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Woodstock Is About to Sign a Blank Check to a San Francisco AI Surveillance Company. Nobody Can Tell You What Year Two Costs.

  • Jul 26
  • 19 min read

On the night of Monday, July 27th, Woodstock City Council votes on a three year contract connecting our police department's records to a platform run by the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office and built by Peregrine Technologies, a San Francisco company valued at $6.8 billion.


The contract has no stated price for years two and three. The County sets it, with no cap and no Council vote. It renews itself automatically. It contains no retention limit, no audit requirement, and no deletion of our data if we quit.


Council approved the money in June as a budget line. The contract itself appears in the public record for the first time in Monday's packet.


Vote no on item 7.2.


First, how any of this actually works


Most people have never sat through a city council meeting, and city government uses words that normal people do not use. Here is the vocabulary. Skip it if you already know it.


The packet. Before every meeting the city publishes one PDF containing every item Council will vote on plus the supporting documents. Monday's is 227 pages. It is public, free, and posted days ahead. When we cite "packet page 19," that is a page you can open and read yourself. Almost nobody does, which is not a criticism of anyone. It is just how things pass without being noticed.


The consent agenda. Council does not discuss every item. Staff sort the agenda in advance and bundle routine items into one list called the consent agenda. Council approves the entire bundle in a single motion, usually in seconds, with no presentation and no questions.

The logic is sound. Nobody needs a debate about disposing of old laptops. The trouble is that once an item is in the bundle it is treated as routine whether it is or not.


A work session. Woodstock also holds work sessions, which are public meetings where Council discusses things before voting on them. That is the normal place for a significant item to get aired out.


IaaS. The contract uses this acronym throughout, including in the clause that sets the price. In the tech industry it normally means Infrastructure as a Service, which is renting computing power instead of buying your own servers. That is not what this is. The Sheriff's Office is using it to mean Intelligence as a Service. Woodstock is not renting server space. Woodstock is buying into an intelligence operation the County runs.


A budget is not a contract. These are two different votes, and understanding the difference is most of this article.


A budget says how much money a department may spend and roughly on what. It is permission. A contract is the actual legal agreement with the other party: what you get, what you pay, what each side must do, what happens when something goes wrong, and how you get out.


Think of buying a car. Deciding your household can afford $30,000 for a vehicle is the budget. Signing the loan paperwork is the contract. The paperwork is where the interest rate lives, and the late fees, and whether you can pay it off early, and what happens if you lose your job. Nobody sane says "well, we already decided we could afford a car" and then signs whatever the dealer slides across the desk without reading it.


Woodstock took the first vote in June. The second vote is Monday.


What a contract does not say, it does not control. This is the whole ballgame.


A contract exists so neither side has to rely on the other side's goodwill later. Everyone is friendly on signing day. The document is for the day somebody is not, or for the day the people who signed it have all moved on. If a contract does not say how long they keep your information, there is no answer to that question, and whoever holds the information decides. If it does not say who they can share it with, same thing. Not because anyone is a villain. Because nobody wrote it down, and you cannot enforce a rule that does not exist.


What the city produced


Item 7.2 runs from packet page 17 to 23. Page 17 is a cover sheet: date, submitter, item type, subject line, file name. Pages 18 through 23 are the contract itself, drafted for the County.


That is one page of Woodstock's own work. No summary of terms. No risk analysis. No privacy review. No legal opinion. No estimate of what it will cost the City to connect its own systems, even though the contract makes those costs Woodstock's alone.


Compare that to an item three slots down on the same consent agenda. A road closure for a beer festival in October went through the city's Special Event Review Committee, which reviewed it and attached written Conditions of Approval, all included in the packet.


A committee reviewed the street closure. The packet contains no record of any committee reviewing this.


In plain English: Closing three streets for a beer party got a review committee and a written set of conditions. Connecting the police department to an outside intelligence system got one cover sheet.




Five problems with the document


Every one of these is either in the text or missing from it. The simplest version: Council votes once, then the County sets the price for three years and Woodstock pays whatever it says.


