Will they remember this the next time he’s up for reelection?
Voters have a depressingly short memory.
That’s why democracy is also known as being ruled by the hordes of idiots. It’s amazing when people are well informed on what they are voting on, the problem is that’s never happened in mass and never will. People will vote based on their feelings or just straight up not at all.
I’m imagining the most wealthy (who think they know what’s best for the world, like P.T.) would say something eerily similar to what you are saying.
The very rich have access to all of the information. One can’t expect people who face significant barriers to higher education (and other means of informing themselves) to be on the level of experts, the educated and informed, or the very rich.
Why are people against experts, the educated, and the informed?
Partisan news media seems like the likely culprit. A broken political system posing as democracy could be another factor to consider. Opaque algorithms that put people into information bubbles (with the intention to make them addicted and as uninformed/reactionary as possible) are definitely a major factor.
This guy is gonna get himself shot by angry residents. I’ve never been to a county meeting before in my life, but I can’t imagine just telling people to fuck off when they come to voice their opposition to issues in their town/city.
Aw, shooting him is too easy. There’s lots more to do before that.
Does he own a business on main street? Be a shame if his big plate glass window got broke. Then got broke again. And again…
His tires keep getting leaks, because nails keep showing up in his driveway. His car keeps getting keyed. Somebody turned the hose on at his house, and it ran for three days, flooding his backyard, and running his bill up a couple of hundred dollars. Somebody poured gasoline on his lawn spelling “FLOCK?” Rumors have been spreading about extramarital affairs, his AND his wife’s. Online reviews for his business have cratered.
Maybe he’ll feel like talking at the next county meeting.
If not, maybe things start to burn.
Funny thing about American voting: for all the ways that people insist voting doesn’t matter, the one place in America where one vote travels the absolute farthest is in a small town election, and right next to that are county elections, for positions like these.
County sheriffs are often elected, as are county commissioners; who gets elected and who gets appointed depends entirely on applicable state and local law. But even if both of these positions are appointed in Madison County, North Carolina, where this debacle took place, the appointer will almost always be an elected official, like a mayor.
In other words, there is in fact a place where the buck stops in local politics, whether it’s with the mayor or the commissioner or the sheriff or all of the above, and everyone who lives there already knows exactly where it does, especially in a back wood county in the hills like this one.
Add the fact that the meeting was already full of angry people, people who cared enough about the whole thing to make the drive into the county seat and attend, only to be shut up once they arrived.
So while they were silenced at this meeting, it’s not over. None of them want Flock cameras, and nobody wants to take the time and trouble to come to a goddamn podunk county commission meeting only to be told to shut up and sit down.
Come election season, any neighbors with short memories will absolutely be reminded of this, in the kind of local election where often every single vote counts.
The article quotes a Madison County privacy org directly:
“The Sheriff Office claims they are only using this technology for serious crimes, yet published audit logs tell a different story,” a website called Madison for Privacy says. “Madison County has searched the nationwide database over 1,200 times over just a 60 day period. In a county over only 20,000 residents, its hard to understand what could warrant this many searches.”
Holy shit, they’re not wrong. Follow that haveibeenflocked.com link to the Madison County sheriff’s office Flock searches, and the accompanying note:
These are some of the searches performed by Madison County NC SO. We have seen a total of 1,216 searches for this agency, performed by 1 person over 62 days between 3/11/2026 and 5/11/2026 (1 user was active in the most recent six months) The most recent import of records for this agency happened on 5/17/2026.
Madison County is southwest of Asheville on the state line between NC and TN, comprised mostly of unincorporated communities, which is a polite way of saying most residents live in the hills, not in the towns. The entire county has a population of roughly 21,000, and the largest town, Mars Hill, has only 2,000 residents. It doesn’t get much more rural than this on the East Coast.
So given the population and its distribution, and the fact that the sheriff’s office only serves the unincorporated communities because the three towns have their own municipal police, where the fuck does the sheriff’s office get cause or even time for what averages out to 600 Flock searches in a month?
But it gets even stranger. I clicked on a few searches, just to see what I could see, and every single one I clicked on with an unredacted reason* was associated with the same two or three other non-local police departments as the source of the information retrieved, two of which were the exact same ones every time: Forest Park Ohio PD, Tifton Georgia PD, and occasionally the Douglas County Nevada SO. There were a couple others, but always at least one of those three. (If you go to the little i next to the other PDs, it tells you, “This audit record appears in [n] different public record files.”)
This is true whether I clicked on a homicide, a non-DUI alcohol inquiry, a burglary, a car theft, or a sex offense. No matter what reason I chose, no matter how disparate the crime or the date, one if not all of those three law enforcement agencies came up as the source of the Flock information that inquiry pulled from. And this is the same of every search I clicked on, over and over and over again.
(*The sole exceptions to all this were where the crime itself was redacted, and then the associated source of information was Buncombe County, NC, which neighbors Madison County and could potentially be a valid law enforcement reason to search Flock data.)
And when I selected the Repeat Searches checkbox at the top, defined as “Display filter that hides likely duplicate searches (identical searches within 5 minutes). Does not affect server-side counts or downloads,” an even 800 of those 1,216 searches get loaded. So fully two thirds of those searches across two months qualify as duplicates executed within five minutes of each other, to Flock parameters at least. (Or maybe one third, if I’m understanding it wrong; I’m sure someone will be along to correct me shortly.) But that’s still a fuckton of duplicates executed within five minutes of each other.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand how it all works on the Flock side, but it almost seems like someone in the Madison County, NC sheriff’s office is just sitting on their ass keeping serious tabs on a short list of people living in other places.
This is from someone who sounds like they work for the Sherrif in Madison County. I asked them about those two towns.
“Those two towns are just the towns who have had their network audit logs released through a public records request and uploaded to HaveIbeenFlocked”
That’s possible, but does not seem likely. First, it wasn’t just the two towns, and hits came back from Buncombe County as well.
Also, the results exclude Madison County altogether, though there are cameras in the county, and presumably queries were made in regard to Madison County residents and plates, which is the supposed reason Madison County has Flock to begin with.
The way I read the HaveIbeenFlocked site was that the query itself was answered from that specific town or group of towns linked to the response, which would not be possible if the query itself had NO response from the HaveIbeenFlocked database.
Also, those two towns were just the most frequently listed, but others across the country have come up as I noted, as well as Buncombe County, which is where you’d think the vast majority of responses should be coming from, but they’re not.
Buncombe County (Asheville) is the source for multiple queries, but not anywhere near a majority. And someone involved in the HaveIbeenFlocked flow of information is very aware of the Buncombe County responses, because on all the Buncombe County hits I saw, the reason for the query was redacted: that didn’t just happen, someone chose to do that.
But if all this is legit, you know what source I never saw linked to a query? Madison County itself.
Now how is it possible, when cameras are in Madison County – iow, Madison County is itself a valid source on HaveIbeenFlocked – and the law enforcement requests are coming from Madison County, presumably pursuant to a valid Madison County law enforcement need for information, but the cameras in the county are not the source of any information requested? (Or very little, and I just missed them time after time.)
But don’t take my word for it: the links are in my post. Look for yourself. Click on anything you find, as randomly as you like, and see what you see.
