SF Bay Area surveillance gone too far, warns Brian Hofer, Exec Director, Secure Justice #deflock
The short version: Brian Hofer tells Palo Alto that Bay Area agencies are over-deploying Flock ALPRs and warns against merging plate data with other surveillance streams.
Our Take
Matt Schlegel's recording of Brian Hofer at Indivisible Palo Alto Plus' Democracy Forum is worth your time precisely because Hofer isn't a newcomer to this fight. As Executive Director of Secure Justice, he's spent years in the weeds of surveillance oversight fights across the Bay Area, and his warning here is specific: local agencies have moved past reasonable traffic enforcement and into a dense, overlapping web of ALPR coverage that nobody outside the department fully understands or controls.
The point about data co-mingling deserves more attention than it usually gets. A single Flock camera logging your plate is one thing. That same plate read getting cross-referenced against license databases, federal watchlists, or other surveillance feeds is a different animal entirely — it's how a tool sold as 'find stolen cars' quietly becomes a tool for tracking anyone, anywhere, for any reason an agency can dream up. Hofer's push for friction — public hearings, use policies, audits, actual city council votes before deployment — is the unglamorous but essential work of keeping that from happening by default.
This is exactly why local transparency fights matter more than most people assume. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and if you want to push back the way Palo Alto residents are doing, our take-action page has the tools to get started.
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.