Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

DeSantis Orders State Agencies To Pull Down Flock Surveillance Cameras From Florida Rights-Of-Way

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday announced that state agencies are removing Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader cameras from state rights-of-way, stepping up his campaign to curb what he called an out-of-control surveillance system spreading throughout the Sunshine State.

“Pull ’em down,” DeSantis told reporters at the press conference following his announcement, noting that all of the Flock Safety cameras on state rights-of-way will be removed by state agencies. The governor said that the cameras, which are used by various state agencies, are being removed following his remarks at Florida International University in Miami earlier in the week regarding the Flock Safety cameras and their use as a mass criminal surveillance system with little to no oversight.

Locally, surveillance on roads across South Florida has been the focus of Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers installed by participating state, county and municipal law enforcement agencies. In this region, state troopers used the system to support the federal immigration sweeps of Operation Tidal Wave. Statewide, Reason magazine reported that more than a third of those arrested had no prior criminal history. 404 Media first reported last spring that Florida wildlife officers were accessing the system using the accounts of other law enforcement agencies, including to run immigration related queries, totaling 38 such looks in a single month, without Flock Safety contracts of their own.

Most Flock Safety cameras are owned by thousands of local police and sheriff’s departments, but DeSantis is asking for an accounting of all the cameras that state agencies have and how they are using them. The governor said he is also looking at New Hampshire’s approach to limiting the placement of such cameras on state property as a model for Florida legislation.

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Texas Governor Orders Halt to State Funding of Flock Cameras

Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered all state agencies to stop funding local law enforcement Flock camera purchases and operations. The move comes shortly after the Texas Tribune announced an investigation into $30 million provided to local police departments for Flock cameras.

The order from the Texas governor came Thursday, shortly after an investigation published by the Texas Tribune came online. The investigation revealed that the State of Texas added a $1 fee to car insurance policies. That money was then distributed to local law enforcement agencies to help reduce catalytic converter thefts.

Texas funding led to the purchase of about 2,000 Flock Cameras by the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Board, the Tribune reported. The State funded an additional $15.9 million to Texas DPS to purchase an additional 1,200 cameras.

Abbott’s Communications Director, Andrew Mahaleris, told the Tribune, “To the extent that cities get any funding for those cameras, most of it comes from the federal government. To the extent any funding comes from Texas agencies, those agencies are clarifying that those funds cannot be used for Flock cameras.”

Despite their success in solving many crimes, including the kidnapping of children, the surveillance camera systems have come under massive scrutiny after concerns of abuse of civil liberties arose.

The Tribune reported that the number of Flock cameras purchased by the insurance policy fee may be on the low side, as they had difficulty obtaining complete information from agencies.

Many Texas legislators expressed concern about the excessive use of electronic surveillance through the AI-driven Flock system.

One legislator, State Representative Mitch Little (R-Lewisville), told the Tribune, “The sheer volume of information captured is not something that is entertained, in my view, by the Fourth Amendment.”

In an interview on Bloomberg’s Balance of Power, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) expressed strong disapproval of the threat of over-surveillance posed by these systems.  Cruz stated:

I’ll tell you what a Ted Cruz would make of it, which is I don’t like Flock cameras. I don’t like government surveillance, I don’t think the government should be surveilling innocent citizens. We should use law enforcement to go after criminals. But we have a presumption of innocence. And I think the surveillance state — China has built an espionage and surveillance state. I don’t want to see America the same way. I think these Flock cameras really invite abuse, and I’m hopeful the political process will constrain it.

State and local law enforcement praise the technology and its impact in solving or reducing crime. The Dallas Police Department’s Major Felony and Vehicle Recovery Division said the department uses hundreds of cameras to track suspects involved in violent offenses, hit-and-runs, and auto thefts. The clearance time for many of these crimes fell from days to hours, the department stated.

Texas DPS also reports the use of automatic pings to intercept stolen vehicles, fleeing felons, and human smuggling operations along major highway corridors.

Governor Greg Abbott’s abrupt freeze on state funding for Flock cameras highlights a growing collision between law enforcement technology and constitutional privacy rights in Texas. While police agencies credit the AI surveillance network with drastically cutting crime clearance times and recovering stolen property, the revelation of millions in state-funded grants—drawn from auto insurance fees—has catalyzed broad bipartisan pushback.