One. It is on the consent agenda.


No presentation, no questions, no separate vote. Consent agendas are built to pass. No one is required to explain any individual item, because no one is expected to ask about one. Item 7.2 is scheduled to be voted on alongside surplus cell phones and a playground contract, and unless a council member stops it, not one word will be spoken about it in public.


If Council was briefed on these terms, it did not happen at a public meeting. Staff can brief council members individually, which is legal and routine, but it means residents never hear the questions or the answers. We reviewed the May 11 budget packet, the May 18 and June 8 meeting minutes, the July 20 work session minutes, and the full July 27 packet. Outside the contract itself and two budget bullets, we found no public discussion of this contract's terms anywhere.


Any single council member can pull an item out of the bundle and make it stand alone. It takes one sentence. One of them did exactly that seven weeks ago.


Two. It renews itself.


Section 3 gives it a one year term that automatically extends two more years unless Council takes action to stop it. So one vote Monday commits Woodstock through 2029.


An automatic renewal means the default answer is yes. If a future Council does nothing at all, it continues. Somebody has to notice the deadline and act to end it, which is precisely the kind of thing that gets missed in a city with a 227 page agenda packet.


Section 5 muddies even that, describing what happens "should the Parties wish to renew," which sounds like renewal requires both sides to agree. The contract does not say which clause wins. It also does not say what happens if Woodstock objects to year two's price.


Three. The price is not in the document.


Here is Section 5. Read the wording. After year one, "the annual reimbursement shall be determined by the County based on the total cost incurred for IaaS support. The reimbursement rate may be subject to change each year based on vendor pricing adjustments, expanded service features, or changes in user allocation." The County gives sixty days written notice.


To be fair to the County: that is a cost sharing formula, not the County naming any number it feels like. The amount is supposed to track what the program actually costs.


But look at what is missing. There is no maximum. There is no audit right, meaning Woodstock has no ability to inspect the County's books and check the math. There is no Council vote on the new number. And "expanded service features" means the County can add capabilities Woodstock never asked for and send us a share of the bill.


Notice also what the price is based on: "the total cost incurred for IaaS support." The contract never itemizes what is inside that number or how Woodstock's share of it gets calculated.


In plain English: Year two costs whatever the County calculates, using a formula nobody has shown us. They send the number, we pay it, and nobody in Woodstock gets a vote or a look at the arithmetic.


Four. Its protections guard the wrong thing.


Section 4 has two provisions that look like safeguards. It limits access to "authorized personnel of the City's police department," and it makes Woodstock users "subject to the same policies, training, and restrictions as County users."


Both are reasonable. Neither is what you might think. They govern how Woodstock officers behave. Nothing in this contract governs what happens to Woodstock's data.


That distinction is critical. You can have perfectly disciplined users and still have no rule about how long the information is kept, who else can see it, or whether it is ever deleted. That is the contract we have.


There is no retention schedule, so the default is forever. There is no notice requirement before Woodstock data goes to a third party. And there is no report to Council, ever.

Most importantly, there is no audit log requirement. An audit log is the record of who searched for what and when, reviewed by someone whose job it is to review it. It is the standard safeguard against misuse of a police records system, and in Cherokee County it is not a hypothetical.


In June, three Cherokee County sheriff's deputies were arrested and fired for running a license plate surveillance system against people for non law enforcement reasons. One of them looked up a co-worker. All three face a felony count of violating their oath of office. They were caught because the Sheriff's Real-Time Intelligence Division audited its own logs and acted on what it found, which most agencies never do. We wrote about it at the time and gave the Sheriff credit for it: https://www.ngacan.org/post/three-cherokee-deputies-one-surveillance-system-and-a-lot-of-unanswered-questions


That is the point. The audit is the only reason anyone knew. Woodstock is about to hand its records to that same intelligence operation under a contract that does not require an audit of anything, does not require anyone to tell Woodstock if our data is misused, and does not require a single report back to Council.


