“It seems like data centers and Flock cameras are the only things we can agree on,” said Taylor Nicks, 48, who was troubled to learn that the recording device outside his Asheville coffee shop had been installed without local input. Laura J. Nelson and Kris Maher’s front-page story in Friday’s Journal is about the strangest political alliance of the year, and it is worth reading for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.
In the liberal Blue Ridge city of Asheville, North Carolina, progressives feared the administration could use the cameras to surveil political dissidents, transgender residents and undocumented immigrants. Ninety-five miles south, in deep-red Oconee County, South Carolina, Republicans saw the same AI-enabled license-plate readers as a threat to constitutional privacy rights, and read from the Federalist Papers aloud at public meetings.
Days apart, both communities voted to stop using them.
How the coalition formed
“Government has got to be restrained,” said Matthew Durham, chair of the all-Republican Oconee County Council and a nuclear-reactor operator by trade. “It’s a 90-10 issue.” Kim Roney, a progressive member of the Asheville city council, offered the mirror image: “Appalachian people don’t trust the government for a lot of reasons.”
The Asheville cameras went up in February 2025 without a council vote. They surfaced publicly in April at a gathering called Nerd Nite, where a hacker known as Colonel Panic described governments “perfecting the art of watching you.” A summer of organizing followed — abortion-access activists, hackers and public-records experts in an encrypted chat. The council voted 5-2 to end the contract; the two dissenters, its two Black members, said their constituents in public housing worry about crime.
In Oconee County, a Republican party leader began filing public-records requests from a home office, sitting next to a copy of the Constitution and a teddy bear in a Trump T-shirt. She learned the sheriff’s department had suspended an officer for a day in 2022 for using Flock to investigate colleagues. She allied with a retired computer programmer and a Democrat who had mapped 25 cameras in the county. Clemson students held signs reading “Make Orwell Fiction Again.” The measure passed. The next day the council chair began unplugging cameras and putting plastic bags over them.
The case on the other side
It deserves stating fairly. Asheville police credit Flock with helping recover hundreds of stolen vehicles, find children abducted by relatives, and advance investigations including one after a July Fourth weekend shooting. Chief executive Garrett Langley has acknowledged the criticism, says the company continues to grow, and notes Flock recently added safeguards to prevent misuse.
And there is a concrete harm on the record too: an Asheville resident told the council that law enforcement in the Atlanta area held his husband at gunpoint after a plate reader flagged the Lyft he was riding in.
Our read
The financial version of this story is not about cameras. It is about the same underlying fact — that a great deal of information about a household is being collected by parties the household never chose, and stored in databases searchable by people it will never meet.
The one thing that translates directly is the credit freeze, and it is the single highest-value fifteen minutes in personal finance. It is free at all three bureaus, it takes about five minutes each online, and it can be lifted temporarily when you actually need credit. It does not stop data from being collected; it stops the most common way collected data becomes money out of your account. Elder-fraud losses are still rising and the median victim in these cases is the person least likely to have done this.
Two smaller items in the same spirit. Check whether your mobile carrier and your car’s connected-services account are selling location and driving data — several have, by default, and the opt-out is usually buried two menus deep. And be aware that the “heat map” capability described in this story, showing where a vehicle has been over time, is the same class of information an insurer would very much like to price on.
“This is just the very beginning,” one of the Oconee organizers said outside the courthouse. On that, at least, everybody seems to agree.