The Surveillance Glossary

The cameras & hardware

ALPR (Automated License Plate Reader). A camera that photographs every passing vehicle and logs its plate, the date, the time, and the location. It reads all plates, not just suspects’ — collection happens first, questions come later. (What one read captures.)

Flock Safety. The private company whose cameras the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office uses under contract #25-0364. “Flock” is shorthand for its devices and the searchable network they feed.

Falcon. Flock’s fixed, pole-mounted plate reader — the solar-powered roadside camera most people picture. Variants include the Falcon Flex and Falcon LR (long-range).

Condor. Flock’s live-video PTZ camera — it streams and records video and can zoom in on a scene. The county’s own order form lists eight Solar Condor cameras alongside its plate readers, and officials have not disclosed where they are. (The contract detail.)

PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom). A camera that can swivel and zoom on command, rather than sitting fixed on one lane. Condor is a PTZ camera.

Raven. Flock’s audio sensor, marketed to detect gunshots and, more recently, “human distress.” A microphone on a pole raises separate wiretap questions. It is a different product from Wilmington’s existing ShotSpotter sensors.

The data they create

Vehicle fingerprint. Flock’s own term for the profile it builds of a car — make, model, color, and features like bumper stickers, roof racks, and damage. It lets the system match a vehicle even when the plate is missing or unreadable. (How it works.)

Pattern of life. The detailed, searchable history of where a vehicle has been, assembled from many reads across a camera network. It is the phrase courts use, and it is the core privacy concern — not any single photo, but the whole picture of your movements.

Read vs. hit. A read is any capture of a passing plate (everyone gets read). A hit is a read that matches a flagged plate on a hotlist.

Hotlist. A list of plates loaded into the system to trigger an alert — for example, stolen vehicles or wanted persons. Who is on a hotlist, and why, is set by the agency.

How the network is searched

Network audit / event log. The records of who searched a Flock network, when, and under what stated reason. New Hanover County’s audit logs roughly 2.98 million searches in about six months — with the name of every searching agency and officer redacted. (Three million searches, zero names.)

Reason field. The free-text box where an officer types why they ran a search. It is self-reported and, in the records we obtained, not independently audited — so “law enforcement purpose” is whatever the searcher writes.

FreeForm / vehicle-description search. Searching the network by description — “white pickup with a ladder rack” — instead of a specific plate. Some description searches target people, not just vehicles. (What police can actually search.)

Convoy search. A tool that finds vehicles seen traveling together, or near a target vehicle, across the network — mapping associations, not just one car.

Nova. Flock’s people-search product, which links plate data to individuals using commercial data broker records. It is how a plate becomes a name without a warrant or a face.

The systems it plugs into

Real-time crime center (Fusus). Software that fuses many camera and sensor feeds into one screen for police. Wilmington runs one — the “STING” center — layered on top of the ALPR network. (Inside the STING center.)

Other ALPR vendors. Flock is the largest, but not the only one — Rekor, Genetec AutoVu, and Motorola sell plate readers too. “We don’t use Flock” is not the same as “we don’t run ALPRs.”

ShotSpotter (SoundThinking). An acoustic sensor network that listens for gunshots and alerts police. Wilmington runs it. A microphone grid over the city raises its own accuracy and wiretap questions, separate from the cameras. (On ShotSpotter here.)

ShadowDragon. An open-source-intelligence (OSINT) tool that scrapes and maps people’s public social-media activity into profiles and link charts. New Hanover County purchased access without a public vote. (What the county bought.)

SignalTrace. Device- and phone-tracking technology that ties the electronics you carry — not just your car — to location, building a movement trail from wireless signals. (How device tracking works.)

Drone (UAS). Unmanned aircraft used for aerial surveillance. The Wilmington Police Department operates them, and in North Carolina most surveillance of public space by drone triggers no warrant at all. (On police drones here.)

The law & your records

Fourth Amendment. The constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Whether warrantless ALPR tracking violates it is an open, actively litigated question.

Carpenter v. United States (2018). The Supreme Court held that accessing long-term location data is a Fourth Amendment search, because the aggregate reveals a “pattern of life.” It concerned cell-phone data, not plate readers directly — but it is the same constitutional ground.

N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.30–.33. North Carolina’s ALPR statute. It makes captured plate data confidential, caps retention at 90 days, bars selling it, and limits disclosure to law enforcement for a legitimate purpose. It does not currently require a warrant to search the data. (The actual statute.)

Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. Chapter 132). The law that lets any resident request government records — the contracts, audit logs, and policies we publish. It is how the public sees what the county bought in its name. (The records hub.)

Retention. How long data is kept. Flock’s contractual default for raw plate scans is about 30 days; North Carolina’s statutory ceiling is 90. Two different limits — don’t confuse them — and the county’s contract grants Flock a perpetual license to derived data.

Adjacent surveillance you’ll hear about

Geofence warrant. A request for every device (or vehicle) in a given area and time — a location dragnet, rather than a search for one known suspect.

OSINT / social-media monitoring. Open-source intelligence — tools that scrape and map public posts. New Hanover County purchased one such tool without a public vote.

IMSI catcher (“Stingray”). A device that mimics a cell tower to identify or locate nearby phones. Not part of Flock, but part of the same conversation about warrantless tracking.

General information for public discussion, not legal advice. Product names and trademarks belong to their owners and are used for identification and commentary. Last updated July 26, 2026.