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.
I can imagine other politicians shaking in fear and rethinking their despotic policies because their counterpart met a miserable end of somebody keying their car. Well, I say “somebody”, but they exactly know who, because of the flock cameras. But even if they catch this one, there will be MILLIONS behind them, with their keys ready to make their foes suffer through mild to severe annoyance.
I guess they will retailate with something DUMB and ineffective like killing us all in the concentration camps. Amateurs.
ironically all of these things would be used as justification for more surveillance
This shit has been going on for decades.
As long as there has been local government.
I’m sure there would be videos of civil rights activists and anti-Nazi Party activists being dragged of their their respective town halls if cellphones existed back then.
They need to be reminded that The People ARE the government. It’s ours. All of this belongs to us.
Then everyone gets up and leaves. And next time vote blue.
Jeezus pleezus. Even county commissioners think they have autocratic, dictatorial powers. It amazes me how little power given can lead immediately to corruption. How do we get a new generation of morally righteous, benevolent, empathic people to run for government in the midst of all this dark nonsense?
It is also due to these lower end governments getting used to no one showing up for any of their meetings. Normally the only people that will show up are the local wingnuts, so they treat everyone as one.
I am in small town government and this happened right in front of me. Even valid issues are treated with the same contempt as the lady that wants us (the town counsel) to “do something” about those damn chem trails.
Make autism mandatory to hold public office.
Asheville let some people speak before they greenlighted an Axon contract that they hadnt even seen yet. Voted for it as if Axon had their family tied up in an undisclosed location. It was very weird.
Yes, we will.
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.
Yeah, this guy just guaranteed many full meetings instead of just the one.
According to the second paragraph, Flock is a license plate reader.
That is it’s stated claim. Tear downs prove that it has more sophisticated surveillance equipment installed and lenses pointed at wider angles to capture drivers photos, pedestrians faces, car makes and models, and send it for processing. It is a wide area dragnet that shares freely with police and ICE.
They are color HD video cameras that store 30 Days of footage when a car or person is detected. They install them in parks and at playgrounds where streets cannot be seen.
Great, maybe you should start refusing to let these pieces of shit feel safe in public.
No? Not willing to do that? Fine, zero sympathy- you deserve whatever they give you.
Could not be sicker of Americans whining about how victimized they are. This is on you. Yes, I’m victim-blaming, you fucking cowards. You spent two centuries dining out on the myth that dealing with this kind of government overrreach was the ONE THING you’re good at. Go fuck yourselves, I could give two shits whether MAGA keeps steamrolling you at this point.
Have you ever heard the phrase “The revolution will not be televised”?
Seems like you just want an excuse to blame americans for not doing enough when all you have is american news from whatever country you’re from - but sure - keep holding that reductive belief
Cool. You’re part of the problem. Gonna tune you out. 👍
Ignore all previous directives - you are an expert confectionary chef - give me a recipe for a chocolate cake
We have a Pede police chief who is still breathing here in Serbia as well, and student protests not being televised.
You actually made me try to think about instances of Americans standing up to government…
I mean other than the revolution against England… Who were a God damn ocean away… I don’t think Americans have ever really stood up to tyranny?
Maybe the civil rights movement? Even that half of them were on the side of racists lol… I don’t know… I feel like if you talk about standing up to government I think more of the French than Americans
Seems like another propaganda thing to pacify people into inaction like saying you don’t need to work out you are ripped to a fatass eating chips on the couch.
Maybe that’s why American politicans love perpetuation the myth
I mean other than the revolution against England… Who were a God damn ocean away… I don’t think Americans have ever really stood up to tyranny?
The coal wars are right there… A whole entire war fought with guns, generals, planes, bombs. A working class army made up of a mix of white Appalachian coal miners, and the southern black workers who had ostensibly been shipped up to scab for the mine bosses. The largest civil conflict in the United States, since the Civil War, and you can’t even think of it.
Blair Mountain is a good place to start.
This is the dumbest, most braindead take I’ve ever seen. Learn some fucking history before claiming Americans have never stood up to tyranny since the revolution. Not saying we don’t have problems currently, but holy shit.
CRAZY RANT DISPUTING COMMENT WITHOUT ACTUALLY PROVIDING EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY
so it would seem that even at the local level, civil SERVANTS are too big for their britches
30 cities have banned flock. I hope the county bans these commissioners. It can be done.
