Blog

Senate Probes Flock Safety Over 20 Billion Vehicle Scans

The US Senate has joined a host of other actors in putting pressure on Flock Safety, a maker of automated license-plate readers, over misuse of its technology by law enforcement and others.

The Senate’s scrutiny came in the form of a letter that was sent by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, on August 26.

The senator gave Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley until September 8 to answer a series of questions and produce documents.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The investigation targets the scale of the operation, the retention of data collected from the more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states that Hawley said the company has, as well as customers’ search capabilities.

Hawley’s letter says the cameras produce more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. The scans are then turned into records that can be searched by customers.

Hawley’s concern is that this is turning the act of driving a vehicle into a record that can be searched – and he said that Congress has never authorized the creation of such a network.

“But Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church,” the senator wrote. “Congress never authorized the network your industry has built.”

The letter seeks information on whether customers can run statewide or nationwide searches of vehicle or driver data, and if this is the default option. The retention periods, both default and maximum, are also of interest to Hawley, as is the number of confirmed misuse cases since January 1, 2021.

Hawley also wants to know what information customers must provide to justify a search, what restrictions Flock imposes, and what the accuracy is when it comes to complete and correctly attributed vehicle identification. The frequency of incorrect alerts is also a question.

Flock is also asked to provide details about the data the devices capture, whether the data is linked to any outside source, and whether multi-factor authentication is required of all users.

And in a question that goes beyond the plate readers, Hawley wants to know if Flock has the capability to biometrically track people.

The request for documents includes contracts with governmental customers, prices and fee schedules, information about pilot programs, discounted or donated equipment, and help given to customers to secure federal, state, or private grant funding.

Keep reading

Wyoming GOP Gov. Mark Gordon Whines About ‘Aggressive, Unexpected’ DOJ Election Monitors – Orders Investigation

Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon is complaining about federal election monitors sent to observe last week’s primary elections.

Gordon is also ordering an investigation after Justice Department officials attempted to examine voting procedures in the state.

Two DOJ monitors arrived at a polling location in Cheyenne last Tuesday as part of a federal effort to ensure elections comply with voting and civil-rights laws.

According to Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee, the monitors asked questions about election procedures, sought to speak with voters and requested access to voting equipment.

Local officials refused some of those requests, and Gordon was less than pleased.

“It was aggressive, unexpected, disruptive and certainly didn’t seem to show respect for the state,” Gordon moaned.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of it as best we can.”

Keep reading

ICE to Deploy Boston Dynamics Robot Dogs for Its Enforcement Operations

Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) is preparing to deploy robotic dogs as part of its immigration enforcement operations.

The agency planning to spend as much as $2 million on Boston Dynamics’ four-legged Spot robots.

The Department of Homeland Security says ICE needs remotely operated robots capable of entering dangerous locations where sending officers could put them at unnecessary risk.

According to procurement documents, the robots will be used for “inspection, situational awareness, and hazard assessment” in confined, unstable and otherwise difficult-to-access environments.

ICE is expected to spend between $1 million and $2 million purchasing Spot robots and accompanying equipment.

With individual units costing roughly $75,000 before additional equipment, the contract could put dozens of robotic dogs into service.

Keep reading

Does the Flu Vaccine Prevent Death?

Dear Editor,

My letter is concerned with a topic of utmost importance: The effect of the flu vaccine on flu-related death. That’s the ultimate endpoint of interest for vaccine effectiveness (VE) research, yet it is not captured in most studies that employ the test-negative design.

Faksova et al. (January 2026) reported in your journal results from a large cohort study of the flu vaccine in 2024–2025 in elderly residents (age≥65) of three Nordic countries. The estimated VE against flu-related death was 63%, which corresponds to a risk ratio (RR) of 0.37. How robust is the result? What does sensitivity analysis show?

The authors relied on a matched design to avoid confounding bias, a major threat in observational research. Unvaccinated members of the cohort were matched to the vaccinated (one-to-one matching) on several variables, including key comorbidities.

Sweden was not included in the mortality analysis (small numbers), and the mortality graphs were displayed by country (Denmark, Finland). I will examine the data from Denmark, a matched cohort of over one million people.

Graphs of cumulative mortality by vaccination status were displayed as of 14 days after a matched index date. For a vaccinated person, the index date was the vaccination date; for their unvaccinated counterpart, that matched date was just a random date on the calendar. I will return to this point later when we discuss their health status.

