Fish, sharks, stingray caught in illegal net off Sanibel shoreline
The short version: A WINK News report on Sanibel crews freeing fish, sharks, and a stingray from an illegal fishing net falls outside our usual ALPR beat.
Our Take
This one's a departure from what we normally cover at DeFlock The USA. WINK News' report on Sanibel police and the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation pulling roughly 500 feet of illegal netting — and the marine life tangled in it — off West Gulf Drive is a good piece of local accountability journalism, but it's not a surveillance story. Credit to WINK News for covering it.
We built this site to track a different kind of net: the automated license plate readers that Flock Safety and others are stringing up along American roads, quietly logging where everyone drives whether or not they're suspected of anything. If you're curious whether that kind of net has been cast near you, our camera map is the place to check.
We'll stick to our lane here, but stories like this are a reminder that unchecked infrastructure — whether it's a net in the water or a camera on a pole — tends to catch more than it was meant to. If you want to push back on the version happening in your own town, our take-action page is a good place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WINK News, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.