Cherokee's Real-Time Intelligence Division chose to audit itself. Good. But a contract is not supposed to depend on whoever is running the shop choosing well. Put it in writing. One more thing. The County can revise those policies without Woodstock's agreement, so the standard we are signing up to is whatever the County decides it is later. Council should ask to see the current version before voting. If staff can produce it Monday, no harm done.


Five. Leaving does not get the data back.


Section 3 lets either side end the agreement with fifteen days written notice, which is genuinely useful and Council should protect it. But nothing requires the County or the vendor to delete or return Woodstock's data when we go.


In plain English: We can cancel the subscription. We cannot take back any surveillance data that we already handed over.


One more thing worth a council member's question. The attachment is titled "IGA City of Woodstock - DRAFT Updated.pdf." Presenting an unsigned agreement is normal, so that alone is not a problem. But "Updated" implies revisions, and nothing in the packet establishes that Cherokee County has agreed to this exact text. Council should confirm it is approving the version the other side signed off on.


What the system actually does


Section 1, packet page 19, describes it in the County's own words: intelligence analysis, digital forensics, crime analysis, and real time information from the Real Time Intelligence Center, consolidating criminal records, digital forensics, surveillance footage, social media, and open source intelligence. It states the system can identify patterns, predict criminal activities, and uncover connections between individuals and events.


Section 4 is what Woodstock gives up: the City "agrees to connect City's Report Management System data to the Peregrine system maintained by the County."


What that means in practice. A police records management system is the department's central file. Incident reports. Calls for service. Arrest records. And the names, addresses, phone numbers, and details of everyone involved in any of it, which is not only people who got arrested. It is victims. Witnesses. People who called 911. People questioned and released. People whose names somebody else gave, who were never charged with anything.

If you have ever filed a police report in Woodstock, you are in that system. If you witnessed a wreck, you are in it. If a neighbor gave your name during a dispute, you are in it. Being in a police records system is not evidence that you did anything.


"Open source intelligence" is the trade term for information gathered from public sources: social media posts, websites, public records, news. Nothing about it is secret. That is the point of the name. What makes it different from you Googling somebody is scale, automation, and the fact that a government agency is doing it and keeping the results.


The vendor is Peregrine Technologies, founded by Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph, both formerly of Palantir. On June 22, 2026 it announced a $250 million Series D at a $6.8 billion valuation, roughly triple its valuation fifteen months earlier, serving more than 400 agencies. See https://peregrine.io/resources/peregrine-technologies-raises-250-million-series-d-at-68-billion-valuation and https://fortune.com/2026/06/22/exclusive-peregrine-nick-noone-ai-public-safety-palantir-2026-world-cup-just-sequoia-capital/


An investor research report at https://research.contrary.com/company/peregrine states Noone's Palantir role was head of US Special Operations, using intelligence datasets in the Middle East to help identify ISIS members in Syria. CB Insights classifies the company in the crime prediction and forecasting software market: https://www.cbinsights.com/company/peregrine-1


The County's system is not a two party system. Peregrine's own case study on the Cherokee Sheriff's Office says it integrated the Sheriff's records, jail management, and jail visitation systems with Georgia Department of Corrections data, plus data from participating partner agencies, naming the Cartersville Police Department and MARTA Police Department: https://peregrine.io/resources/cherokee-sheriff-s-office-integrated-jail-management-for-data-driven-decisions


We are not claiming those agencies would see Woodstock's records. The contract does not say either way, which is the point. Woodstock would be feeding data into a platform that already pools records from outside agencies, under an agreement that says nothing about who can see what.


The company's marketing promotes universal search across partnering agencies' systems and sharing data with all involved agencies in minutes at no additional cost: https://peregrine.io/resources/interagency-collaboration-made-easy


Peregrine also states it makes government data searchable without collecting or owning that data. That is their position and it belongs on the record. It also sharpens the question this contract never answers: if the vendor does not own the data, who does, for how long, and under what rules?


What Council was told in May


Woodstock funded this in public, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Finance presented the FY 2027 budget on May 11 as item 5.2. Public hearings were held May 18 and June 8. Council adopted it 5 to 0 on June 8, with Council Member Rob Usher absent. It took effect July 1.


