Ban Data Centers NOW! Protect Our Planet #shorts
The short version: Drew Ribar's short ties data center expansion to surveillance and environmental harm, a timely reminder that every ALPR scan has to live somewhere.
Our Take
Drew Ribar's clip is aimed at local zoning fights over data centers, not license plate readers specifically, but the dots aren't hard to connect. Every Flock Safety camera, every automated plate scan, every "vehicle fingerprint" has to be stored, processed, and backed up somewhere — and increasingly that somewhere is a water-guzzling, power-hungry data center going up with little public input. When a city council fast-tracks a data center the same way it fast-tracks a Flock contract, residents end up hosting the infrastructure of surveillance in their backyard without ever voting on it.
We're not in a position to verify every claim in the video, and we're not an environmental outlet, but the underlying instinct is one we share: communities deserve a real say before infrastructure that watches them or taxes their resources gets built. Surveillance tech doesn't exist in a vacuum — it needs servers, bandwidth, and retention policies, all of which have costs that get passed down locally while the benefits flow to vendors.
If your town already has ALPR cameras feeding data into systems like this, check our map to see what's been deployed near you, and use our take-action page to push your council for transparency on both the cameras and whatever's storing what they capture.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Drew Ribar, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.