DeFlock NSB“Nobody” is watching you. Everybody can look you up later.
New Smyrna Beach is part of Flock Safety's nationwide camera network — automated readers that photograph and record every passing vehicle, storing where you drive whether or not you are suspected of anything. No public vote authorized it. No published policy governs it. That is not law and order — it is government surveillance of law-abiding citizens.
119
ALPR cameras now mapped across the United States
83
of those readers are made by Flock Safety
30
your movements are kept on file, by stated policy
0
warrants, charges, or public votes required to track you
What a license-plate reader records about you
It reads every plate
Mounted on poles at intersections and town entrances, the camera photographs the back of every passing vehicle, converts the plate to text, and logs the time, the place, the direction of travel — and often the make, model, and color of the car.
It builds a history
Every read is filed into a searchable database — a running record of everywhere your car has been. Thirty days by default, and longer wherever a contract or an agency decides it should be kept.
It is a network, not a camera
Local reads join a nationwide system. Agencies across the country — and, as reporting has shown, federal ones — can query where a plate has traveled, far from the town where the picture was taken.
Why this matters for your rights
The Fourth Amendment
Americans have the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches. Logging every driver's movements — with no warrant and no suspicion — is precisely the kind of general search the Founders rebelled against. The writs of assistance that let the Crown search colonists at will helped spark the Revolution.
Government that stays in its lane
A free people should not have to assume the government is recording where they go. Mass surveillance treats every resident as a suspect. And once the infrastructure is built, its uses only grow — that is mission creep, and it rarely reverses on its own. Worse, the record does not stay local: it sits on the servers of Flock, a private out-of-state company, and has already been searched from as far away as Nevada.
Innocent until proven guilty
These cameras do not watch suspects. They watch everyone — churchgoers, gun owners, patients, business owners — and keep the record. A system that collects first and asks questions later quietly inverts the presumption of innocence.
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”
— United States Constitution, Amendment IV
Find the readers near you.
This live map is drawn from DeFlock, an open-source project that documents license-plate readers using public records and volunteer reports. Because it is crowdsourced, it shows only what has been reported so far — the real count in New Smyrna Beach is almost certainly higher. Zoom into our streets, and if you spot a reader that is not on the map, report it.
What we know — and what we are not being told.
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Confirmed in the network
New Smyrna Beach Police appears as an active agency inside Flock's national system, listed among the connected agencies on other departments' transparency portals. The city is in the network — that much is not in dispute.
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No public count
The city publishes no camera count, no map, and no transparency portal. Residents cannot easily learn how many readers watch our streets, or where they stand.
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No known vote
We found no commission agenda, minutes entry, or news coverage of a Flock vote in New Smyrna Beach. A purchase at this scale can clear the city manager's desk without ever reaching the public — which is exactly the problem.
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Hidden in plain sight
In Volusia County, a Flock camera was found concealed inside a speed-radar-box housing — surveillance disguised as ordinary road equipment, documented in national reporting in July 2026. If some cameras are hidden, how many have residents never noticed?
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Sharing beyond our borders
Records show Volusia deputies ran a search against camera data captured in Sparks, Nevada, on Christmas Day. Whatever the intent, it shows the network reaches far past the promise that “our data stays here.”
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A live legal question
A Florida law firm argues that Flock's contracts may violate state law — the company operating, in effect, as an unlicensed private-investigation business under Chapter 493. The legality itself is being contested in Florida right now.
It is not too late to act
Mayor Cleveland and Commissioners Perrine and Martin are on the 2026 ballot — primary August 18, general November 3. City commissioners answer to voters, and in Florida your email to them is public record. This is the moment residents hold the most leverage.