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.

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.

This is not all they have to say, either. Their blog: https://deadeclipse666.blogspot.com/

As LBJ once noted of a detractor, “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

The slop company should have just paid them.

Bernadette Banner also has many videos on doing this with simple hand sewing

I was looking for historical costume project information once on YT and saw her channel. Very interesting. It’s worth noting that the hand-sewn historical garments she was copying, hundreds of years old already, are often worn, even well worn, and where there are defects it’s because the material itself failed before the seams did.

One time I had to sew up the entire side seam of a dress shirt with needle and thread, there was no one around with a sewing machine to do it for me and I needed that shirt, so I did it myself. I drew a line and used a backstitch with the smallest spacing I could manage. It took a couple hours maybe. When I got done with it, it looked and felt indestructible. Couldn’t even tell it had been resewn from the outside.

But I can’t take credit for just knowing how. Long, long ago when I was a kid, everyone had to take Home Ec at some point in their schooling; for me it was junior high iirc. It was a required subject. Everyone I went to school with knew how to turn on a stove, follow a recipe, use an iron, sew a simple project like a potholder, that kind of thing. All of it was useful, but hand sewing especially is an incredibly handy skill to have. I honestly thought it was stupid at the time – “For what purpose could I possibly need a potholder?” – but I can’t count the number of times I have used that skill since.

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Didn’t read the article and don’t know how state government works?

Pritzker called on state lawmakers this year to suspend incentives for two years while they hammer out a comprehensive review of the impact centers are having on communities.

Pritzker is making the move after lawmakers did not act. The governor cannot unilaterally halt the program, but the executive branch does wield some control over processing applications, according to his office.

He recently did an interview with Heather Cox Richardson that lays his ideas out pretty clearly. He’s an interesting guy, and they talk a lot about what he’s already done and how and why, not about what he’s going to do. Which is to say it’s not the usual load of jam tomorrow political bullshit because he’s already done what he talked about doing. Listen (or read the transcript) for yourself.

For myself, I don’t want another fucking billionaire in power. But if it’s Pritzker I would make an exception, because while he’s not perfect he’s demonstrably worked (and is still working) very hard for his state and its people in the ways that matter right now. I am sure there are things he could do better or more of, but he’s doing a lot of things right, especially when it comes to building Illinois’ economy and protecting individual rights.

He’s also trying to make it as difficult as possible for the orange hitler to fuck with Illinois, and right now that’s a huge plus in my eyes, as it speaks to character: does a politician actually see all citizens as equal, and immigrants deserving of all their rights under the law in this country? Pritzker does, which is admittedly a low bar in itself but jesus fuck do some people currently in power manage to limbo under it these days. Or I could just say, “He’s not a fascist,” but it’s the same thing. Ten years ago I’d have laughed; today it’s at the top of my list of necessary qualifications for public office.

Or to put it another way, we regular Americans have never been so hated by those in power as we are right now, especially in the midwest and southeast: take a look at some of those governors and senators and appointees and tell me they don’t fucking loathe their own voter base. Pritzker is genuinely not among those that hate their own constituents: he seems to love Illinois and its people and it’s been working out well for Illinois.

Truth. I had a friend who worked at MS (not in Redmond) back in the early 90s post-IPO when Ballmer was CEO, and when most of the people working there were temps so MS could avoid the legal repercussions of the toxic workplace culture they’d built (harassment lawsuits) and get around paying benefits or overtime, and even then Ballmer was the most personally repugnant trailer trash CEO imaginable. People put up with it because it was Microsoft and endless fountains of cash, but he was an even worse CEO than he was a human being, and that’s quite a low bar to limbo under but he managed.

The location is known, and I seem to remember it being fairly simple to view the contents in the right system viewer with a bit of work, so yeah. I never considered that but you’re quite right: MS is packaging that shit up all nice and handy for whoever can grab it by whatever means.

Fair enough. Thanks for the feedback.

The statement you quoted is itself a lie. It talks about snapshots, when that’s not at all what Recall is about. It takes snapshots, true. But it does not matter to MS whether the snapshots themselves are saved, or where. “Recall does not share snapshots or associated data” is a reference solely to the snapshot itself, not the data Recall creates from it.

