Have I Been Flocked Doesn’t Work in North Carolina

We want to be fair to the reporting. Bob Liepa’s StarNews explainer is accurate about what the site is, and the site itself is careful about its own limits. HaveIBeenFlocked — an independent non-profit, not affiliated with us — says plainly that its data is “incomplete,” that it is not real-time, and that it holds only what governments have released. Our concern is narrower and specific to this state: the way the tool works collides with the way North Carolina law is written, and the collision produces a false sense of safety for the exact people it is meant to help.

First, a distinction that trips up almost everyone. These records are logs of searches — the moments an officer typed a plate into Flock to look it up — not the passive photographs the cameras take of every car that passes. HaveIBeenFlocked only ever sees released search logs; it never sees the captures. The site says as much: by its own account, its results “don’t show when or if your vehicle passed one of Flock’s” cameras. Nearly everything below follows from that split.

And it sees only one kind of camera. These are plate-reader logs. They do not reflect the Condor video cameras — the pan-tilt-zoom units that record live video and can zoom in on people, eight of which New Hanover runs alongside its plate readers, per WECT. Whatever those cameras see never appears on this website at all. The tool understates the surveillance before a single redaction is applied.

What the tool actually checks

HaveIBeenFlocked does not watch the cameras. It has no access to Flock’s private database, and it cannot tell you when or whether your car passed one of the roughly 120,000 devices on the network. What it does is narrower: it collects audit logs that agencies have released through open-records requests, and it lets you search those logs for your plate. Nationally it reports holding 4,684,253 plates drawn from 241,961,192 searches — a large aggregation, but entirely of records that were already released. An audit log is a record of searches — a line for each time an officer typed a plate into the system, with a reason. So the site can only show you something if two things are both true: someone searched your specific plate, and the log of that search was released with your plate still visible.

In North Carolina, the second condition almost never holds. And that is not an accident of the data. It is the law.

North Carolina locks the plate itself

North Carolina’s automated-license-plate-reader statute (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.30 et seq.) treats captured plate data as confidential. It is not an ordinary public record open for inspection, and when our agencies release Flock audit logs, the license-plate field is redacted. We have the productions to prove it: in the audit files released by Kure Beach and Carolina Beach, the plate column reads “Redacted” on every row. HaveIBeenFlocked works by matching your plate against what agencies released — and in North Carolina, your plate is exactly the thing they black out. Your plate cannot match a column that has been erased.

And it hides who did the searching

There is a second lock. When North Carolina agencies release the network audits — the records that show which outside agencies reached into their cameras — they redact the searching agency and the officer, citing the criminal-investigation-records exemption at N.C. Gen. Stat. § 132-1.4 and the security-features exemption at § 132-1.7. New Hanover County’s own audit is the clearest example: its network was searched 2,980,082 times in sixteen months, and the Sheriff’s Office has redacted the searching agency on every single row. So even the “who” is stripped out. Between the two exemptions, a North Carolina audit log comes out of this state missing both the plate that was searched and the name of who searched it — the two pieces of information a person would need to learn anything at all.

What a blank result really means here

Put those two locks together and the practical result is stark. A New Hanover County driver can type a plate into HaveIBeenFlocked, get back nothing, and walk away believing the cameras never touched them — when in fact their plate may have been searched dozens of times by agencies hundreds of miles away. The cameras in this county alone were searched nearly three million times. Down the coast, Carolina Beach’s five cameras were searched roughly three million times in a single quarter, and Kure Beach’s four cameras around 2.56 million times over five months. Almost none of that is visible to the person being searched, because almost all of it was released with the plate and the searcher redacted. The blank result is the confidentiality working exactly as designed — not evidence that nothing happened.

Three small jurisdictions, roughly 8.5 million searches — and in every one, the license plate is redacted, so you cannot find yourself in any of it.

That is the danger. A tool built to expose surveillance can, in North Carolina, quietly reassure people that they are fine. False reassurance is worse than no answer, because it tells someone to stop asking.

The one way a North Carolina plate does show up

There is a narrow exception, and it is worth understanding because it explains the results people do occasionally find. If an out-of-state agency ran your North Carolina plate, that search can surface through another state’s public-records laws — laws that may not redact the plate the way North Carolina does. Roughly nine in ten searches of North Carolina’s Flock cameras come from outside the state, so this happens. But notice what it means: the only reason a North Carolina plate appears on that website is that some other state was more transparent than ours. Your own government’s records told you nothing. A stranger’s did.

