Flock and Cyble: Aligned Values (Part IV)

Yesterday, I received a Flock customer email blast where the company recommends leaving the nationwide network to evade transparency. It was sent out by Chris Colwell, Flock’s Vice-President of “Solutions Engineering”^[1]. Colwell assures his police customers that “Flock has not been breached or compromised” and that the data published on this site is “agency-released public-records data.”

That’s the version for Flock’s customers.

Behind the scenes, Flock and Cyble—companies birthed from the same Atlanta-area Y Combinator network—are weaponizing opposing claims to silence a critic.

I wasn’t going to spend more time on Flock’s internal contradictions, but the sheer coordination of this effort deserves a spotlight. It’s important that people know the type of company that local elected officials are choosing to do business with, and that police are choosing to trust.

Flock knows they are on thin ice. If they filed meritless abuse notices themselves, they would be wide open to a claim of tortious interference with a contract. A court case would open them up to discovery—an expensive process where Flock’s internal communications would become public.^[2]

So they use fellow Y Combinator company Cyble to do their dirty work. Send notices to take down a critical website. Censorship-laundering. Of course, that can only really work if you keep your plausible deniability plausible.

Flock being Flock … well, let’s go through it.

The Timeline

• December 8: Flock sends out a mass email: “Flock has not been breached or compromised.” and “websites like the one circulating online are using agency-released public-records data.”
• December 8: I receive a “Forgotten email notification” for the Cloudflare account.^[3]
• Before December 10, 2025: Houston HIDTA sends out a “Situational Awareness Bulletin” about haveibeenflocked.com.
• December 10, 2025: ROCIC^[4] forwards the Houston bulletin to its coordinators.
• December 11: The FBI sends out an email to agencies stating “Flock has committed toremoving officer usernames from future audits.”
• December 12: I receive an email: “Cloudflare has received information that the following URL violates Cloudflare’s Developer Platform Terms of Service, which prohibit content that discloses sensitive personal information”
• December 16: Cloudflare slaps a “phishing interstitial” on the site and forwards a report submitted by Thomas Siah, of Cyble:

Logs or other evidence of abuse: The mentioned website is wrongfully using our client’s registered trademark in the fake web page. The use of the Client’s registered trademark descriptively in the reported URL in order to disguise or phish the general public has not been authorized by our client.

• December 19: Siah sends a report to Hetzner claiming: “The website publicly and deliberately releases extensive, sensitive information obtained from Flock” and “Additionally, the website may be used to phish the general public on the name of Flock Safety which is a serious concern to notify you.”^[5]

• December 29: Siah “supplements” the complaint by claiming “the website publicly and deliberately discloses extensive, sensitive information obtained from Flock and its automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems with the apparent intent to undermine law enforcement operations.”

Thomas Siah: The Real Agentic?

Cyble’s core offering and flagship product revolve around autonomous brand repcybersecurity threat enforcement by using agentic AI to send takedown notices.

This works for Cyble, because, in 2022, the company “Enter[ed] into a Threat Intelligence Contributor Partnership with VirusTotal” — meaning Google-owned VirusTotal will consider reports from Cyble’s platform credible.

The fact that no automated notices appear to have been submitted and VirusTotal comes back clean for haveibeenflocked.com means that “Cyble Vision” or “Blaze AI” or whatever other label they slapped on ChatGPT did not flag the website and did not send an automated report.

But Flock didn’t go to the Cyble website and hit “checkout” to be assigned an AI bot and (probably) an agent in Bengaluru being paid starvation-wages.^[6] The person who filed the complaints with Cloudflare and Hetzner, Thomas Siah, was recently promoted(?) from being Cyble’s “Head of Business Development, APAC,” to being its “Vice-President of Partner Success.”

If Cyble’s AI is as “agentic” as their marketing claims, why did a Vice President have to manually file a report? Either the AI knows I’m not a threat, or the AI is a façade for manual censorship.

Whichever of these may be true, Cyble’s Singapore-based VP of Partner Success—and former Head of Business Development for the Asia-Pacific region—Thomas Siah, has no business handling low-level complaints for Flock.

Cyble is not a small company. It has offices and employees on multiple continents, and, according to a quick search, has raised north of $40M in funding. And it’s no secret that “AI” companies often use cheap offshore labor (Flock uses contractors for its AI detection). Cyble, very likely, is not the exception to this faux-rule.

But Siah is not cheap offshore labor. He is a high-level executive with a company that likely carries a nine-figure valuation. It makes no sense for someone at the senior executive level in Singapore to involve himself in managing a complaint against a website with a $10 hosting bill.

