Right now, without a warrant and without your consent, a permanent, searchable record of where you drive is being built across North Carolina — camera by camera, contract by contract, and mostly without a public vote.

Flock Safety's automated license plate readers (ALPRs) photograph every passing car — resident and visitor alike, no suspicion required — and feed the data into a nationwide network that thousands of outside agencies can search. This is not a parking camera. It is a tool that reconstructs where a person has been, and it is pointed at everyone.

The records show what that means in North Carolina:

• In New Hanover County, the Sheriff's Flock network was searched nearly 3 million times — and the county redacted the name of every searching agency.
• In Brunswick County, public audit data shows at least 83,232 searches since 2023, roughly 90% with no case number attached.
• Most searches come from outside North Carolina, beyond the reach of our state's privacy law. Once your plate data crosses the border, our protections stop — theirs may not exist at all.

Officers across the country have already been caught using these systems to stalk ex-partners and track people who did nothing wrong — entering false "reasons" that no audit caught until the damage was done.
 

But this can be stopped — and it has been. Fifteen North Carolina communities (and counting) have already removed, rejected, or barred Flock. This is not a partisan cause: conservatives, libertarians, and progressives have stood together, because warrantless mass surveillance should trouble everyone.

We call on North Carolina's leaders to:

1. Take the cameras down. Residents should not be treated as suspects when they have done nothing wrong.
2. Require a public hearing and a recorded vote before any ALPR system is installed, funded, or renewed — no more surveillance by administrative signature.
3. Require independent external audits of every agency using these systems — for use, misuse, access, and security — with the results made public. No more letting the officers who run the system audit themselves.
4. Require a warrant and a case number to track any individual.
5. End default nationwide and out-of-state data sharing — no agency outside North Carolina should search our cameras without a warrant.
6. Publish the full organizational and network audits — who searched, when, and why — unredacted as to the searching agency, and let residents obtain their own data.
7. Cap data retention at the shortest workable period, and enforce the existing bars on using plate data for traffic enforcement.
8. Reverse the statewide build-out the 2025 budget authorized on state-maintained roads.
    

To be clear: removal is the goal. Everything after the first demand is the floor for any system not yet taken down — harm reduction, not our consent to a regulated surveillance network.

We are not asking to make anyone less safe. We are asking that a permanent, searchable record of where everyone drives not be built without our consent — and that the decision be made in the open, by the people we elect.

Add your name — then take the step that matters most.
Sign here. Then go to DeFlockILM.org and add your name to our North Carolina list. Change.org keeps your email — we never receive it — so the only way we can tell you when Flock lands on your county's agenda is if you're on our list. Sign both, and share this with one neighbor who drives. That is exactly how fifteen communities got to "no."

We have another petition focused on the Cape Fear Region at change.org/DeFlockILM

DeFlockILM is a nonpartisan, citizen-led coalition documenting ALPR and police surveillance across North Carolina. Everything above is drawn from public records.