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Flock’s Optional Gunshot Detection Feature Has Fourth Amendment Implications for Gun Owners
Flock is just one of many suppliers in the global gunshot detection market, which has an estimated total value of $1.5 billion. But the company’s marketing material raises concerns about the technology’s capabilities, which go beyond simply detecting gunfire. In Flock’s own words, a confirmed gunshot “can surface the vehicles seen entering or leaving the area around the time of the sound, using nearby Flock license plate reader cameras.” That statement deserves scrutiny, since it describes a mechanism for turning suspected gunfire into a list of nearby vehicles.
Innocent gun owners could end up on such lists. Suppose a bang recorded by one of these microphones gets classified as gunfire (which it may not actually be, given the possibility of a false positive from a similar noise). That “confirmed event” can trigger an ALPR [automated license plate recognition] inquiry that sweeps in drivers who had nothing to do with the noise. In a country where more than 20 million people have carry permits and 29 states do not require them, some of those drivers will be lawfully armed. The proximity of those innocent drivers could be mistaken for evidence that they fired the shot.
This possibility raises two legal concerns for lawful gun owners. First, what justifies stopping a person on one of these lists? Second, is querying the database a search under the Fourth Amendment? Recent cases provide some answers.
The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen protects lawful public carry. In the 2024 case United States v. Daniels, which involved the detention of an unarmed man who did not match a 911 caller’s description of armed men, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit noted that no crime was reported. Citing Bruen, the court said it “cannot look with suspicion on citizens presumably exercising their Second Amendment rights in a lawful way.”
Last May in Commonwealth v. Foster, by contrast, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld a stop where police responded within seconds to late-night alerts from a gunfire microphone, found only two people, and observed conduct the court considered evasive. An investigative stop requires reasonable suspicion based on specific facts connecting someone to suspected criminal activity. The risk here is that an alert combined with a plate match could be treated as sufficient for reasonable suspicion even though it only establishes proximity.
A recent case from New Jersey illustrates that risk. Last March, in State v. Carrillo, a state appeals court ordered suppression of evidence (an unlawfully possessed handgun) discovered in a minivan after a traffic stop. The police searched the minivan after obtaining a warrant. But the court held that a gunshot alert and an ALPR hit did not adequately connect the minivan to a shooting the day before. Prosecutors conceded that video supposedly showing muzzle flashes from the minivan at the time of the gunfire actually showed none.
Academic Survey Finds 35 Percent of Americans Can’t Name All Three Branches of Government
The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center recently conducted a survey that found 35% of Americans can’t name the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial.
This is an amazing indictment of our education system, but it also raises questions about our national discourse.
For instance, virtually everyone has an opinion about politics, and many people these days seem to think that they are experts in the topic. How is that possible when a third of Americans lack basic civics knowledge?
Campus Reform reports:
35% of Americans cannot name all three branches of government: SURVEY
A new survey found significant gaps in Americans’ basic civic knowledge, including that more than one-third of U.S. adults cannot name all three branches of government.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that just 65 percent of respondents correctly named the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The survey, conducted Aug. 6-9, included a nationally representative sample of 1,034 U.S. adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The survey also examined Americans’ ability to identify the rights protected by the First Amendment.
Seventy-three percent of respondents named freedom of speech as a right protected under the First Amendment, while only 43 percent named freedom of religion, 31 percent named freedom of assembly, 29 percent named freedom of the press, and just 12 percent named the right to petition the government.
Only 9 percent could name all five protections, while 24 percent could not name a single one. Moreover, 25 percent of respondents mistakenly said the right to bear arms, protected under the Second Amendment, is a First Amendment right.
“Ignorance is costly. You can’t protect and cherish rights that you don’t know you have,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said.
PETA Appears to Run Cover for Brutal Monkey Torturer After Obama-Appointed Judge Reverses Trump’s Harvard Funding Freeze
PETA has spent three years telling its donors that the “lights are out” on Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone’s cruel infant-monkey lab, but federal records say otherwise.
