The Town Called Plate Data Confidential. Then It Handed Us the Plates.

In August 2025, the Town of Atlantic Beach approved two Verkada automated license-plate-reader cameras at the Town Park sign on the Atlantic Beach Causeway — a $11,126, five-year arrangement the police department pitched, in the Town’s words, to “boost public safety” (WCTI News 12). Part of the cost was donation-funded. The cameras are wired into the SBI‘s access to the FBI’s NCIC hot lists, so every plate is checked against state and federal watchlists.

On August 30, 2026 we asked the Town, through a public-records request, for the records that show how the program actually operates. What came back is a case study in two things: how heavily a two-camera beach town uses this system, and how a government that calls plate data too sensitive to release will disclose it anyway.

What the data shows about how the town uses it.

The Town produced the Verkada “Command” audit log — the record of what its officers did inside the system — for a single three-month window, June 3 to September 1, 2026. On just two cameras, that log records:

• 1,222 license-plate searches
• 1,400 live-stream sessions and 361 video-history pulls
• active “License Plates of Interest” and “People List” watchlists — the system is used to flag specific vehicles and people, not just to watch passing traffic

That is roughly thirteen plate searches a day, every day, from two cameras on a beach causeway. When Atlantic Beach approved the readers “to boost public safety,” this is what the day-to-day use looks like in the records: a small department running hundreds of searches a month against a state-and-federal watchlist network.

The Town called the plate log confidential — then disclosed plates anyway.

The Town withheld the Verkada “license plate recognition event log” — the stream of plate reads — citing N.C. Gen. Stat. §§ 132-1.4, 132-1.4A, and 20-183.32, the statutes that make captured plate data confidential. We do not contest that the raw reads are confidential; we did not ask for them.

But the audit log the Town did produce contains, buried in a data field, 153 distinct license plates that its officers searched — and the names of the officers who ran each query. The data the Town called too sensitive to release, it released — just in a different file.

We are not publishing it.

We could. Once a record is produced, it is arguably public. We are not. We stripped those files from the records we mirrored for the public, we kept the raw audit and user exports offline entirely, and we told the Town — in writing, through counsel — about its own over-disclosure so it can address it.

The reason is simple, and it is the whole point of this project. Our objection is to warrantless mass surveillance, and it is made on behalf of the people those cameras watch. Publishing a stranger’s license plate, or an officer’s name, because a clerk pasted it into the wrong spreadsheet, would do to private people exactly what we are asking the government to stop doing. We do not need the plates to make the point. The counts make it.

What we did publish — and what we are still asking for.

What belongs to the public is the accountability record, and we have preserved it: the Verkada contract, the ALPR policy, the SBI and CJIS agreements, the budget, and our own demand letter are mirrored, unaltered, at the Internet Archive. Our deficiency response (Rice Law, PLLC, on behalf of DeFlockILM) presses the Town for the remaining administrative records — the data-sharing configuration, the written authorization for the People/Vehicle-of-Interest features, and the NCDOT right-of-way records for cameras placed on a state causeway. Not the plates. Not the officers. The paperwork that lets the public judge the program.

A government told its residents that plate data was too sensitive to see, and then handed it over in its own export. The people insisting it stay private are the ones who oppose the cameras. That is the difference — and it is worth sitting with.