Keep reading

Will WAR Bankrupt the West?

War and sovereign debt are merging into a vicious spiral that will determine which nations survive the coming monetary crisis. Governments entered the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, along with the escalating confrontation between the United States and China, already buried beneath debt accumulated through decades of fiscal incompetence. Now they are increasing military spending, subsidizing domestic industries, restructuring supply chains, and borrowing even more money to prepare for conflicts their own foreign policies helped create.

The United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan already carry gross government debt exceeding an entire year of economic output. Russia has drained much of its National Wealth Fund to finance the war in Ukraine while Western governments froze approximately $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets. Gulf states are being forced to expand defense spending amid the conflict with Iran, and Europe has committed itself to raising NATO-related expenditures toward 5% of GDP by 2035. Trump wants to increase annual US defense spending by $500 billion to reach $1.5 trillion, but Washington is already borrowing simply to pay interest on the debt it accumulated before this latest round of wars began.

These people speak about military spending as if the money materializes from thin air without consequences. Government does not possess wealth of its own. Every missile, drone, weapons package, foreign aid program, and military deployment must be financed through taxation, borrowing, or inflation. Taxation drains the productive economy, borrowing competes for private capital, and inflation silently confiscates purchasing power from everyone. Politicians choose debt because it conceals the cost until after the election, allowing them to play emperor today while leaving future generations with the bill.

The yield on the 10-year US Treasury has nearly tripled over five years to 4.3%, which means Washington is financing a vastly larger debt at far higher interest rates. This is elementary mathematics that the political class refuses to confront. A government may survive $10 trillion in debt when rates are near zero, but the same fiscal structure becomes impossible when the debt multiplies and borrowing costs normalize. Every additional dollar devoted to interest is a dollar that cannot maintain infrastructure, reduce taxes, or support genuine economic development. Government then borrows more to cover the interest, increasing the debt that created the problem in the first place.

The attempt to separate national economies from geopolitical rivals will impose another enormous cost. Europe abandoned cheap Russian energy and then wondered why its industries became uncompetitive. The West wants to reduce dependence on Chinese manufacturing and rare earths, but rebuilding those supply chains will require subsidies, tariffs, controls, and years of expensive investment. Iran’s position around the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates how quickly a regional conflict can threaten a route that previously carried roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply. Every attempt to create economic security through political coercion raises prices, reduces efficiency, and demands still more government borrowing.

Keep reading

The Bunker State: The Government Will Survive, but Will the Constitution?

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.“—Theodore Roosevelt

What began publicly as Donald Trump’s lavish, taxpayer-funded vision of a gilded White House ballroom is now being justified by the administration—in and out of court—as a matter of national security.

To President Trump, it seems, a ballroom by any other name is a bunker.

And what a bunker it is.

Court documents indicate the massive subterranean military complex being constructed five stories beneath the White House grounds will include bomb shelters, a hospital, “top secret military structures and equipment, military-grade venting, a single integrated air conditioning and heating system, sniper nests and a drone port on top.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff, has explicitly invoked “continuity-of-government interests“ in defending the ballroom/bunker project, arguing that the reinforced underground military installation is necessary to ensure uninterrupted presidential command during an attack or global crisis.

The White House, however, already has a bunker built for precisely this purpose.

According to former officials, a nuclear-hardened facility buried more than 60 feet underground was secretly completed during the Obama administration. It can reportedly shelter dozens of officials for weeks and provide the president and senior officials with a secure command center during an extreme national-security crisis.

Which raises an obvious question: if the White House already has a nuclear-hardened Continuity of Government bunker, why does it need another one?

What threat justifies a new five-story military complex beneath the People’s House—one large enough to include bomb shelters, a hospital, military infrastructure, sniper positions and drone facilities? And if this is really about national security, why has so much of the project been wrapped around a ballroom that the administration initially presented as something quite different?

It is telling that they are building it at breakneck speed.

Keep reading

The Economy Is Stagnating

The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge rose again in July, with the headline Personal Consumption Expenditures index increasing 0.2% for the month and 3.7% from a year earlier. Economists expected the annual rate to decline to 3.6%, yet it remained unchanged from June, while core PCE excluding food and energy increased 0.2% monthly and 3.3% annually. The political class has spent years promising that inflation was retreating, but prices are still rising at nearly twice the Federal Reserve’s official target after households already endured the largest cumulative increase in the cost of living in decades.