Unless that high-level executive coincidentally(?) graduated from the same Business Systems program at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, as Eric Tan, Flock’s former CIO.^[7]

Or unless the high-level executive works for another Y Combinator-backed company. And that company, despite its main office being in Cupertino and its incorporation in Delaware, has its formal headquarters in Alpharetta, next door to Flock. At an address registered to Cyble’s co-founder and current COO Manish Chachada, who lists 25 years of “Full-time Senior Finance Executive” experience in the Atlanta area on his public LinkedIn page.

It probably also helps for the executive filing the complaint to be in Singapore, outside the reach of American courts.^[8]

Y Combinator, Reddit, and Speaking Out

This network of Y Combinator alumni—the tight-knit network both Flock and Cyble are part of—talks about “aligned values” while it funds the surveillance infrastructure and the machinery to silence its critics.

Flock’s first investors were Y Combinator’s President and CEO Garry Tan, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. This led to Flock CEO Garrett Langley interviewing Ohanian for Flock’s blog.^[9]

In the interview, Langley starts a question with “One thing that Y Combinator pushes is the relationship between co-founders.” YC partner Ohanian responds to that sentiment by doubling down: “Where we align is where I really push founders to make sure they are aligned—on their values.”

Flock’s and Cyble’s values are aligned.

Stickied to the top of Alexis Ohanian’s Reddit profile is “An Open Letter to the Reddit Community,” which railed against Donald Trump’s January 2017 executive order directing DHS, the FBI, and intelligence agencies to implement:

a process to evaluate the [visa] applicant’s likelihood of becoming a positively contributing member of society and the applicant’s ability to make contributions to the national interest; and a mechanism to assess whether or not the applicant has the intent to commit criminal or terrorist acts.

Ohanian strongly—and rightly—condemned the order, calling it “deeply un-American.”

Six months later, either not connecting dots or ignoring them, he first invested in Flock.

Two years later, he told Garrett Langley “I have a Flock camera outside my home … I had the search on vehicle color and it was able to pull up every white car that had passed by my camera.” Shortly after that interview, his company contributed to another Flock funding round, alongside defense investors Bedrock and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.

He then founded Seven Seven Six and invested in Flock again—this time, joined by Andreessen Horowitz.

His 2017 pro-immigrant, anti-authoritarian post is still stickied to his Reddit profile:

Right now, Lady Liberty’s lamp is dimming, which is why it’s more important than ever that we speak out and show up to support all those for whom it shines—past, present, and future. I ask you to do this however you see fit, whether it’s calling your representative (this works, it’s how we defeated SOPA + PIPA), marching in protest, donating to the ACLU, or voting, of course, and not just for Presidential elections.

I am an immigrant speaking out against surveillance technology and the company deploying it.

A company that directly implements the 2017 executive order by using “predictive intelligence” to find “suspicious travel patterns” to find if anyone — not just immigrants — “has the intent to commit criminal or terrorist acts.”

A deeply un-American company, whose only “aligned value” is profit.

We donated to the ACLU because we knew they would call this what it is: “authoritarian tracking infrastructure.”

We protested SOPA and PIPA because we knew large corporations send bullshit notices about trademarks and phishing to shut down their critics.

Meanwhile, Flock has been using its investment money to detect human voices, hire sitting mayors, develop person-tracking, and pay Thomas Siah to shut down websites … for officer safety.

Lady Liberty’s lamp isn’t dimming—it’s being used to read your plates.

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1. A title that sounds impressive but obfuscates his actual role. ↩︎

2. Their lawyers are also probably busy drafting a motion to intervene in Michael Moore v. SFPD, the class action lawsuit filed in the N.D. of San Francisco last Sunday. The Plaintiff’s attorney is Ramzi Abadou, who, according to his profile at Berkeley Law, “has been responsible for securing securities class action fraud recoveries exceeding $1.5 billion.” These are about to be interesting times for Flock. ↩︎

3. Related to Flock? Who knows. The notification arriving shortly after an email blast sent out to a bunch of cops raises questions in my mind. ↩︎

4. ROCIC is one of the RISS—the federally funded, private corporations police use to backdoor surveillance sidestep oversight. ↩︎

5. This is the one where Siah used pirated software from a German “brand reputation” company GlobalEyez to submit a screenshot proving … input validation(?) ↩︎

6. I have yet to see confirmation that Flock is a Cyble customer. Given the nature of both companies, I would expect one of them to do a press release announcing a “strategic partnership.” The attachment Siah hinted at in Part III sounds like it might show that Flock is a customer—I will update if Hetzner forwards it. ↩︎

7. Tan left the company in September 2025. ↩︎

8. That said, I question the wisdom of putting the words “govt agencies” and “kindly suspend the services” so close together. It’s a good thing I’m not a contract lawyer and don’t know latin. ↩︎

9. initialized would contribute to Flock’s $47M Series C funding round a few months later. ↩︎