With state lawmakers questioning the program’s Fourth Amendment boundaries and Abbott shutting off the state spigot, local departments will likely face increased scrutiny and tighter legislative guardrails if they choose to continue funding these automated tracking networks using local or federal dollars.

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Russia Hits Kiev Ammo Dump Next To Homes; Ukraine Admits 90% Of Retail Food Logistics Wrecked

A Russian drone struck a Ukrainian Defense Forces ammunition storage site in the village of Myla Friday evening, just west of Kiev. The resulting fire and hours of secondary detonations killed at least 37 people, injured dozens more, damaged around 50 residential buildings and a care home for the elderly and disabled, and forced the evacuation of hundreds. Among the dead was the local community head who had gone to help.

In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the placement of a weapons depot next to civilians was “terrible negligence.” The first impact, he said, hit a depot storing shells, mines, other munitions, and drones that “definitely shouldn’t have been there” – while prosecutors in Kiev opened a criminal investigation into the legality of storing explosives next to civilian housing. This is the second such incident in two months. A July strike on a depot in nearby Vyshneve produced similar secondary blasts, deaths, and later detentions of state defense-company executives.  

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Who Is Legally Liable When An AI Agent Goes Rogue?

Autonomous AI agents can behave in highly unpredictable ways. Give an AI Agent a goal such as passing a test of its capabilities, and it might just decide the best way to score highly is to break containment and hack into a competing company in search of the answer sheet.

That’s what happened when Open AI’s GPT-5.6 Sol hacked into Hugging Face last month. Anthropic and Meta subsequently admitted their models had also escaped testing sandboxes to hack third parties too.

But who is legally liable for agents that have minds of their own? OpenAI didn’t intend for the model to go rogue, and issued no instructions for it to do so. If your personal AI agent decides on a course of action that results in harm or financial damage in the real world, can you be held liable if it’s something you could have reasonably foreseen?”

Magazine spoke with Rikka Law Group owner and CEO Charlyn Ho to find out the state of play in this emerging legal field.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Magazine: When an AI model hacks an outside company, who is liable. Can Hugging Face sue OpenAI over the incident in July?

Charlyn Ho: Anyone can sue anyone for anything. Currently, there is no federal AI agent liability law, so we would have to look at existing law. With respect to Hugging Face and OpenAI, to set the baseline, the AI agent itself cannot be liable, it’s not a separate legal entity.

Terms that are used in a few of the AI laws are “developer” and “deployer.” The developer makes the AI, the deployer actually deploys it and uses the AI. The lines of responsibility are also not entirely clear. You have to look at the facts and circumstances.

For example, if the deployer instructed the agent, even if they didn’t actually tell them to go and breach Hugging Face, but if they were negligent in creating the parameters in which the AI agent operated, I would say you would have to look at standard tort law and go through the negligence analysis. 

Magazine: In the case of open source models which have been released by anonymous developers, is there anyone you can go after in those instances?

Ho: Not really. Often, if it’s open source, the license usually has a pretty strong disclaimer of liability. The person or company using that open source code is going to have to understand that the tradeoff of having free code is that you have to comply with the open source license, which also generally sets the parameters of liability.

If you think about it from a different perspective, another analogy is Tesla and the self-driving car accidents. If the product malfunctioned and there was a solid products liability claim, Tesla could be liable. But it’s often a facts and circumstances determination, whereby the human driver — who maybe just set the autopilot and went to sleep — could also bear liability. I think that’s somewhat analogous here because Tesla would be the developer, and the deployer would be the driver.

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DOJ Weaponization Working Group Drops Explosive Report Exposing FBI’s Outrageous Spy Campaign Against Traditional Catholics Under Biden Regime

The Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group released a bombshell report detailing how the Biden-era FBI expanded an investigation of one dangerous criminal suspect into a disturbing intelligence operation targeting Catholic priests, traditional Catholic churches and constitutionally protected religious beliefs.

The 231-page Richmond Domain Perspective Report concludes that personnel responsible for the disgraceful intelligence product have now been removed.

“The FBI personnel involved in the creation of the Richmond Catholic Memo have been terminated from their positions,” the report states.

