The big picture
What a few cameras can see in a small county
Published
A rural county has a handful of roads in and out. Put a camera on each one and the result is a ledger: when you left town, how often, and in which direction. The ledger holds the trip to the clinic, the trip to church, and the trip to a friend’s house. Where it lives, how long it is kept, and who can search it are set by contracts and retention policies. Whether your county’s versions were ever publicly debated is knowable. Agendas and minutes are public records, and reading them is exactly what this site does.
The historical limit on mass surveillance was manpower: someone had to watch. That limit is gone. Analysis is automated now, and the infrastructure gets cheaper every year. The time to decide what your county collects is before the ledger is comprehensive, not after.
Why counties
Big cities may be past the point of counting cameras. A county is not. At county scale a person can still know every device, read every contract, and attend every meeting where these decisions get made. County government is also close enough to answer its residents.
This is not a partisan project. Not wanting your daily movements in a searchable database may be the one thing everyone in a small county can agree on. The frame is transparency and informed consent: what is operating, who approved it, what it cost, and what the record does and does not show.
Every page on this site follows the same rules. Every fact names its source and the date we checked it. Community-reported and verified are labeled separately and never merged in a count. Unknown renders as unknown, never as zero. The methodology page spells the rules out in full.