This is what they refuse to explain when they celebrate a lower inflation rate. A decline in the RATE of inflation does NOT mean prices declined, for it merely means the government believes they are increasing at a slower pace. The rent, insurance premium, electric bill, grocery receipt, property tax, and cost of borrowing do not return to where they stood before the inflationary wave began, and wages must rise faster than this accumulated increase simply to restore purchasing power that has already been destroyed.

The core figure is equally deceptive because removing food and energy excludes two of the expenses people cannot avoid. Economists defend this practice by claiming those categories are volatile, but that volatility does not make the expense imaginary. Energy flows into transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, utilities, packaging, and practically everything that must be produced or delivered, while food is not some discretionary luxury that families can postpone until the next Federal Reserve meeting.

The problem is now spreading well beyond one monthly inflation report. The economy expanded at an annualized rate of only 1.5% during the second quarter, employers eliminated 23,000 jobs in July, and May and June payrolls were revised downward by a combined 103,000. Inflation remains at 3.7% while employment has been stagnating for months, which is the precise environment the Keynesian playbook cannot resolve because raising rates attacks economic activity while doing nothing to repair the geopolitical, fiscal, regulatory, and supply-side pressures driving prices.

The Federal Reserve is now trapped by government. Washington continues to borrow and spend regardless of the business cycle, forcing the Treasury to compete for capital while interest payments consume an expanding share of federal revenue. The central bank can raise short-term rates, but it cannot produce oil, lower insurance costs, reverse taxation, rebuild supply chains, end wars, or restore confidence among businesses that no longer know what their expenses will be six months from now.

This is not a new inflation cycle appearing in July, just as the weak employment report did not suddenly mark the beginning of labor deterioration. Both figures confirm a trend that has been in motion beneath the government’s revised statistics for some time. The private economy is losing momentum while the cost of government, debt, energy, insurance, and basic necessities continues to rise, and calling this a “soft landing” will not change the fact that Americans are being forced to pay more merely to stand still.

Keep reading

Homeland Security warns of Chinese parts in election machines, will require paper ballot audits

The Homeland Security Department will require random audits of paper ballots in the midterm elections, citing long-simmering concern that the nation’s largest voting technology companies use Chinese parts in their voting machines, according to a letter from Secretary Markwayne Mullin released Thursday.   

Mullin sent the letter to the White House Transparency Task Force earlier this week outlining the dangers posed by Chinese components in American voting machines and the way that these components could be exploited by hackers or other malicious actors.

The letter highlighted longstanding concerns first raised in a bipartisan manner before the 2020 election, but which officials appear to have taken little action on in the intervening years.

“Voting machines with components manufactured by foreign adversaries introduce significant security risks,” Mullin wrote. “These vulnerabilities mean that malicious actors could potentially compromise election infrastructure at any stage of the supply chain, even before the machines are assembled or deployed.” 

The secretary explained, “If a component is tampered with during manufacturing, it could serve as a point-of-entry for hackers, allowing for the possibility of synchronized attacks across multiple machines and jurisdictions.”

Two Biden administration Intelligence Community memos in 2024 identified China as “the most active and persistent cyber threat” and assessed that China, along with Iran and Russia, has “the technical capability to access some U.S. election-related networks and systems.”  

You can read Mullin’s letter below: 

08.20.2026 – WHTF Letter Commerce – S1 SIGNED.pdf

Earlier this year, the Trump administration took drastic action to ban the import of all internet routers manufactured in foreign countries because of the unacceptable security risks posed by Chinese hacking capabilities.

Internet routers connect computers, cellphones, and other electronic devices to the internet, the backbone of the modern economy.

Keep reading

ICE Awards $16.7 Million No-Bid Contract For 6,000 Pairs Of Electric Shock Gloves

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a $16.7 million contract to purchase 6,000 pairs of gloves that can deliver electric shocks. Officers would use them to control resisting detainees and protesters, according to a federal notice published Thursday.

The no-bid deal went to Compliant Technologies LLC, a Kentucky firm that manufactures the devices, and covers the gloves plus support equipment and services over the next six months.

ICE moved forward with the purchase despite ongoing objections from civil rights advocates and Democratic senators. They said the agency already draws criticism for use of force with unclear oversight.

Hours before the notice appeared, a group of senators led by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) wrote to ICE’s acting director, urging the agency to abandon the plan. Fifteen colleagues from the Democratic caucus signed on.

