What the Flock!?! | Public Records, Transparency, and Government Oversight
The short version: Steven Todd Faircloth's "What the Flock!?!" spotlights how public records requests can crack open the black box of local ALPR deployments and vendor contracts.
Our Take
Credit to Steven Todd Faircloth for doing the unglamorous work that actually moves the needle on surveillance accountability: filing public records requests and asking why nobody in city government seems to know the full scope of what they bought. That's the real story with Flock Safety almost everywhere — councils approve a "camera pilot program" without reading the data-sharing agreements, and suddenly there's a statewide or even national network of plate readers logging every car that passes, with little record of who's pulling that data or why.
Transparency isn't a nice-to-have here, it's the whole ballgame. Flock's business model depends on municipalities treating these systems as routine purchasing decisions rather than mass surveillance infrastructure, and it depends on residents never finding out how porous the audit logs really are, how many agencies share access, or how long footage sits in a database. When citizens start FOIA-ing contracts and board minutes, that's the only real check anyone has left, since most of these networks never went through a public vote.
If this video got you wondering what's sitting on a pole in your own town, don't just wonder — go look. Check our camera map to see what's already been documented near you, and if you want to push back on a local deployment or file your own records request, our take-action page walks you through it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Steven Todd Faircloth, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.