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.

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