It’s Not Just Cameras: The Sheriff Bought Software to Map Your Online Life

New Hanover County’s surveillance debate has been about the hardware you can see — license-plate readers on poles, live-video Condor cameras, a real-time crime center, a growing police drone fleet. But a public-records request has surfaced a very different capability the Sheriff’s Office bought quietly: software to watch what you post online.

What the records show

In December 2024, the Sheriff’s Vice & Narcotics unit — through Lt. Ashley Freeman, approved by the county’s Chief Financial Officer — purchased ShadowDragon’s “SocialNet” and “Horizon” tools for $13,399.92: a 12-month subscription good for 1,000 queries a day (Purchase Order #20250876-00). It was bought through the government reseller Carahsoft on a GSA schedule — a cooperative federal contract that let the county skip competitive bidding entirely, the same shortcut used to buy Flock.

What ShadowDragon actually does

ShadowDragon is not a camera. It is open-source-intelligence (OSINT) software that lets investigators pull and cross-reference data from more than 500 online sources — social-media platforms, forums, dating apps, gaming networks, breach data, and the dark web — to identify a person, resolve their aliases, and map their network of connections. Give it a name or a handle, and it assembles a portrait of who you are online and who you associate with.

Why it’s controversial

The Intercept described ShadowDragon as software that “can watch your every move,” and civil-liberties groups have pressed the point concretely. In December 2023 the ACLU and the Brennan Center formally asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Meta and X for letting surveillance vendors — ShadowDragon named among them — mine users’ posts and profiles for government surveillance in violation of the platforms’ own rules. The core objection is the “public data” loophole: because the software only scrapes what you’ve made public, police can run your email, alias, or phone number across 500+ platforms and assemble an intimate behavioral dossier without a warrant, a subpoena, or even reasonable suspicion. The same tools have been bought by ICE to pull data from immigrant communities’ social-media accounts, and 404 Media documented ShadowDragon reaching into pregnancy-tracking sites, gaming platforms, and dating apps.

An honest caveat. We’re not aware of a publicly documented case of a New Hanover officer — or any officer — being disciplined for personally abusing ShadowDragon, the way officers have been caught misusing plate-reader and DMV databases to stalk people. The concern here is different, and in some ways sharper: the worry isn’t one rogue search — it’s that the tool works exactly as designed, mapping identities, associations, and speech at scale, bought with no public vote and no published policy on who may run a query, for what reason, or how long the results are kept.

Does it require a warrant? Does North Carolina law limit it?

Short answer: not really — and that’s the problem. When ShadowDragon is used to collect publicly available information, current Fourth Amendment doctrine generally requires no warrant — and not even reasonable, articulable suspicion — because courts have long held you surrender your expectation of privacy in what you post publicly (the “third-party” doctrine). That doctrine is no longer absolute: the Supreme Court’s Carpenter and 2026 Chatrie decisions show it eroding for aggregated digital data. But for scraping public posts, it still largely holds. (Private messages, subscriber records, or stored data are a different matter and can still require a warrant, subpoena, or court order.)

North Carolina has no statute on point. The General Statutes don’t specifically regulate law-enforcement use of OSINT or social-media-scraping tools like ShadowDragon. The state’s wiretap law (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-287) reaches only the interception of communications and expressly exempts anything “readily accessible to the general public” — which is exactly what these tools collect. The cyberstalking statute (§ 14-196.3) targets malicious harassment, not police intelligence-gathering. Neither one applies.

That doesn’t mean no limits exist — the U.S. and North Carolina Constitutions (including First Amendment protections for speech and association), federal privacy statutes, agency policy, employment and ethics rules, civil-rights law, and discovery and evidentiary rules can all bear on a particular search — and surveillance aimed at protesters or political activity is especially fact-sensitive. But there is no North Carolina statute that requires a warrant to run you through ShadowDragon, caps how long it keeps what it pulls, mandates an audit the public can see, or gives a citizen any way to learn they were searched. The only real guardrails are the ones the agency writes for itself — and, as with the plate-reader audit, the county hasn’t published them. A tool this powerful, governed only by internal policy the public can’t inspect, is the accountability gap this whole campaign is about.

Why it matters here

Two things. First, the county’s surveillance reach doesn’t stop at your car — it extends to your online identity, your associations, and your speech. Second, it fits a pattern: a powerful surveillance tool, bought on a no-bid cooperative contract, with no public vote and no published policy on who may run a query, for what reason, or how long the results are kept. We only know about it because someone filed a records request. See it alongside everything else watching Wilmington.

The record: this purchase was disclosed by the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office in response to a public-records request (filed via MuckRock, fulfilled July 7, 2026) — Sheriff’s Office PO #20250876-00 and Carahsoft invoice IN1851513 for ShadowDragon Federal, LLC.

Sources

• New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office Purchase Order #20250876-00 and Carahsoft invoice IN1851513 (ShadowDragon SocialNet + Horizon), obtained via public-records request.
• The Intercept — “Inside the Social Media Surveillance Software That Can Watch Your Every Move”
• 404 Media — “Inside ShadowDragon, The Tool That Lets ICE Monitor Pregnancy Tracking Sites and Fortnite Players”
• ACLU of Northern California & Brennan Center — FTC letter naming ShadowDragon (Dec. 2023)
• EFF Street-Level Surveillance — Social Media Monitoring

This article reports on documents obtained through a public-records request. It describes a lawful government purchase and does not allege that any specific search has been misused; the point is that the capability exists, without a public vote or published safeguards.