Astroturf has a new engine.
In Knox County, Tennessee, a surveillance company called Flock Safety spent the summer trying to hold onto its network of licence plate reader cameras, installed for the sheriff’s office. As residents turned against the cameras, a nonprofit called Neighbors for Strong Communities appeared to defend them. It sent text messages from local area codes. It offered to help residents produce emails to their commissioners. It presented itself as a local effort.
The local part was the thinnest. According to reporting by Matt Sledge at The Intercept, the nonprofit was incorporated in Washington, D.C., in June. Its incorporation papers list directors including several political consultants and at least one former registered lobbyist. The page on its website devoted to Knox County carries an image of a man with six fingers.
The campaign did not work. Last month the Knox County Commission voted to cancel the Flock arrangement, after commissioners said they had never been asked to approve a contract in the first place. Flock had already collected more than $2 million from the sheriff’s office.
The person who pulled the thread was Ashley Smith, a Knox County mother of four with years in local conservative politics. She got a text in July from a group she had never heard of. She filled out its form twice. The first time, indicating opposition, she got nothing. The second time, pretending to support the cameras, she was handed a draft email addressed to her county commissioners — with no indication that AI had written it or which group was behind it. Her own searches turned up the nonprofit’s D.C. incorporation paperwork, and she noticed the address it listed was shared with an Italian restaurant. When she posted what she had found to a local politics page, at least nine other residents said they had received the same texts.
Her objection was not that the emails were fake. It was about trust. A company that, as she put it, “manipulates and manufactures fake neighbors” was not one she expected to honour its own data policies once several hundred cameras were up and running.
Former at-large Commissioner Larsen Jay, whose term on the commission ended in August, shared eight pro-Flock emails with The Intercept. None were identical and several carried personal detail, but the resemblance was close enough that he read them as “form letters.” In face-to-face conversations, he said, opposition to Flock ran 99-to-1. Andy Fox, the commissioner who represents Smith, said he received dozens of template emails in support.
Here is the part worth sitting with: the emails appear to have come from real people. Two residents confirmed to The Intercept that they had sent them, though one had since changed her position. The campaign did not have to invent constituents. It only had to supply them.
Astroturf campaigns are old. Tobacco companies ran them. Oil and gas companies ran them. Pharmaceutical companies ran them. What is different now is the marginal cost of producing a convincing-looking constituent.
The Intercept traced the text messages Knox County residents received to a link containing the word “influent.” At least two directors of Neighbors for Strong Communities helped found Influent, a company that uses AI to generate letters to elected officials. Whether Influent has a business relationship with Flock is not known; the company did not respond to a request for comment. Its own marketing draws a line between generic astroturf form letters and messages tailored to each individual sender.
Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the media reform group Free Press — which opposes both Flock and the Paramount Skydance–Warner Bros. Discovery merger the same nonprofit has campaigned for — told The Intercept he saw no sign of any genuine upswell of support in Knox County. “There are no neighbors and there are no communities,” he said.
The group has defended itself. In a statement posted to its website after the campaign ended, it said technology had played a role but was never the point, that the residents involved were “real people,” and that each of them signed off on the AI-generated drafts. It has not disclosed who funded the effort.
The mechanics matter because they reveal the design assumption. By Smith’s account, a draft email appeared only once she indicated support; opposition produced nothing. Thomas Lyon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business who studies corporate public relations, told The Intercept that a campaign can still count as astroturf even when the letters come from ordinary citizens — in the pre-AI era, PR firms would phone people and offer to write the letters for them over the line.
Elected officials, in most local jurisdictions, do count inboxes. A commissioner receiving eight emails on a niche procurement question has historically treated that as a signal. The AI-assisted model exploits precisely that heuristic. It is cheaper to supply the appearance of civic engagement than to organise the real thing, and until recently the two were hard to tell apart.
The six-finger image is the detail that travels, and it is worth being precise about it. Extra fingers are a well-documented failure mode of image generation models and have become a running joke online. But it was The Intercept, not a Knox County resident, that found the picture on the group’s Knox County page — the same page asserting that Flock’s supporters are real people. Nobody appears to have changed a vote over a hand. The tell that actually did the work was the form that only answered you if you agreed with it.
That question — can we trust you — sits at the centre of the surveillance debate everywhere Flock operates. Flock’s licence plate readers capture the movements of vehicles passing fixed cameras and store the data in a searchable database accessible to law enforcement. The company’s pitch to municipalities is straightforward: solve more crimes, recover more stolen cars, deter more offenders. The counterargument, from civil liberties groups and a growing number of local officials, is that a persistent, searchable record of who drove where and when is a category of information governments historically have not had, and one that is difficult to place under meaningful oversight once collected.
The complaints that actually moved the Knox County Commission were procurement complaints. Commissioners said they had never been asked to approve a Flock contract. In August, then-Mayor Glenn Jacobs wrote to the company saying he did not consider its 2020 agreement with the county valid and intended to terminate it. The astroturf reporting arrived weeks after the vote. It did not decide the outcome; it explained what the losing side had been doing.
The reputational cost to Flock is the interesting variable. A company selling infrastructure that depends on public trust — that the data will be handled responsibly, that access will be limited, that the vendor is being straight with the community — has now been publicly linked to a partnership with a group its critics call astroturf. Whether that damages Flock’s business in the next county over is an open question. The company operates in an environment where most contracts are approved with limited public scrutiny.
The pattern is not unique to surveillance. DMNews has covered how industry-friendly regulatory outcomes often depend on carefully constructed public support, and how corporate tax positioning can quietly cost jurisdictions billions in foregone revenue without a single voter weighing in. The Flock episode is a specifically digital instance of a much older playbook, updated with tools that lower the cost of manufacturing the look of consent.
What Knox County got right was noticing. A group nobody local had heard of, a form that only worked one way, an address in Washington shared with a restaurant, near-identical emails landing in commissioners’ inboxes — none of it would have mattered without a resident willing to fill out the same survey twice and then go looking. The vulnerability of the model is that it depends on nobody checking.
The uncomfortable implication is that most of these campaigns will not be checked. In most jurisdictions, on most contracts, the eight emails a commissioner receives will be read as eight voters, and the vote will go the other way.
That is the actual stakes question raised by this story, and it is not primarily about licence plate readers. It is about whether the basic signal local officials have relied on for decades — that a constituent who takes the time to write is a constituent who cares — still means what it used to mean. On the available evidence, it is getting harder to tell, and the tools making it harder are getting cheaper every quarter.
The cameras in Knox County are coming down. The playbook that tried to keep them up is already being used somewhere else.