Concerned resident addressing the Auburn City council regarding mass surveillance technologies

Our Take

Orwell Day's clip from an Auburn City Council meeting captures something we're seeing pop up in public comment periods across the country: ordinary residents standing up to tell their elected officials, in plain terms, that they don't want AI-powered surveillance systems rolled out in their town. The speaker's framing is blunt — calling backers of this tech "domestic enemies" — and whether or not you'd choose that exact language, the underlying frustration is real and increasingly common. People are waking up to the fact that license plate readers and similar systems aren't just traffic tools; they're networked, retained, and often shared well beyond the jurisdiction that installed them.

What makes these council-meeting moments matter is that they're often the only point of friction in an otherwise frictionless procurement process. Flock Safety and similar vendors pitch ALPR contracts to city staff and police departments directly, and councils frequently rubber-stamp them without public hearings, data-sharing audits, or sunset clauses. A resident showing up to push back — even in anger — forces a pause, a public record, and sometimes a vote that wouldn't have gotten scrutiny otherwise. That's democracy doing the job these systems too often skip.

If you want to know whether your own city has quietly deployed this kind of camera network, check our map before it shows up as a line item nobody remembers approving. And if you're ready to speak up the way this Auburn resident did, our take-action page has the tools to help you push back at your next council meeting.