Your neighbors, standing up for your privacy
DeFlockILM is driven by residents across the Cape Fear region who refuse to let their home become a surveillance grid. It was founded in Wilmington by local attorney Mark Spencer Williams and now works from New Hanover to Brunswick, Pender, Columbus, and Onslow. More on the group →
You shouldn’t have to wonder who’s watching when you drive your kids to school.
We’re not activists by trade. We’re parents, workers, churchgoers, and small-business owners who assumed our daily movements were our own business — and learned they may not be.
Wanting safe streets and wanting your privacy are not in conflict. You can have both. This isn’t about being anti-police. It’s about being pro-Constitution: public safety should never require suspicionless tracking of innocent people.
This felt like it was already decided. It isn’t — and you don’t have to figure it out alone. That’s why DeFlockILM exists: to replace that powerlessness with a clear, doable next step.
- ✓We keep it factual and local. Every claim is backed by records, law, or documented cases.
- ✓This is not anti-police. It’s pro-Constitution — safety without suspicionless tracking.
- ✓We never sell or misuse your information. A privacy movement that leaks your data would be a contradiction.
- ✓Privacy is for everyone — every party, every neighborhood. A civil-liberties issue, not a partisan one.
Why I started this
In February 2026, I was driving through Wilmington when I noticed a camera on a pole — a small solar panel above it — that I had passed a hundred times without a second thought. This time I asked myself a simple question: what is that?
When I looked it up, I became genuinely concerned. I watched an 18-minute video about these cameras — and I almost never sit through an 18-minute video — and by the end I needed to understand the whole picture. So I dug in.
I have children. When I learned that Flock’s cameras had been left exposed online, with no reliable security — that anyone, including people who mean harm, could watch a park where kids play — it stopped being abstract. We are building a system that is not only contrary to what I understand America to be, but one that, when abused, does real and serious harm.
Then I read about the harm that had already happened: the North Carolina women wrongfully arrested because a license-plate reader flagged the wrong car, and the officers who abused the system. Not hypotheticals. People.
As an attorney, I know why the Founders wrote protection from the government’s warrantless searches into the Constitution. They had lived under the British “writs of assistance” — open-ended search powers, no judge, no limit — and they wrote the Fourth Amendment to end them. A government network that logs everyone’s movements, with no warrant and no real oversight, is repulsive to that promise. It is the kind of mass-surveillance state imagined in George Orwell’s 1984 — the opposite of the country I believe in.
So I got involved, and I became an activist against mass surveillance — in my own community, where I can do something about it. If you’ve read this far, I’d be grateful to have you with us.
Mark Spencer Williams
Founder, DeFlockILM · Wilmington attorney, Rice Law PLLC
We turn quiet surveillance into public record
DeFlockILM isn’t a petition and a hashtag. It’s a working transparency effort. We file public-records requests with the agencies that run these cameras, publish the documents they release — contracts, policies, and audit logs — and explain in plain language what they mean.
We’ve served requests on New Hanover County and its Sheriff’s Office, the Wilmington Police Department, the surrounding Cape Fear counties, the New Hanover beach towns, and every university in the UNC System. When an agency stonewalls or blacks out the records, we say so publicly and, where the law allows, we push back with formal demands. Everything we obtain goes online as a primary document, so you never have to take our word for it — you can read the government’s own paper yourself.
We also hand you the tools to act: a step-by-step guide to filing your own records request, talking points for a commission meeting, and a one-click way to email the officials who fund the cameras.
The receipts, not rumors
The public record already tells a troubling story in New Hanover County:
- ✓The county’s Flock network was searched roughly 2.98 million times in about 16 months — and the Sheriff’s Office redacted the name of every searching agency and officer. Read the analysis →
- ✓The Sheriff’s Office holds a roughly $219,000 Flock contract (#25-0364) that no one voted in at a public hearing. See the documents →
- ✓All four Cape Fear sheriffs — New Hanover, Brunswick, Pender, and Columbus — run Flock, and the office that operates it kept no transparency portal until launching one on Aug 10, 2026 — and even that shows only its own searches, not who else is searching.
- ✓Buried in the county’s own order form: eight Condor pan-tilt-zoom cameras — not plate readers, but live video — that were never publicly announced. What the contract really includes →
- ✓It isn’t only the county: Carolina Beach and Kure Beach run their own Flock cameras, wired into a nationwide network that searched them millions of times a quarter. (Carolina Beach · Kure Beach)
- ✓And it reaches well beyond plate readers: the Sheriff’s Office also runs ShadowDragon social-media surveillance, Wilmington police fly drones, and a Fusus “STING” real-time crime center stitches the feeds together. The full inventory →
Want to help pry more loose? Here’s how to file your own request →
From tracked & resigned — to informed & in charge
Before
A tracked, resigned resident who assumes the cameras are here to stay and that one voice can’t change anything.
After
An informed, confident citizen who knew their rights, used their voice, and helped reclaim their community’s privacy.
Questions? Contact Mark Williams at Mark@DeFlockILM.org.
You’re not a suspect. So stop being tracked like one.
It takes one minute. Add your name — then tell the officials who represent you to take the cameras down.