North Carolina is not the only state where the site goes dark

This is a spreading pattern, and North Carolina sits squarely inside it. A growing list of states have walled ALPR data off from their public-records laws, so a plate search on HaveIBeenFlocked returns little or nothing in those states too. Georgia exempts data “captured by or derived from” plate readers and makes it a misdemeanor to request it for any non-law-enforcement purpose. Maryland exempts “information gathered by” an ALPR. Washington passed a law in 2025 that overrode a court ruling that ALPR images were public records — blocking people from seeing even the photos of their own cars. Illinois cut its state police ALPR data out of its records law; Oklahoma did the same for a district-attorney program; and Florida and Tennessee restrict disclosure as well. Arizona and Connecticut are weighing the same bans now. North Carolina’s ALPR statute puts it in that company. (See the EFF’s roundup of these laws.)

And to be fair: keeping the plate confidential is the right call

Here is the honest part, because we will not overstate our case. Hiding the searched plate is the privacy-protective choice, and we support it. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation — which uses these very records to expose ALPR abuse — says the plate number in an audit log generally should not be released, because disclosing it would reveal that a private person is under investigation and would let anyone pull a stranger’s movements. We agree. So the problem in North Carolina is not that it protects the plate. The problem is what it hides alongside the plate.

This is not about unredacting your plate

Be precise, because this is where it matters. We are not asking any agency to publish the license plates in its logs — those should stay sealed, for your privacy and everyone else’s. And no audit, redacted or not, will ever let you type your plate into a website and pull your own history; the plate is confidential by design, here and in a dozen other states. What North Carolina hides that it should not is the searching agency — the “who.” Our agencies black out the outside department on every row, so a resident cannot see that Houston, or the FBI, or an out-of-state sheriff reached into New Hanover’s cameras. That is the wall that should come down: name who is searching, and how often, in aggregate — while the plates stay protected. It is the exact balance the EFF recommends, and it is what the County has so far refused. Here is what the audits we have pried loose already show about who is searching North Carolina.

So don’t read a blank result on that website as “I’m safe.” Read it as the two-part reality of North Carolina law: your plate is confidential, and the people searching it are hidden. You have a right to ask whether your car has been searched. You will rarely get a real answer — and that, not the website, is what has to change.

What a real fix looks like

Let’s be clear about the actual remedy. It is not a better transparency portal. It is to stop treating North Carolina residents as suspects when they have done nothing wrong — to end warrantless mass government surveillance and take the cameras down. A permanent, searchable record of where free people drive is not made acceptable by auditing it more neatly. A community is not a lineup, and the presumption of innocence is not a setting to be configured.

If officials will not go that far, transparency is the floor — and even that they have refused. Short of removal, the minimum is:

• A local condition on the program. New Hanover’s commissioners can require — by ordinance, or as a term of the Flock contract they fund — that the Sheriff’s Office publish a quarterly network-audit summary: the outside agencies that searched county cameras, how many times each, and the out-of-state share. Plates and officer names stay withheld.
• A narrow statutory floor. The General Assembly can make the searching-agency field in a network audit an affirmative public record, while leaving captured plate data confidential exactly as it is now — institutions named, individuals protected.
• Publish the settings. Agencies should disclose their Flock “Network Discoverability” scope and sharing-partner count — how far a local camera’s reach extends, giving away nothing about any person.

But understand those measures for what they are: damage control, not a cure. You cannot make a dragnet of the innocent acceptable by keeping better records of it. The fix is to stop running the dragnet.

Tell the county: end the warrantless surveillance See the letters we’ve sent →

HaveIBeenFlocked.com is an independent non-profit project not affiliated with DeFlockILM; we describe it here as reported by the Wilmington StarNews (Bob Liepa, Aug. 24, 2026) and by the site’s own published limitations. The redaction described here reflects the productions DeFlockILM has received from North Carolina agencies and the exemptions those agencies cited; it is general information about public records, not legal advice, and it is not a criticism of the site’s operators. If any statement here is inaccurate, write to mark@deflockilm.org and we will correct it in public. First published August 24, 2026.