Everything Is Perfect · The Appendix

Uncle Flocker

An open record, sung as a duet.
♪ The Overture I. The Source Book II. What We Won't Take § Corrections
Censor bar Fair warning: the uncensored version is also safe for work.
The Program

This page is the bibliography for everything else on this site.

Every number, map, docket, tally, and timeline published across Everything Is Perfect came from somewhere. This is that somewhere — itemized, linked, and labeled with what we actually do with it. Nothing here is proprietary, nothing here was bought, and nothing here required anyone to be photographed.

The name is a joke with a point. A license plate reader learns where you were and will not tell you how it knows. We learn where the money went and will tell you exactly how we know, down to the endpoint. Same verb, opposite manners.

  • 1If we can't cite it, we don't publish it. A claim without a source is a rumor, and rumors are what we're trying to replace.
  • 2Cited is not the same as ingested. Entries below are labeled either Ingested (we pull and store data) or Cited (we read it and link to it, and store nothing).
  • 3Public means public. Every source here is open to you on the same terms it is open to us. No login of ours unlocks anything you can't reach yourself.
  • 4We archive so links can die. Government portals rotate URLs constantly. Where a source allows it, we keep our own copy and show you the original address anyway.
  • 5Machine output is labeled as machine output. Auto-captions, classifiers, and generated summaries are never presented as the official record.
—Sources listed
—Ingested
—Cited only
—Categories
—Modules fed
Overture

The Uncle Flocker Duet

two voices · one appendix
Two people stand at a curb at 6:04 in the morning. A pole across the street is already awake.
Stage left
Somebody wrote down where I was on Tuesday.
Stage right
Who did?
Stage left
Uncle Flocker did.
Stage right
Uncle Flocker? On whose say-so?
Stage left
Nobody asked me. Nobody voted. It just went up on the pole.[1]
Both
UNCLE FLOCKER —
YOU KNOW WHERE I SLEPT AND I DON'T KNOW YOUR NAME.
UNCLE FLOCKER —
SHOW YOUR WORK.
Stage right
Ask them how many searches they ran last month.
Stage left
They publish a page about that.[1]
Stage right
And?
Stage left
And it doesn't say who they handed it to.
Stage right
Twenty-four thousand sharing agreements say otherwise.[1]
A third voice from off stage: "Fine. Then where did YOU get YOUR numbers?"
Stage left
Oh, thank you for asking.
Stage right
He's been waiting all week for somebody to ask that.
Stage left
The agendas come from the city's own portal.[4]
Stage right
The county's come from the county's.[5]
Stage left
The dead-plant list is the EPA's own file.[10]
Stage right
The river gauge is the U.S. Geological Survey's.[13]
Stage left
The megawatts are the Energy Information Administration's.[16]
Stage right
And the video is the government filming itself.[8]
Both
EVERY LINE, A FOOTNOTE.
EVERY FOOTNOTE, A DOOR YOU CAN OPEN YOURSELF.
THAT'S THE WHOLE DIFFERENCE, UNCLE FLOCKER —
WE SHOW OUR WORK.
Curtain note. The obscenity was never the word. Flip the censor bar off up top and the salty version turns out to be a bird, a verb, and a vendor. What's actually indecent is a device that reads forty thousand plates a month and answers questions with a press release. Everything below is the opposite of that, in list form.
Act I

The Source Book

One entry per source. Ingested means we pull data and store it. Cited means we read it, link to it, and store nothing. Where a source publishes a license, the license is named; where a source is a government body publishing its own record, it's public domain and says so.

Act II

What We Won't Take

the other half of transparency

A source list only tells you half the story. The other half is what a system refuses to collect even though it easily could. Here it is next to the thing this page is named after.

This project
A plate-reader network
No plates. We do not read, store, or match a license plate anywhere in this system. The detection demo at /get-the-flock-out deliberately cannot do it.
Plates are the product. Every passing vehicle is captured, timestamped, and geolocated, whether or not anyone is suspected of anything.
No faces. No facial recognition, no biometrics, no person-matching of any kind.
Vehicle fingerprinting by make, model, color, damage, roof racks, and bumper stickers — a description specific enough to follow one car.
No stored IP addresses. The visitor stats at /stats resolve a country at the moment of ingest and throw the address away. The daily hash is one-way and cannot be reversed or joined across days.
Retention by default, measured in days or months, applied to everyone in the frame.
No cross-source profiles. We do not join sources to build a dossier on a private individual. Case files at /private-eye cover public officials acting in public roles, and cite every claim.
Network sharing — thousands of standing agreements that let one agency query another's cameras, often without a warrant and without local notice.
No cookies, no trackers, no ad tech. No third-party scripts run on these pages. Static modules load nothing from a CDN.
Opaque access logs. Search-audit pages report totals, rarely the recipient, and almost never the reason.
No paywall on the sources. Every entry in the Source Book is reachable by you, at no cost, today.
A contract you didn't sign, priced per camera, approved on a consent agenda, renewed automatically.
The standing offer. If any of the above turns out to be false about us, we will say so on this page, in the Corrections log below, with the date — not in a footer, not in a policy update nobody reads. That is the entire point of publishing an appendix instead of a promise.
House Rules

Corrections, disputes, and how to check us

Found something wrong?

Say which page, which claim, and what the record actually shows. Corrections that come with a citation get made the same day; ones that don't get researched anyway.

Write to requests@everythingisperfect.org.

Check a number yourself

Every entry above links to the live source, not to our copy of it. If our figure and theirs disagree, theirs wins and ours gets fixed.

Refresh cadence is listed per source. Anything marked manual is only as current as its last sweep — the date is shown on the module that uses it.

Are you a source?

If you run one of the systems listed here and you want the entry worded differently, ask. We'd rather describe your data the way you'd describe it, as long as the description stays accurate.

If you want to be removed, tell us which legal basis applies and we'll evaluate it in public — on this page.

Reuse this

The list is not secret sauce. If you're building a civic transparency project in your own town, these are the doors, most of them federal or state and open everywhere.

Start with the meetings category — an agenda portal and a video channel are enough to begin.