Anti-surveillance advocate demands Palo Alto City Council cover Flock cameras, cancel Flock contract
The short version: A Palo Alto resident's Moby Dick-tinged plea to cover up Flock cameras and dump the city's contract shows local pushback on ALPR surveillance is spreading.
Our Take
Credit to Matt Schlegel for capturing this moment at Palo Alto City Council, where a resident apparently channeled Ahab to make a point: obsessively chasing "public safety" through blanket license plate surveillance can wreck the ship before it catches the whale. It's a quirky analogy, but the underlying ask is dead serious — cover the cameras, cancel the Flock contract, and stop treating every driver in town as a suspect by default.
This is exactly the kind of grassroots friction that matters right now. Flock Safety's pitch to city councils is always the same: a few cameras, a little data, nothing to worry about. What rarely gets mentioned in the sales deck is how fast that network scales, how long the data lingers, and how little oversight exists once the contract is signed. Palo Alto residents showing up to push back in person is a reminder that these deployments are not inevitable — they're policy choices made by people who can be un-made by public pressure.
If you want to see whether your own neighborhood has already been wired up, check our camera map, and if you're ready to do more than watch, our take-action page has the tools to turn frustration into a council agenda item.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Matt Schlegel, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.