Why we built this

Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and networked surveillance cameras — Flock Safety being the best-known brand — are being installed across Palm Beach County, usually approved in routine town meetings that almost no one attends. By the time residents notice the cameras on their street, the contract is years long and the data-sharing is already running.

DeFlock PBC exists to move that conversation earlier. We read the public meeting agendas of every municipality in the county and flag surveillance-camera items before they're voted on, so you can email a commissioner or show up to public comment while it still changes the outcome.

The case for paying attention

• It's a dragnet, not a targeted tool. Flock's network logs roughly 20 billion vehicle scans a month across thousands of communities; a single search can reach tens of thousands of cameras nationwide. (ACLU)
• Tracking without a warrant. In Carpenter v. United States (2018) the Supreme Court held that compiling a person's detailed location history is a search requiring a warrant. Courts haven't ruled directly on ALPRs, but the same logic applies to the location trails they build. (opinion)
• Shared far beyond your town. Reporting found thousands of Flock lookups nationwide tied to immigration enforcement via local-police access, despite ICE having no Flock contract — and in Florida, FHP ran 250+ immigration-related searches in under two months. (404 Media) (Tampa Bay Times)
• Used to track abortion seekers and protesters. A Texas officer searched 83,000+ cameras to find a woman who self-managed an abortion; EFF found dozens of agencies running protest-related queries. (EFF)
• Officer misuse. Investigations documented officers using ALPR systems to stalk romantic partners — one ran a woman's plate roughly 400 times. (Institute for Justice)
• Real harm from false hits. Plate misreads have put innocent people — including children — at gunpoint, leading to large settlements. (EFF)
• Weak evidence it reduces crime. Federally funded research found readers help recover stolen vehicles but did not significantly reduce crime in hot spots. (NIJ)

What we are — and aren't

We're an independent, volunteer transparency project focused on Palm Beach County. We are not affiliated with any government or with Flock Safety. We don't take a position on every camera — we surface the decisions and the evidence, and let residents decide. Reasonable people support some public-safety cameras; the point is that those choices should be made in the open, by the community, with the tradeoffs on the table.

We're the pre-vote, agenda-monitoring complement to the people mapping cameras already installed: the DeFlock camera map, the EFF Atlas of Surveillance, and the ACLU of Florida's organizing toolkit.

See exactly how we find and verify these items →