The administrator’s name was the former board president, a man who had resigned in 2021 and moved out of the community the following year. I asked the management company why his name was attached to an account that was still active, and the woman said it was probably a legacy account that had never been removed. I asked whether legacy accounts could still view the gate camera, and she said she would have to check. She called me back an hour later and said yes, the account had full access to the camera system, including plate searches and historical footage. I asked her how often it had been used. She said the system didn’t keep a complete audit history, but she could see searches going back to 2020. Then she said something that made me ask her to stop talking and send me the records instead. The account had searched my neighbor’s plate thirty-seven times before the violation letter was ever issued.
I requested the complete access history for every account on the list, and the management company initially said they only kept thirty days. My lawyer pointed out that their own system had produced four months of gate data for the violation, so they clearly had records beyond that period. A week later they sent me a spreadsheet with thousands of entries. Five board members had normal access. The management accounts were normal. Then there was the old administrator account, and its activity was different. It wasn’t just checking plates connected to violations. It was searching specific residents, sometimes dozens of times in a single week. The same four residents appeared over and over, including the woman who had filed sixty-one complaints and two people who had publicly disagreed with the board about dues. I compared the searches with the complaint dates, and almost every complaint came within days of a plate search. Then I noticed something else: the account had been used after the former president moved away, and every late-night login came from the same IP address.
The management company said they couldn’t tell me whose internet connection it was, but my lawyer subpoenaed the records from the provider. The address wasn’t the former president’s new house. It wasn’t the management office either. It was a small office suite in town that had been rented by a private investigator. I asked why a private investigator would have access to our neighborhood gate cameras, and nobody on the board had an answer. Then the investigator’s invoice appeared in the association’s accounting records. There had been monthly payments to him since 2020, all categorized as “security consulting,” even though the association had never disclosed hiring a private investigator. I asked for the contract. The board president said there wasn’t one. My lawyer found one anyway, attached to an old email from the former president. It authorized the investigator to monitor “specific residents of concern,” and the first name on the list was my neighbor — but the second name was mine.