Here’s what really happens. Once a snapshot is taken, it is analyzed with AI as well as converted into text (if text is present) and all that content (including passwords, banking details, medical records, whatever passes the desktop when a snapshot is taken) plus its local AI analysis is kept in a local database. That shrinks its size to almost nothing, making it much easier for MS to collect. This secretive local database itself is inaccessible to you (even as admin), one you have zero rights to control or delete or edit or even view, one over which you are never given any permissions, and at regular intervals that database is scraped and sent back to MS to use in data aggregation and resale and AI training and whatever the fuck else they want to do with it. Sure, you can turn off Recall in the AI settings, but it has now been proven that any Windows update just turns it all back on again.

Knowing this, go back and reread their statement in regard to snapshots. The entire thing is a misdirection and never once addresses the real payload of Recall and why MS, even after they pinky swore they had dropped it, they continued partnering with hardware makers to deliver “Recall-ready” PCs that already have the requisite NPU on the motherboard, which are needed to do all that local data OCR and analysis on the snapshots that don’t even matter to MS once they’ve been scraped for content.

No. The common denominator between the average CEO and the average sexual offender is an all-encompassing sense of entitlement: I should have what I want, and you need to give it to me, and if I have to wrest it from you in ways that are harmful to you, well that’s okay too. And it’s not just those two groups, it’s anyone who regularly relies on coercion and abuse to get what they want, right down to what happens in the home where domestic violence is the problem.

As our president himself has proven beyond all doubt, in countless acts of power combined with the sexual misuse of others, from children to E. Jean Carroll, the jump from CEO to sexual offender is really NOT the impossible intellectual leap you seem to think it is, nor is it unfitting in this context.

That is extremely cool, thank you.

Thanks. It’s good to hear.

Truth. And AOC is the best of them. But that doesn’t let Trump’s little MAGA culture warrior off the hook. This is the Laken Riley Act guy.

If I were in Georgia’s 10th and had a mind to run, I’d wipe the floor with commercials showing AOC representing the 10ths need for clean water and physically holding up that jar of muddy water in Congress on their behalf, interspersed with shots of Collins’ own social media and deepfaked AI ads against Jon Ossoff illustrating what he’s really been busy with, and asking why he’s nowhere around when they simply need clean water.

That actually had me wondering. This is about Georgia. AOC is a gem, but why is it a NY rep bringing this to the EPA and not that town’s own congressional rep?

So I looked it up in the article, which never names the town nor its congressional representative but refers to Morgan County, Georgia multiple times. (The author goes out of their way to talk around various glaring facts; this is one of them.) So I looked up Morgan County, Georgia, which is in Georgia’s 10th congressional district, and is currently represented by Republican Mike Collins.

And there it is. Mike Collins is himself the answer as to why it’s AOC, a congresswoman from New York, holding up a jar of muddy water in Congress on behalf of the citizens of rural Georgia that he was elected to represent.

Oh, they’re being nice when they use the phrase “crashing out” to describe what this dude actually wrote. I was curious so I followed the link in 404media out to the local paper, and was not disappointed.

From the local newspaper, this is the actual text of the manifesto statement the aforementioned crashed-out Texas town councilmember released after getting his contract with Flock shot down by “a standing-room-only crowd of residents voicing concerns about privacy, transparency and government overreach tied to the planned camera system.” The bold is his own:

The Bandera Declaration of Digital Independence

To the Citizens of Bandera:

For months, I have listened to the outcry regarding License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology. I have seen the eyerolls, and I’ve even been met with “Nazi rhetoric”, the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism. Comparing a neighbor’s desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges; it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.

I’ve also read the social media comments suggesting that if I want a camera, I should “put one on my own house.”

Funny thing is, I did. And that camera caught a gang of criminals from San Antonio who drove into our town in a stolen car to break into mine. My private camera caught them after the crime was done. But if we had LPR readers at our city limits, that stolen car would have been flagged the moment it entered Bandera, likely before those criminals ever reached my driveway, or yours.

I now understand your concerns and I secede. Your outcry is just too logical to ignore. Since the Council has decided we are the “Free State of Bandera”, a place where the ‘rights’ of a car thief or human trafficker to remain anonymous apparently outweigh the right of a resident to protect their property and the safety of their family, then we must go all the way.

To ensure our historic County Seat becomes the most “traditional” sanctuary in Texas, I have requested the following for the next City Council agenda:

• A Modest Proposal for Digital Device Prohibition: A total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we are to be truly “private,” we must leave our smartphones at the city line.