The Justice Department did not publicly identify the terminated personnel.

The DOJ announced Thursday that investigators reviewed more than 1,800 pages of internal emails, intelligence assessments and investigative records concerning the FBI Richmond Field Office’s infamous January 2023 memorandum.

The report reveals that FBI personnel:

  • Opened investigative “Guardian” assessments on two Catholic priests.
  • Examined the priests’ travel and communications.
  • Pulled airline and credit-card information.
  • Searched one priest’s phone at Boston Logan International Airport.
  • Followed that priest from the airport to a private residence.
  • Conducted surveillance outside another residence associated with him.
  • Proposed cultivating Catholic clergy and church leaders as “tripwires” and sources.
  • Considered elevating the Richmond memo into a national intelligence product for senior FBI leadership.
  • Continued revising the project even after FBI headquarters ordered the original memo removed from bureau systems.

The FBI eventually closed both assessments after finding no national-security threat or evidence linking the priests to violent extremism.

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The Guest List Economy: How Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Real Estate Lock You Out

Who, exactly, manages the U.S. economy? And what happens when the people who run it convert it into their own private club — one that has a guest list that somehow never includes you?

Big Tech giants like Apple decide which apps you’re allowed to see and use. Remember when it shut down Parler? 

One day Parler was up. The next day Parler was gone — just because Apple decided the wrong people were talking too much.  

That’s a very convenient arrangement, don’t you think? 

Big banks and payment processors often play the role of gatekeepers too — deciding which businesses get accounts, which transactions get processed, and, in some cases, who gets access to the financial system at all. Conservatives learned just how much power those institutions wield during the years-long fight over politically motivated “debanking.”

Then there are the pharmacy benefit managers — middlemen who stand between you and the medicine your doctor prescribed. They decide which drugs get covered by insurance, which pharmacies you get to use, and how much you pay.

Do we honestly believe these people have the patients’ best interests at heart?

Of course we don’t.  

Average people lose choices and smaller competitors must follow the rules as written by the powerful and well-connected.

Their latest racket is in housing. 

Giant real estate players are creating preferred networks, where the well-connected get the first look at available homes on the market while regular buyers are left to scour through a public market that no longer always presents everything that’s actually for sale.  

House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Chair Scott Fitzgerald is asking the right questions. He has demanded answers from Compass — the country’s biggest real estate brokerage — and Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) MLS system about the private listings partnership they have popularized together, which only MRED members can see. Because the MLS controls nearly all the listings that are visible in one particular region, this anti-competitive behavior has real consequences.  

But the American people have many allies in their corner. 

Just like Rep. Fitzgerald and the rest of his colleagues on the congressional antitrust subcommittee, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have also never been afraid to enforce the competition laws on the books to protect

Populist conservatives should always do antitrust this way — enforcing the law, knocking down the barriers anti-free market actors put up, and giving regular people a fair shot at competing. But then getting the hell out of the way.

The goal should be to protect competition, not to remake the economy to fit a more egalitarian, socialistic model — like how the Biden administration prevented low-cost airlines Spirit Airlines and Jet Blue from merging, leading to Spirit’s bankruptcy earlier this year. That didn’t help consumers. That led to less choices and higher fare costs. 

What helps consumers is a government willing to take down the corporate actors who violate the consumer welfare standard and leave Americans with fewer choices, not more. Right now, the most urgent target for that kind of enforcement is the housing industry.

The hallmarks of a free marketplace are competition, choice, and the promise that an outsider can still knock the people on top off their perch by building a better mousetrap. 

America’s economy is supposed to be a marketplace open to everyone, not a managed economy that has its rules set by the members of a members-only club. The more Congress, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson can do to keep it that way, the better off we’ll all be.

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REPORT: Fauci Told Aide to Permanently Delete Emails About Gain-of-Function Research

Newly obtained documents reportedly show that Dr. Anthony Fauci instructed an aide to permanently delete an email concerning controversial gain-of-function research years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The emails, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, date back to 2012, when Fauci was defending experiments that made a highly dangerous strain of bird flu transmissible through the air.

Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier conducted the experiments with funding from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Fouchier described the resulting virus as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.”

