Technology

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.