broad pattern of vendor staff using a customer's live data to pitch other customers is older than Flock and not unique to surveillance technology. The reason to know the phrase is because of the specific way it inverts.

Inside Flock, in a sales meeting, demo partner program describes a customer-development relationship in which the customer has graciously agreed to make its production environment available for product demonstration. From the inside, the language fits. From the outside — from inside the JCC pool, inside the gymnastics class, inside the contract the JCC believed it had signed — demo partner program describes a vendor's commercial use of a private-citizen camera feed, sustained over multiple sessions, by named employees, for purposes that do not appear in any agreement the camera's subjects ever saw.

The same set of operational facts produces two narratives:

Both descriptions are true. That is the part that takes time to absorb. The contractual relationship is a real thing; so is the gymnastics class. The two descriptions sit on opposite sides of a B2B/B2C boundary that a single technical infrastructure renders meaningless. The cameras don't know which side they're on. The children don't know which side they're on. The Flock VP scrolling through dashboard tiles knows exactly which side he's on, because the dashboard is labeled, the access is logged, and the program is named.

The dashboard is labeled. The access is logged. The program is named. No one is spying on children in parks.

Coda

What stays with me from the Dunwoody story is not the gymnastics-room detail, though that detail will be the one that ends up in most retellings. What stays is the renewal. A city council, presented with the access logs, with the discrepancy between the JCC's stated conditions and the actual operational pattern, with the line about retail parking lots, voted to keep the relationship intact. The demo partner program continues — under different camera-selection guidelines, in other cities. The audit trail continues to exist; the next public-records request waits for the next resident with the patience to file it.

The thing about surveillance infrastructure of this kind is that it does not exactly watch you in the moment; it remembers you, in a way that becomes accessible to people you didn't authorize, at moments and for purposes you didn't consent to. The Dunwoody children in the gymnastics room are not, in any practical sense, going to be remembered by name. The Dunwoody cameras have been removed from the demo rotation; future demos will be conducted in retail parking lots; the contract is renewed; everyone moves on. But the infrastructure that made the gymnastics-room demo possible is still in place, and the shape of the next disclosure — because the access logs continue to accumulate, and because Hunyar is not the last resident who will file — is already implied by the shape of this one. Demo partner program is the name. The cameras are still on.