They Watch You Without a Warrant. You Need a Court Order to Watch Them.

Read them together. When the government records you, access is instant, warrantless, and nationwide. When the government records itself, access runs through a courthouse. Surveillance flows one way; accountability flows the other. Every camera in this arrangement points down.

You paid for both sides of the one-way mirror

The body cameras were sold to the public as an accountability measure — and taxpayers bought them. The plate readers were sold as a safety measure — and taxpayers bought those too, along with the software subscriptions, the real-time crime center, and the social-media search tools. Our cost breakdown for New Hanover County is on this site. The result of all that public money: a system in which the watched party funds the watching, then must hire a lawyer to see footage of its own encounters with police — while an officer three states away reaches our cameras with a search box and a reason field no one reviews.

A neutral gatekeeper is not a radical demand

One of our most-upvoted commenters framed the fix as a principle: if police want to run a standing surveillance system over everyone, access to it should require the same thing they demand of us — a specific request, reviewed by someone neutral, with a record of who asked and why. That is how wiretaps have worked for fifty years. North Carolina law demands a court order for a pen register recording the numbers you dial. It demands nothing comparable for a network recording everywhere you drive.

The audit asymmetry

The imbalance runs through oversight, too. When we ask who searched our cameras, the produced records arrive with the searchers’ names redacted — agencies visible, individuals hidden. When police want to know where you were last month, no redaction protects you. The statute requires ALPR use to be audited once a year, by the agency itself, reported to its own chief. No court sees it. No commissioner sees it. We documented that gap in Who Watches the Watchers; this is its plain-English conclusion — the entities with the least power in this arrangement face the most scrutiny, and the entities with the most power face the least.

The reciprocity question nobody has answered

The sharing network is defended as mutual: we open our cameras to other states, and they open theirs to us. Fine — then the numbers should be public in both directions. How many searches did North Carolina agencies run against other states’ cameras last quarter, and for what reasons? We have not seen that number produced anywhere, and we are pursuing it through records requests. If reciprocity is the justification, reciprocal transparency is the test. An agency proud of its searches should be willing to count them in public.

What balance would look like

None of this requires abolishing anything. It requires symmetry: a neutral gatekeeper before movement histories are searched; audit logs, unredacted, published on a schedule; sharing settings set by elected boards in public session, not by vendor defaults; and citizen access to government recordings on terms no harder than the government’s access to recordings of citizens. Until those terms exist, the honest description of the current system is the title of this post.

Ask your commissioners which side of the mirror they sit on. They meet regularly — find the next date, and the sign-up to speak is on this site.

Sources & method. The body-camera access rule is N.C. Gen. Stat. § 132-1.4A; the pen-register comparison and the annual self-audit requirement are drawn from North Carolina’s electronic-surveillance and ALPR statutes. The search figures are our own tally of audit logs produced to us and archived in our NC Records Repository. Statutory characterizations reflect our reading and are general information, not legal advice. DeFlockILM is a citizen effort on ALPR and privacy in the Wilmington area.