DeFlock PBCWatching the watchers in Palm Beach County

How this works

Transparency is the whole point, so here's exactly what we do — and where the limits are.

1. We read public agendas

For each of Palm Beach County's municipalities we connect to its official meeting-agenda system and collect upcoming and recent agendas. Where a town offers a structured public API (Granicus Legistar, CivicClerk), we use it; otherwise we read the same public agenda pages and PDFs any resident can open. We throttle our requests well below normal limits and identify ourselves honestly. We only ever read published public records — nothing private, nothing behind a login.

2. We keyword-match for surveillance items

Agenda text is scanned for a tiered dictionary of surveillance terms. Tiered, because words like "camera" are too broad to mean anything alone:

  • Strong Vendor and technical terms that almost always mean surveillance — e.g. Flock Safety, ALPR, license plate reader, real-time crime center, Fusus.
  • Possible Broader but meaningful — e.g. surveillance camera, CCTV, facial recognition, data-sharing agreement.
  • Weak Ambiguous terms (camera, traffic camera, Axon, smart city) that we count only when a stronger term also appears in the same document, to keep out false alarms.

3. A human confirms before it's published

Automated matching surfaces candidates; it doesn't publish them. A person reviews each flagged item against the actual agenda before it appears on this site, and dismisses false positives. If we get something wrong, tell us and we'll correct it fast.

4. Known deployments are separate, and sourced

The "already installed" deployments we list come from the EFF Atlas of Surveillance and cited news reporting, not from our scrapers. Anything resting on a single source is labeled unverified until we confirm it against a primary record.

Limits we're honest about

  • Some agendas are scanned-image PDFs; text extraction (and OCR) can miss items. We're improving coverage town by town.
  • Not every surveillance decision hits a public agenda — some are staff-level purchases or grant-funded buys. We catch what's public.
  • Carpenter is a legal analogy for ALPRs, not a direct ruling on them.

Current dictionary: 45 strong, 20 possible, and 13 ambiguous terms.