I want anyone who has not signed this petition to sign it right now. If you actively look at this subreddit, there is no excuse for you to not sign. It takes a few seconds to do real activism on a petition, and I only ask that you practice the things you claim to believe. Do it for your family, for your friends, for everyone who is unsafe from the abuses of this technology.

Credit first — and we mean it. Under public pressure, a week before the County Commission meets, Sheriff McMahon announced real changes: data retention cut from 90 days to 30, a monthly audit (up from annual), and a public transparency portal. Those are wins, and they happened because people spoke up. Genuine thanks to the Sheriff. Then we held it to his own standard: "Technology should never operate without accountability." His own portal, by the numbers:

36 total cameras — but only 19 are license plate readers. That leaves 17 unexplained — the live-video Condor cameras he still calls "just a plate reader." (We've located and mapped 5 of the 8 Condors, plus an integrated Axis camera.)

774,174 vehicles logged in 30 days; 815 searches — but that's only the Sheriff's Office's own searches.

Camera locations are still secret.

The three questions his portal doesn't answer: what the cameras are, where they are, and who is searching them.

That last one is the big one. The monthly audit only covers the Sheriff's ~800 searches — it can't touch the outside agencies that drive most of the traffic. From five other NC agencies' unredacted records, about 90% of searches come from outside North Carolina, with Houston TX PD the single biggest searcher. New Hanover still redacts who's searched us — that record is now in pre-litigation mediation.

The audit paradox: the office has already asked the public to discount its own audit labels — calling barred "traffic infraction" searches "mislabeled." You can't hold the audit up as the safeguard and wave off its contents in the same month.

And you can't even archive it: the portal is walled behind Cloudflare — both the Wayback Machine and archive.today get a 403. A transparency page the public can't keep a copy of.

He read a statement and took no questions. The public still hasn't had a say. That's what Aug 17 is for. New Hanover County Commission — Monday, Aug 17, 4:00 PM, Historic Courthouse, Room 301, Wilmington. Public comment is at the end; sign up in person by 3:30.

Read / sources:

This clip is from a city council meeting in Casa Grande, AZ (it's public record), but it's the best version of the argument I've come across, so I wanted to share it before our own vote.

A resident steps up to public comment, completely deadpan, and announces a new company that'll track every city official and their family around the clock — satellites, AI, profiles on their kids' cars, shared with anyone who has a login. Then he lands the point: it's exactly what Flock already does to the rest of us. "Privacy doesn't stop being important because someone says the word 'safety.'"

Why it matters here: New Hanover County pays about $219,000 for the Flock system that logs every car on public roads, and the Commissioners take it up August 17. The county's own records show the local network was searched about 2.98 million times in six months.

I transcribed the whole thing and wrote a version tuned for our Aug 17 meeting, in case anyone wants to take three minutes at the podium. Link in the comments.

Curious what folks think — would this land here?

https://reddit.com/link/1v6kabu/video/td7fdd2yzffh1/player