About
We are normal people who do not want mass surveillance.
We are residents of St. Johns County. No staff, no budget, no party affiliation and no connection to any vendor. What we have is the view that a camera network recording every driver in the county is an unreasonable search, and that the county should switch it off. Driving to the Publix is not probable cause.
How did this get in St. Johns County?
Automated license plate readers arrived in Florida jurisdictions the way most surveillance does. A vendor offers a trial. The trial produces an arrest. The arrest produces a press release. A renewal goes on a consent agenda and passes without discussion, and the county now runs a permanent record of who drove where.
Nobody set out to build that. It assembles itself one uncontested renewal at a time, which is exactly why the interruption has to come from outside the building.
St. Johns County is not unusual. That is the point. The same vendor pitch is running in counties across the country, and the response has to be local because the contracts are local.
What we can do now.
Four things, in rough order of how much time they take.
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Show up
Commission meetings have a public comment period. Most of the time nobody uses it to talk about this.
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Explain it to neighbors
Most people have never heard of a Vehicle Fingerprint and are not pleased to learn what one is.
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File records requests
Contracts, invoices, usage policies, audit logs and data sharing agreements are public records under Chapter 119, Florida Statutes. We ask for them and publish what comes back.
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Map the hardware
Cameras get photographed and logged on DeFlock, an open map of reader locations built on OpenStreetMap. Anybody can add one.
What we are asking for.
End the program. Cancel the contract, take the cameras down, and delete what they have already collected. That is the ask.
We do not campaign for a shorter retention period or a tighter search rule. Those arguments accept the record as legitimate and then haggle over its housekeeping. Photographing every car and keeping the result is a search of people nobody suspects, and the Fourth Amendment does not leave room for the county to run one.
We mean the county taking the cameras down, by a vote, on the record. We do not touch the hardware and we will not help anyone who wants to. Damaging a camera hands the other side its argument and puts the person who did it in front of a judge.
Deputies investigated crimes before these cameras went up and can investigate them after they come down. Where there is reason to suspect a person, a judge can issue a warrant. That is what a warrant is for.
Rules we hold ourselves to.
Sources before adjectives
Every factual claim on this site should trace to a document, a recording or a named piece of reporting. If we cannot source it, we cut it. Tell us when we get one wrong and we will fix it in public.
Nothing illegal, nothing clever
Public records, public meetings, public streets. We do not touch hardware and we do not encourage anyone else to. It is also the fastest way to lose the argument.
Names are yours to give
You can attend, read, forward and donate nothing without ever telling us who you are. We keep no member list. The contact form delivers to one inbox and stores nothing on the server.
Not a partisan project
Objections to warrantless location tracking come from across the political map, which is the only reason this kind of campaign ever wins a county vote. We keep it that way on purpose.
There is no membership to join.
Speak at a commission meeting, or do not. Send one email to one commissioner and you have already done more than most people in the county. Start on the Get Involved page.