SF Bay Area Drivers Being Tracked, warns Brian Hofer, Executive Director, Secure Justice #deflock
The short version: Brian Hofer tells Palo Alto residents that hundreds of Flock ALPR cameras now blanket the Bay Area, and warns drivers to wake up before tracking becomes irreversible.
Our Take
Credit where it's due: Matt Schlegel's channel captured a genuinely useful civic moment here, giving Brian Hofer of Secure Justice a mic at Indivisible Palo Alto Plus's Democracy Forum. Hofer has spent years fighting surveillance overreach in the Bay Area, and his warning about the sheer scale of Flock deployment in and around Palo Alto is worth sitting with. This isn't a hypothetical, dystopian future — it's hundreds of cameras right now, quietly logging the comings and goings of ordinary drivers who never consented to being tracked and never committed a crime.
What makes these local forums valuable is that they strip away the marketing language Flock Safety uses to sell city councils on these systems. 'Public safety' sounds great in a sales pitch, but the reality is a permanent, searchable log of everyone's movement, built with little transparency and even less meaningful oversight. Once that infrastructure exists, repurposing it — for immigration sweeps, political targeting, or data sales — is a policy decision away, not a technical one.
If you want to see how this plays out where you live, check our camera map for documented ALPR locations near you, and if Hofer's warning hits home, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the city council level before 'hundreds of cameras' becomes thousands.
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.