• A Modest Proposal for Total Surveillance Abolition (Residential & Commercial): A total ban on all outward-facing cameras, including residential doorbells and all commercial CCTV or security camera technology. If municipal safety cameras are “invasive,” then no business or homeowner should be allowed to “monitor” the public. We will remove every lens in town.

• A Modest Proposal for Total Municipal and Commercial Decommissioning: A total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping. We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only.

The Fiscal Reality of “Freedom”: This decision didn’t just cost us our safety; it cost us our wallets. By canceling this project, the Council didn’t just throw away a state grant (free money); they spent $15,000 of your local tax dollars out of pocket to back out of the deal. Bragging about fiscal responsibility while paying $15,000 for nothing is a very bad deal for Bandera.

A History Lesson: In the 1880s, privacy in this County Seat was non-existent. When a stranger rode into Bandera, the Marshal gave them an interview, not “space.” The livery stable registered their horse’s brand, and the merchants watched their every move. Anonymity was for outlaws; accountability was for citizens.

I even reached out to the Trump camp regarding our “Free State” logic and the way we’re treating our Marshal’s office and the safety of our community. The response was classic:

“Our police are being treated very, very unfairly. It’s a total disaster. We give them the tools, we get them the grants—and I love grants, we have the best grants, nobody gets grants like we do—and then these ‘eye-rollers’ say no? It’s unbelievable. They want the criminals to have the best technology, the newest technology, but they want our great police to have nothing. They want a ‘Free State’ for the bad guys. It’s very sad.”

Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy. If LPRs are “unconstitutional” and invade our right to “public” privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the “Privacy First” crowd showing up to support these bans….just remember to leave your phones at home.

Jeff Flowers
Bandera, TX

Besides threatening all and sundry with a good time banning all communication technology, he also throws in gems like, “I now understand your concerns and I secede” (paragraph 4). Oh, if only. He “even reached out to the Trump camp” for logic (para 11) while making a claim to “Free State” in the same breath, lol.

I don’t guess anyone has the heart to tell Jeff that people pissed off enough to crowd town council meetings to standing room only are also the ones pissed off enough to start recalls and to vote, that a single vote in a local election goes many miles farther than a single vote anywhere else, and that no matter how many florid letters of support Jeff gets from a staffer trying hard to sound like the lunatic-in-chief, “the Trump camp” is not gonna spend a dime on saving a town council seat that is currently occupied by a manifesto-writing lunatic that is busily earning his town’s contempt.

No, you’re quite right. To be fair, from slavery to robber barons, I don’t think we have ever been free of corruption. But now we’re speedrunning into the level of corruption of having to bring extra cash for the bribes when renewing a drivers license.

Well, you have the actual, physical cost of the datacenter – the land, the design, the engineers, the permits, the environmental studies, the lawyers, the construction, etc – and then you have the cost of removing roadblocks along the way. Especially in Louisiana, if you’re not familiar with Huey Long: he’s been gone for many decades, but his way of doing business down there hasn’t changed a bit.

It’s exactly like the East Wing ballroom: there’s a private fund that Trump opened specifically for businessmen to contribute that will fund the ballroom construction, which has been open and taking donations since he tore the East Wing down, and there’s also the bill before Congress, right now, that will have the ballroom paid for by tax dollars, all of it.

“But,” you may ask, and rightly so, “why are private contributions needed to fund a ballroom that will be funded entirely by taxes?” and the answer to that is, “Yes.”

One of the sure signs you’re in a banana republic is that every palm must be greased on the way to getting legal consent for anything, no matter how small. The US is now no different.

I already assume that everything that goes into a cloud somewhere WILL be used for other purposes, at the very least as AI training material, and this will be no different. And the plan is for at least some (possibly all?) video to automatically be extracted to some kind of cloud storage, no matter how temporarily. From the article:

The AirPods will have a “small” LED light to indicate when “visual data is being fed into the cloud.”

That’s a hell of a non-answer to all the privacy concerns Apple already knows the public has. Since this entire article is itself just a manufacturer-friendly puff piece for pre-release promotion, the only conclusion I can draw is that Apple is willfully holding back the specifics on all of that.

And again with the fucking notification light, like that’s the solution to all privacy concerns. On AirPods a light can’t possibly be more than a pinhole itself, just because of the size of the device, so that’ll be even worse than Meta’s joke of a notification light.