So we read the May 11 presentation. All 208 pages. The Real Time Intelligence Center appears exactly twice, as a single bullet each time.


Page 14, under "Budget Committee Suggestions and Assumptions":

Sequoyah Regional Library System (SRLS) contribution $10,000 County Economic Development contribution $20,000 Cherokee Co Sheriff's Office (CCSO) Real-Time Intelligence Center (RTIC) participation $75,000

Page 30, under "General Fund Overview," the same three items in the same order.

That is the entire record. Both times it sits in a list of contributions, directly after a library donation.


Those two bullets do not name the vendor. They do not say Woodstock's police records get connected to it, that the system ingests social media, that the County's own language says it predicts crime, that the term auto renews, that the County sets the year two price, or that there is no retention limit and no deletion clause.


In plain English: Council was told it was chipping in $75,000 to a county program, using the same word as the library donation: contribution. It was not told it was signing a three year data contract with a $6.8 billion company at a price the County calculates.

Approving money is not approving terms. That second vote is Monday.


Somebody noticed. Nothing happened.


At the May 18 hearing, the Clerk recorded no speakers. At the June 8 hearing, one person signed up. From the minutes, item 8.2:

City Clerk Robyn Adams stated Thomas Weaver signed up to speak in favor. Mr. Weaver stated he had a concern relating to the allocation for the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office real time information center, however, his concern was not related to the budget but a policy so he will address at a separate time with City Management, Mayor, and Council.

We don’t know Mr. Weaver and we do not speak for him. He supported the budget. But he identified the exact problem before anyone else: the dollar amount was a budget question, the program was a policy question, and a budget vote was the wrong place to settle it.

He was right. We have found no record of that conversation in any public meeting we reviewed. And now the policy is on consent.


If that conversation happened, residents should see it. If it did not, Council should ask why.


Legal Isn't the Same as Honest

Everything in this article was public.


The budget presentation was public. The hearings were noticed and held. The minutes were posted. The agenda packet went up days in advance, free, online, exactly as required. No law was broken. If the city responds to this article, that is almost certainly what it will say, and it will be true.


It's also beside the point.


Here's what "public" meant in practice. A $75,000 commitment to an intelligence platform appeared as one bullet on slide 5 of a 208 page budget presentation, positioned directly beneath a library donation and described with the same word: contribution. It appeared once more on slide 21, in the same list, in the same order. The vendor was never named. What the system does was never described. Two months later the actual contract surfaced on page 18 of a 227 page packet, with a single page of city explanation, in a bundle of items designed to pass in one motion without discussion.


To catch this, a Woodstock resident would have needed to read a 208 page slide deck in May, notice a single line item, understand that "participation in the Real Time Intelligence Center" meant connecting police records to a commercial data platform, know that the money vote and the terms vote were separate, wait ten weeks, download a 227 page packet, find page 18, and read a six page intergovernmental agreement closely enough to notice what was missing from it.


Disclosure is not the same as telling people. A document nobody can reasonably be expected to find, written in language that does not describe what the thing is, does not inform anyone. It only creates a record that can be pointed at later.


This is also not the first surveillance purchase to move through Woodstock this summer. In June, Council took up a roughly $94,000, thirty six month contract for in car cameras and continuous GPS tracking across forty police vehicles, bought through a cooperative purchasing agreement that skips separate competitive bidding. We asked then who could access that footage, how long it was kept, and whether any of it could be queried by outside agencies. Those questions were never answered in public, and they are the same questions this contract does not answer now.


And residents should not have to work this hard. You should not have to attend every council meeting to know whether your police department is joining a surveillance platform. You should not have to read every line of every budget slide to keep track of what your government is building. Most people have jobs. Most people have kids. The entire reason we elect six council members and hire a city staff is so that ordinary people do not have to audit their government line by line in order to be governed with their consent. Right now the process treats a surveillance data contract exactly like a playground renovation, and nothing in it distinguishes the two.