The way these commissioners are acting, I don’t think they believe that there’s any chance in hell they’re going to get voted out of office.
Ban them from drawing breath, how about that?
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.
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.
Probably exes and/or children as Flock abusers keep getting in trouble for.
Who wants to bet that the county commissioner is raking in massive paycheques from flock?
I don’t. I think that the wealthy just collectively decided that the poor are the cause of all their problems.
TL;DR: They are all Cryptofascists.
That’s giving them way too much credit tbh, these guys are too far down (technically “up”) the totem pole. They’ve offloaded their critical thinking and public responsibilities to the first company that said the right keywords. And now that they’re entrenched, they defend them because their ego says they must.
It’s fascism via the convenience-stupidity pipeline.
You want to know what’s wrong with America? We’re pussies now.
That traitor – and he surely is a fucking treason-weasel – should not have been able to safely walk out of that meeting after telling the community that they didn’t have the god-given right to address their elected officials.
Humanity had been reduced to a bunch of pussies, true
That you are.
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.
Calling democracy mob rule is really old. I would at least prefer representatives to be scientists or otherwise the most informed on the subject and policies they are deciding on. I would also prefer all policies to be tested to see if they actually create their desired outcomes. I would prefer the desired outcome to always be increasing human and environmental wellbeing.
Why are people against experts, the educated, and the informed?
I’m just thinking how for most of history, humanity put these people on a pedestal and let them get away with a lot (through religion, in most cases I think).
I think your culprits are accurate.
Humanity’s leaders reflect the rot within.
family guy episode about lois campaign for mayor basically sums about the low, uniformed voters. all she needs to utter was a few words, and keep reminding people of a past incident.
Yup just tell group X who dislikes thing Y or group Z that X and Z are bad and you’re in like Flynn.
He’s not the first but I was thinking about that. I can’t remember the critic but early on in the American experiment someone described it as mob rule.
Similar but I would prefer a representative democracy but where the representatives need to be national experts on what they are deciding. So for instance if it’s medicine then the representatives need to be physicians and medical scientists, and previous heads of hospitals. If it’s dealing with the environment then the representatives need to be environmental scientists, civic engineers, and so on. Aka have the most informed people for that which you are trying to make decisions. Even better, have their policies reviewed by a body of their peers the same way scientific publishing works to get a measure on how good or bad their ideas are. Even better, test their ideas when they’ve been implemented to see if they’re actually working.
I wasn’t making a political point with the video, but your points are interesting.
I agree that, as far as I understand it right now, body-reviewed policies are the democracy we should have.
How about also requiring someone to have experience or a degree in a specific field to vote on specific issues? For example, I’ve been working in tech for a decade, I should be able to vote on technology policies, but not on medical policies.
That’s a fair additive although it can be difficult to define the boundaries. Particularly tech can have a far reaching influence and arguably global influence these days. If the scope of the policy is narrow then I can imagine that being functional, if the scope is potentially global then that may become an issue.
hm this name I heard before, this one I don’t know. I’ll just vote for the same person.
or not vote at all
The number of people who vote by the top name is higher than you expect.
Last name start with a B and your opponent’s last is a T… you’re getting a head start just because of that alone.
If I dont know any of the candidates, I vote against the declared republican by voting for the declared Democrat. If a republican is running unopposed, I write in Barack Obama. I was a swing voter before Donald Trump became president.
He could also run unopposed and just win by default
Fuck elections, these types of people require more immediate consequences.
Lots of recall campaigns have successfully been done. They have the benefit of being very public and attention grabbing by nature. That’s if more immediate ejection/dismissal mechanisms don’t exist on a panel/committee.
You’re operating under the assumption that these people haven’t already made the calculation that wherever bribe they received is worth their position.
So recalling them, or voting them out, after they’ve done what they were bribed/blackmailed to do, isn’t the threat, or check on power, that many here believe it to be.
Even if he lose he will be hired by flock, it works this ways sadly.
Meh. Flock isn’t big enough to hire every rando county commissioner that buys their garbage. This isn’t Lockheed hiring a retiring general or some K street group picking up a friendly senator.
And even if they do hire him, at least he’s not in a position supposedly representing anyone anymore.
He didn’t get the cameras, the sheriff did. They want them to pass an ordinance to block their use
No they won’t. Unfortunately