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US Looks To Revive ‘Prize Courts’ For Iranian Oil Seizures

The US government is exploring an unusual legal route for dealing with Iranian oil and ships captured as part of its blockade: bringing back a wartime maritime system that has barely been used for generations, according to Bloomberg.

The Justice Department, working with the Pentagon, is preparing to use prize law, which historically allowed courts to decide whether vessels and cargo captured during armed conflict could legally become property of the United States. The mechanism was once commonplace in naval warfare but largely disappeared from American practice after the 19th century and has been dormant since World War II.

The appeal for the administration is largely practical. At present, the government generally relies on civil forfeiture to take ownership of vessels accused of sanctions violations or other offenses. Those cases can become complicated and slow, particularly when shipping companies, creditors, terrorism victims or other parties assert competing rights to the ship or its cargo. A prize proceeding could potentially narrow those disputes and allow captured oil to be sold more quickly, with the proceeds going to the US Treasury.

Bloomberg writes that Houston is being considered as a central venue for these cases. The Southern District of Texas has jurisdiction over a major port and sits alongside the country’s largest concentration of petrochemical infrastructure, giving it the capacity to receive and store substantial quantities of crude. US Attorney Aaron Reitz, whose office is working with DOJ officials in Washington, said the department is “now reviving” prize courts, describing the concept as an “ancient body of maritime law.”

The effort comes as Washington looks for additional ways to put economic pressure on Iran. US forces have already intercepted Iranian-owned or Iran-linked vessels since the blockade was imposed in April. Using prize law could turn those captures into a more direct financial tool: ships and oil deemed lawful prizes could be liquidated, potentially generating revenue while depriving Iran of valuable exports.

Supporters also see a strategic purpose beyond the money. Reviving the system would reinforce the message that the US considers the blockade a serious wartime measure rather than simply another sanctions regime. It could also make it more difficult for neutral commercial vessels to continue transporting goods that Washington believes support Iran.

But there is considerable uncertainty over how a centuries-old framework would operate under modern international law. “This really is a historical area of law that is not tested in modern times,” maritime attorney Allison Luzwick said. Courts could be asked to determine whether the current conflict provides sufficient legal grounds for invoking prize authority at all, particularly given questions surrounding congressional authorization for the hostilities.

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Zohran Mamdani’s New ‘Free’ Childcare Program Plagued With Problems Just Two Weeks Before Launch

Zohran Mamdani’s new program to provide ‘free’ childcare to New York City residents is already running into all kinds of roadblocks from funding to physical resources.

Consider this a preview of how his city-owned grocery stores will operate.

Of course, the mayor has no choice but to try to make this work. He campaigned on this program, among others.

Also, it’s important to point out that this news about the problems with the childcare program is not being reported by conservative media, it’s the liberal New York Times.

From the NY Times story:

Funding Delays Threaten Rollout of Mamdani’s 2-K Program

Funding issues and late payments are threatening the rollout of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s free child care system for 2-year-olds, two weeks before the program is scheduled to begin, day care providers said.

Many early childhood centers have yet to receive funding to buy classroom furniture and basic supplies like pencils and paper, or to pay newly hired teachers and assistants. Without the money, several providers have warned parents that the centers will not open when school starts on Sept. 10.

Because of the delays, city officials had encouraged providers to apply for interest-free bridge loans from the city — not just for 2-K programs but also for 3-K and pre-K programs. But many of those who have applied for the loans say that money has not arrived either, forcing them to take out high-interest personal loans, borrow from relatives and drain their personal savings.

Who could have predicted such a thing?

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Dog-eaten meat, rats and urine: Stomach-churning details of 10K LA street food complaints revealed

A dog eating meat out of a street vendor’s bag before it was served to customers. Cockroaches crawling out of a food truck. Mice scurrying beside open salsa. Raw meat baking unrefrigerated in the heat. People urinating around cooking equipment.

These are just a handful of the stomach-churning allegations listed in a staggering 662-page dossier of 9,746 public health complaints about street food vendors filed across Los Angeles County from 2023 until early 2026.

The disgusting details, obtained by the California Post through a public records request, emerge as LA Mayor Karen Bass ordered the LAPD this week to stop issuing criminal citations to street vendors who flout the rules.

The move will give un-permitted food carts free reign across the city, potentially letting the conditions get even worse.

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