Salt Lake City don't want data centres
The short version: A Salt Lake City community pushback against new data centers is a reminder that surveillance infrastructure needs physical real estate — and local resistance can slow it down.
Our Take
Credit to the creator behind Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency for keeping a spotlight on the unglamorous plumbing of the surveillance state: the data centers. We haven't independently verified the specifics of the Salt Lake City dispute, but the broader pattern is one we track closely — communities pushing back on massive server farms that often exist to store, process, and cross-reference the kind of data that ALPR networks, facial recognition systems, and other tracking tech generate every single day.
It's easy to think of license plate readers as standalone cameras bolted to a pole, but every scan has to go somewhere. Vendors like Flock Safety depend on cloud infrastructure and data retention agreements that quietly expand the footprint of mass surveillance, often with little public input until a zoning fight or a neighborhood's electric bill draws attention. When residents start asking hard questions about what's being built in their backyard — and why it needs so much power and so much storage — that's a healthy instinct, even if data centers serve plenty of non-surveillance purposes too.
We'd encourage skepticism paired with specifics: find out who's leasing the space, what data will actually live there, and whether local law enforcement contracts are part of the deal. If you want to see how this plays out in your own community, check our camera map to see what's already been deployed nearby, and visit our take-action page for tools to push back before the infrastructure — and the data appetite behind it — gets locked in.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.