That is fixable, and Council can fix it Monday. Anything that expands what a government can see about the people it governs should be named as what it is, presented in public, and voted on by itself. Not bundled. Not summarized as a contribution. Not left to whoever happens to read page 18.


If Council will not vote no on 7.2, it should at least stop doing it this way.


A question worth asking


On June 8, the same night it adopted the budget, Council approved consent item 7.6: reclassifying Woodstock PD's vacant Crime and Intel Analyst position, Grade 108, to Evidence Custodian, Grade 104.


Plain translation: the police department had a job for a person who analyzes crime data. It was empty. The city converted that position into a different job, at a lower pay grade, that handles physical evidence instead.


We aren’t claiming those two things are connected; we don’t know. But a council member is entitled to an answer before voting: is Woodstock replacing in house crime analysis with an outsourced county service? If so, Council should see that comparison, because it has never been presented as one, and an analyst on staff answers to Woodstock in a way a county subscription does not.


What is happening with this software elsewhere


Florida created a State Board of Immigration Enforcement, made up of Governor Ron DeSantis, Attorney General James Uthmeier, CFO Blaise Ingoglia, and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, to distribute a $250 million fund for local agencies assisting federal immigration officials.


On June 9, 2026, that board approved more than $87 million in grants to 56 agencies. Peregrine's share was $14.6 million, the third largest category. See https://www.wlrn.org/government-politics/2026-06-09/radios-ai-cameras-desantis-cabinet-approve-87-million-in-immigration-grants


Wire reporting found more than two dozen Florida agencies received grants specifically to buy Peregrine, and that budget language steered at least $6 million more to the company: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/florida-enters-era-ai-policing-201600497.html



Now the careful part, because this is where people overreach, and we are NOT overreaching. This is Florida, not Georgia. Different program, different money, different state. Nothing here establishes how Cherokee County uses its installation.


But it does establish one thing. This platform is not a neutral filing cabinet. In another state, right now, it is being bought in bulk with money appropriated specifically for immigration enforcement.


The question the contract refuses to answer


The agreement says nothing about immigration enforcement. It does not mention ICE or federal agencies at all. It does not limit what Woodstock data may be used for or who the County may share it with. The silence is the problem.


Georgia HB 1105, signed May 1, 2024, requires local and state law enforcement to identify, arrest, and detain undocumented persons, and to notify federal officials and, when able, transport people to immigration detention. Failure can trigger cuts to state administered federal aid, and officials who violate it can be convicted of misdemeanors. See https://georgiarecorder.com/2024/05/01/kemp-signs-bill-into-law-forcing-sheriffs-to-enforce-federal-immigration-law/ and https://www.gpb.org/news/2025/02/07/rules-of-collaboration-are-emerging-between-ice-and-georgias-keepers-of-the-peace


In fairness, that second source, from February 2025, found fears of local roundups replacing ICE appeared unfounded then, and that the agreements reviewed were limited to jail based screening. That is true and we include it. It is also eighteen months old in a fast moving area.

Georgia law already pushes toward cooperation, so Section 4's promise to follow applicable law points that direction, not away from it. The point is: any limit on how our residents' information is used has to be written into this contract.


In plain English: The contract does not say ICE gets your information. It also does not say ICE does not. It says nothing, which means the answer is whatever the Sheriff's Office decides later, and Woodstock gets no vote. We are not claiming ICE will get this data. Council does not know either. You cannot control something you never wrote down.


Check current formal ICE partnerships at https://www.ice.gov/identify-and-arrest/287g


Your wallet, your freedom, your safety


Wallet. Year one is $75,000, which Council approved. Years two and three are calculated by the County alone, with no ceiling, no audit right, and no Council vote. Section 4 also makes Woodstock responsible for the technology work to connect our systems, at the City's "sole cost," and that figure appears in neither packet. The slide said $75,000. It did not say "per year, at a number the County calculates and we cannot verify, plus our own costs nobody has estimated." That money comes from the same pot as roads, parks, and police salaries.


