We never consented to mass surveillance, warns Brian Hofer, Exec Dir at Secure Justice
The short version: Brian Hofer tells Palo Alto residents that mass surveillance was never consented to and has outgrown any constitutional framework the founders imagined.
Our Take
Brian Hofer has spent years fighting surveillance overreach as head of Secure Justice, and his message at this Indivisible Palo Alto Plus forum cuts right to the core of why we do this work: nobody voted for a network of cameras logging every car that passes, yet that's exactly what's been quietly installed in thousands of communities. Flock Safety and similar vendors sell this infrastructure to city councils and police departments with little public debate, often skipping the kind of transparent process that would let residents actually weigh in before the cameras go up.
Hofer's point about the founders is worth sitting with. The Fourth Amendment was written for a world of physical searches and individual suspicion, not a world where a private company can track your movements across a city, build a pattern of life on you, and hand that data to law enforcement or federal agencies on request. 'Consent' isn't just a buzzword here — it's the missing ingredient in almost every ALPR rollout we track, and it's why oversight frameworks like the ACLU's CCOPS model matter so much.
If you want to see what this looks like in your own backyard, check our camera map to find ALPR deployments near you, and head to our take-action page if you're ready to push back at your next city council meeting.
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.