“The blatant and tragic misuse of force in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, Maine, and other locations around the country raises significant skepticism about the agency’s professional capability to safely deploy a new tool that could be used to harm Americans without cause,” the letter said.

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, defended the purchase Thursday.

“Sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable and a deliberate attempt to undermine and endanger our officers,” the agency said in a statement.

The plan for the purchase surfaced earlier this month when ICE posted a notice about buying thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and investigators.

Gloves Look Like Regular Gear Until Button Is Pressed

The gloves appear as ordinary patrol gloves until an officer presses a button, which activates electrical mode. The shock works only on bare skin, and aims to produce enough pain to make a resisting person comply. Some local jails and police departments already use similar equipment.

ICE’s notice listed several scenarios for the devices, including high-tension environments during arrests, transport of combative detainees, and civil disturbances outside detention facilities.

“It will be used when a subject is actively or passively resisting and an officer needs to gain control quickly to prevent injuries to both parties,” the document said.

Officials said the shocks would help maintain control over inmates, stop aggression or escape attempts, let officers handcuff people who hide their hands, and aid crowd control efforts. The aim is to avoid the deployment of greater force, including firearms. The notice mentioned approved policy, training, and accountability standards but no further details.

ICE initially intended to spend up to $20 million on the devices, known as CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E., or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, with delivery expected by March 31, 2027. The gloves were earmarked for Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations officers and agents.

Compliant Technologies said the gloves should not be deployed in the face of verbal defiance or belligerence, serve as punishment, or be used for torture. The company also warned against deploying them on children, the elderly, pregnant women, or people with disabilities.

The manual advised using them when a suspect becomes violent enough to endanger an officer or the public, and only to meet lawful objectives under agency policy. Officers need training and certification, with recertification every two years.

“Every decision is made with careful consideration and appropriately reviewed to ensure that any technology ICE utilizes is consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards,” an ICE spokesperson told The Epoch Times earlier this month via email. “Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training.”

Keep reading

Read Between the Lies: A Pattern Recognition Guide

When Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, announced during Event 201’s pandemic drill in 2019 that they would “flood the zone with trusted sources,” few understood this preview of coordinated narrative control. Within months, we watched it unfold in real time—unified messaging across all platforms, suppression of dissent, and coordinated narrative control that fooled much of the world.

But not everyone stayed fooled forever. Some saw through it immediately, questioning every aspect from day one. Others thought it was just incompetent government trying to protect us. Many initially accepted the precautionary principle—better safe than sorry. But as each policy failure pointed in the same direction—toward more control and less human agency—the pattern became impossible to ignore. Anyone not completely subsumed by the system eventually had to confront its true purpose: not protecting health or safety, but expanding control.

Once you recognize this pattern of deception, two questions should immediately arise whenever major stories dominate headlines: “What are they lying about?” and “What are they distracting us from?” The pattern of coordinated deception becomes unmistakable. Consider how media outlets spent three years pushing Russiagate conspiracies, driving unprecedented social division while laying the groundwork for what would become the greatest psychological operation in history. Today, while the media floods us with Ukraine coverage, BlackRock positions itself to profit from both the destruction and reconstruction. The pattern becomes unmistakable once you see it—manufactured crises driving pre-planned “solutions” that always expand institutional control.

Mainstream media operates on twin deceptions: misdirection and manipulation. The same anchors who sold us WMDs in Iraq, promoted “Russia collusion,” and insisted Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” still occupy prime time slots. Just as we see with RFK, Jr.’s HHS nomination, the pattern is consistent: coordinated attacks replace substantive debate, identical talking points appear across networks, and legitimate questions are dismissed through character assassination rather than evidence. Being consistently wrong isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Their role isn’t to inform but to manufacture consent.

The template is consistent: Saturate media with emotional spectacles while advancing institutional agendas with minimal scrutiny. Like learning to spot a fake smile or hearing a false note in music, you develop an instinct for the timing:

Money and Power:

Medical Control:

Digital Control:

As these deceptions become more obvious, different forms of resistance emerge. The truth-seeking takes different forms. Some become deep experts in specific deceptions—documenting early treatment successes with repurposed drugs, uncovering hospital protocol failures, or exploring the impact of vaccine injuries. Others develop a broader lens for seeing how narratives themselves are engineered.

Keep reading