Freedom. Section 1 ingests social media and open source information with no limit on whose, and no carve out for constitutionally protected activity. Nothing stops Woodstock data from being analyzed alongside information about people who protest, sign petitions, speak at council meetings, or organize against a rezoning. Nothing says it gets deleted. Nothing says anyone will ever check. You do not have to be doing anything wrong. You only have to be in the data, and once you are, this contract gives Woodstock no authority to pull you out.


Safety. Police solve crimes because people talk to them: witnesses, domestic violence victims, parents of missing children, workers reporting unsafe job sites. Every one of those calls requires believing that contacting Woodstock police will not endanger your household. Our own organizing this summer has been shaped by federal immigration operations in this county, and that trust is already thin. If people stop calling 911, criminals get away with more. Your street gets less safe, whatever your politics. The people who pay for that are Woodstock officers trying to solve crimes with nobody willing to talk.


What we are asking, and how easy it is


Vote no on item 7.2. Council approved a bullet point, not a contract. A resident flagged the policy question and no public conversation followed. The price for years two and three is not in the document, and the data protections do not exist. A city does not sign a contract in that condition.


If any council member is not prepared to vote no, then at minimum: pull item 7.2 from consent so it is discussed and voted on by itself.


This is routine. At the June 8 meeting, Council Member Brian Wolfe stated he would like item 7.9 considered separately. Council approved the rest of the block in one motion, then voted 7.9 on its own. It took one sentence.


In plain English: Any council member can do this. One of them did it seven weeks ago. It costs nothing, commits nobody to a position, and it is the difference between a decision made in public and one made in silence.


If Council wants a version it can defend, the path is ordinary: bring back a contract with a stated price and written data protections, and let residents see it first.


How to act


Monday, July 27, 2026 at 7:00 PM. The Chambers at City Center, 8534 Main Street.


Public Comment is item 6. Consent is item 7. Public comment comes first, which means residents speak before the vote. Sign up with City Clerk Robyn Adams when you arrive, and ask how long you have.


One point is enough:

"This contract has no stated price for year two, no limit on how long our residents' data is kept, and no rule about who else can see it. In June a resident told you the policy needed its own conversation. It never happened in public. Please vote no on 7.2, or at minimum pull it, the way 7.9 was pulled on June 8."

If you want to put it back on them, ask this:

"When was each of you briefed on this contract, by whom, and why did it never come to a work session?"


Voicemail: (770) 592-6000, extension 1003


The item is listed under City Manager Jeff Moon and submitted by Cassandra Henry of Administration. The May 11 budget presentation was given by Deputy Chief Financial Officer Crystal Welch.


Anyone can request these documents. Georgia's open records law lets any resident ask the City or the County for the Peregrine vendor contract, the Intelligence Division and RTIC policies referenced in Section 4, the City's projected cost to connect its systems, and any communication between the City and Mr. Weaver after June 8. You do not need to give a reason. Small requests are usually free; larger ones can carry a fee for staff time.



Local government moves fastest when nobody is watching. Monday night is a good night to watch.


Sources


Every claim about the contract comes from Woodstock's July 27, 2026 agenda packet. Every claim about what Council was told comes from the May 11, 2026 packet, item 5.2, pages 14 and 30. Every claim about the budget hearings comes from the City's official May 18 and June 8, 2026 minutes. Council names, wards, and emails come from the city's elected officials page. All city documents are public through the meeting portal below. Agendas change, so check the current one before the meeting. If we get something wrong, tell us and we will correct it publicly.




Woodstock public meeting portal, including the May 11 budget presentation and the May 18 and June 8 minutes: https://woodstockga.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=1






City announcement of FY27 budget adoption: https://www.woodstockga.gov/news_detail_T15_R351.php






Contrary Research report on Peregrine: https://research.contrary.com/company/peregrine



WLRN on Florida immigration enforcement grants including $14.6 million for Peregrine: https://www.wlrn.org/government-politics/2026-06-09/radios-ai-cameras-desantis-cabinet-approve-87-million-in-immigration-grants






ICE 287(g) participating agencies: https://www.ice.gov/identify-and-arrest/287g

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