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Stop Flock Cams Now

Source Standards

Stop Flock Cams Now · Last updated: 2026-08-23 · Licensed CC BY 4.0

Every datum we publish must be traceable to a source a stranger could check. This document defines what counts as a source, what provenance every datum must carry, and how sources rank. It is the working companion to methodology.md (confidence tiers) and editorial-standards.md (claim labeling).

1. What counts as a source

A source is an identifiable, checkable origin for a factual claim. Acceptable:

  1. Primary government documents — contracts, purchase orders, council minutes and packets, permits, agency GIS layers, public-records responses, court filings, statutes, published agency policies (e.g., CA SB 34 disclosures).
  2. Court records — dockets, opinions, filings (via PACER/CourtListener/RECAP).
  3. Official vendor publications — Flock Safety transparency-portal pages, press releases, published policies (cited as the vendor's/agency's own statement, facts extracted with citation, never wholesale page copies).
  4. First-hand observation — an SFCN or OSM contributor's direct sighting from public property, ideally with a photo; the observation record (who-pseudonym, when, what) is the source.
  5. Established datasets with known licenses — OpenStreetMap (ODbL), EFF Atlas of Surveillance (CC BY 4.0), Census TIGER/Line (public domain).
  6. Reputable journalism — named outlets with editorial standards; used for context and leads, quoted briefly with attribution, and where possible traced back to their primary sources.

Not sources: anonymous social-media claims (leads only — must be independently confirmed before anything publishes), AI model output (a lead generator, never a source — see ../docs/AI_RESEARCH.md), proprietary aggregator exports we may not republish (GovSpend/OpenTheBooks — leads only; re-verify from primary documents), rumor, "everyone knows."

2. Primary-source hierarchy

When sources conflict, higher wins; conflicts that survive contact with the hierarchy get the DISPUTED flag and both citations shown.

  1. Court decisions and filed court records (for legal facts — and see the COURT DECISION label rules)
  2. Executed contracts, purchase orders, permits (for spending/deployment facts)
  3. Agency-published data and adopted policies (GIS layers, official maps, SB 34-style disclosures, minutes)
  4. Public-records (FOIA) responses
  5. Vendor self-published statements (transparency portals, press releases) — authoritative about what the vendor/agency claims, not automatically about ground truth
  6. First-hand photographic observation (authoritative for existence/location of visible equipment; weak for operator/contract facts)
  7. OSM/community datasets (aggregate of #6 with variable rigor)
  8. News reporting
  9. Everything else — leads, not sources

Note the hierarchy is per fact type: a photo outranks a contract on "is there physically a camera at this pole today"; a contract outranks a photo on "who pays for it."

3. Per-datum provenance requirements

Every published datum — a camera's location, an agency link, a retention period, a dollar figure — must carry, in the database and visibly on its page:

  • Source type (from the taxonomy above)
  • Citation: URL, or document identifier for offline records
  • Retrieval/observation date
  • License of the source (recorded at ingest — required for redistribution decisions per data-license.md)
  • Archived copy where the source is volatile: government PDFs, portal pages, and news pages are archived (Wayback/archive-on-ingest) with the archive link stored; documents obtained by public-records request are stored and published where lawful
  • Chain of edits: the append-only history record showing who added/changed the datum and on what basis

A claim that cannot carry this provenance does not publish. "Multiple sources say" without enumerable sources does not publish.

4. Specific rules

  • Quantitative claims (counts, dollars, dates, retention days): cite the exact document and page/field. Never interpolate or estimate silently; estimates are labeled as estimates with the method stated, and AI-derived estimates are labeled AI ESTIMATE.
  • Restricted-license sources (LegiScan, news text, GovSpend, vendor pages): facts may be restated with citation; the source material itself stays in the link-and-cite lane and never enters our redistributable ODbL/CC BY datasets.
  • Two-source rule for adverse claims: any claim damaging to an identifiable person or organization requires either one primary document or two independent secondary sources, plus the correct label from editorial-standards.md, plus a documented opportunity for the subject to respond for editorial features.
  • Independence: two sources that trace to the same origin (e.g., two articles rewriting one press release) count as one.
  • Anonymous contributors are fine; anonymous sources for contested facts are not — the platform must be able to stand behind every datum without revealing contributor identity, which is why photographic and documentary evidence is preferred over testimony.

5. Source failures

Dead links get repaired from archives. Sources found to be wrong trigger corrections-policy.md. Contributors who cite fabricated sources are handled under the severe rung of the community-guidelines.md enforcement ladder.