The Document New Hanover Redacts, a Rural County Handed Over

Through this whole campaign, one question has gone unanswered: who is actually searching New Hanover County’s cameras? The county logged 2,980,082 searches in about sixteen months and produced the audit — but redacted the “Organization Name” field, the identity of the searching agency, to “***” on every single row. And the one document that would answer the question directly — the network sharing configuration, the list of agencies the county shares its cameras with — the county has never produced. The Sheriff’s memo did not address it. We are still asking.

So it matters that we can now show you exactly what that document looks like — because a private citizen provided DeFlockILM the same records from another North Carolina county: Madison County, a rural county of roughly 21,000 people in the mountains. Its Sheriff’s Office produced its full network sharing list and a complete report of its own Flock searches by reason. We publish both exactly as received.

What a sharing list actually reveals

Madison County’s sharing configuration lists 1,555 agency relationships. Set aside the networks shared to Madison; look only at the other direction — the agencies Madison shares its own cameras with, meaning agencies that can search Madison County’s network:

• 724 outside organizations can search this one rural county’s cameras.
• Only about 135 are in North Carolina. The other 589 are out of state — Ohio (78), Georgia (74), Indiana (52), Tennessee (48), South Carolina, Michigan, Alabama, Kentucky, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and on.
• The list includes federal agencies: the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, among others.

A county of twenty-one thousand people has wired its cameras into a nationwide web, where hundreds of departments in states its residents will never visit — and the FBI — can query where a Madison County car has been. That is not a New Hanover fact or a Madison fact. It is how the shared network is built by default. It is also precisely the fact the “Organization Name” field would reveal in New Hanover’s own audit — the field New Hanover redacted.

And the county’s own searches

Madison also produced a report of every Flock search its own officers ran, by stated reason — 3,302 searches since it began using the system. Two entries stand out:

• The single most common reason is “Alcohol Offenses (Non-DUI)” — 605 searches, 18% of the total. A license-plate camera cannot observe an alcohol offense; what 605 plate searches under that heading actually were is a fair question for the agency.
• 113 searches cite a “Traffic Infraction,” a use N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-183.31(b) says the data “shall not be used for.”

We are not singling out Madison County. We publish this because it is the record New Hanover keeps from its own residents — and because it shows what these categories look like when an agency actually discloses them.

The point is the contrast

Here is the whole of it. A rural sheriff’s office with a fraction of New Hanover’s budget and traffic produced the sharing list and the reason-by-reason search report in full. New Hanover County — with 2.98 million searches on its network — redacted the searching agency on every row and has refused to produce the sharing configuration at all. Kure Beach released the searcher field. NC A&T released it in eleven days. The document is plainly producible. New Hanover’s refusal is not a technical limitation. It is a choice.

Read the records yourself. We have published Madison County’s network sharing list and its offense-by-reason search report, exactly as produced, in our public records repository and mirrored at the Internet Archive. We are not naming or identifying any individual. The documents are the government’s own, and they speak for themselves.

The ask to New Hanover County is simple, and now unavoidable: produce the same two documents you just watched a county of twenty-one thousand produce. The commissioners who fund the contract meet regularly.