A new notice of funding, thanks at least in part to an Obama-appointed judge reversing President Donald Trump’s Harvard funding freeze, came just sixteen months after PETA toasted “the end of Margaret Livingstone’s career as tormenter of baby monkeys.”
NIH RePORTER still lists Livingstone as the contact principal investigator on a National Eye Institute award at Harvard Medical School with an award notice dated September 11, 2026, fiscal year 2026 funding of $850,148; a budget period running September 1, 2026, through August 31, 2027; and a project end date of August 31, 2028.
Livingstone was also awarded a new grant on April 17, 2025, with fiscal year 2025 funding of $576,474; a project start date of May 1, 2025; a subsequent award notice dated June 1, 2026, for fiscal year 2026 funding of $576,201; and a project end date of April 30, 2029.
PETA’s May 27, 2025, release claimed a “massive victory” and said funding for the baby-monkey experiments “has been terminated.”
A PETA news post updated May 28, 2025, said “the lights have finally gone out on Margaret Livingstone’s dark experiments on baby monkeys” and that the work was on Harvard’s list of canceled federal grants.
PETA2 told younger readers the same week, “the lights are finally out” and “NIH just pulled the plug.
NIH itself posted on May 29, 2025, that it had “terminated funding at Harvard University for studies that included sewing the eyes of young monkeys shut.”
Then, a Boston judge gave the money back.
On September 3, 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs, an Obama appointee, granted Harvard summary judgment, vacated the administration’s freeze orders and termination letters, and barred the government from giving those letters any force.
The NIH termination letter dated May 6, 2025, was among the letters she set aside. The judgment vacated “all freezes and terminations of funding to Harvard made pursuant to the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters on or after April 14, 2025.”
The Daily Caller reported this week that taxpayer money is still moving through multiple Livingstone grants, including the new $850,000 award posted this month and a multi-year grant running through 2029.
PETA’s own description of the “maternal deprivation” horrors in Livingstone’s lab includes infant macaques taken from their mothers, some raised with only a cloth surrogate, some fitted with vision-distorting goggles or strobe-like conditions for months, some with eyelids sewn shut, some implanted with electrode arrays, and many later killed and dissected.
Former NIH Director Francis Collins privately called related maternal-deprivation work “third-rate,” according to the Daily Caller.
OpenAI admits another rogue agent incident
OpenAI’s agents have leaked 53 images uploaded by ChatGPT users, the company has said, without specifying whether the pictures were AI-generated or depictions of real people, or when they were posted online.
The incident comes amid a series of cases in recent months involving autonomous AI agents, which can independently plan and carry out tasks using external tools. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all revealed instances in which their models accessed real systems during testing, including coordinated cyberattacks against government resources.
In a post on X on Friday, OpenAI said most of the leaked pictures had been removed, adding that it was working with hosting providers to take down the remaining content.
The agents had access to the images because OpenAI relies on anonymized user data for part of its model-training process, Reuters reported on Friday, citing the company, its former employees and outside researchers.
Does Britain Have a Free Speech Problem?
When Keir Starmer visited the White House in February 2025, J.D. Vance used the occasion to raise what he called “infringements on free speech” in Britain. Our then Prime Minister, sitting a few feet away in the Oval Office, was having none of it. “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom,” he said, “and it will last for a very, very long time.” He added that he was “very proud of our history there”.
Was Sir Keir right to dismiss those concerns? I want to answer that question not with anecdotes, of which I have a great many, but with numbers.
Arrests, charges and convictions
Let’s start with a new report from Big Brother Watch, entitled Britain’s Free Speech Problem. Its headline finding is that between January 1st 2021 and December 31st 2025, 62,199 people were arrested in the UK on suspicion of committing just three communications offences. These are section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which criminalises sending a “grossly offensive” message over a public electronic network; section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988; and section 179 of the Online Safety Act 2023, the new “false communications” offence.
That’s a shocking figure, but it’s an underestimate. Several police forces didn’t respond to Big Brother Watch’s Freedom of Information requests, including Police Scotland. Big Brother Watch estimates the true figure is 73,023. So on a conservative estimate, the police are arresting an average of 34 people a day for things they’ve said, the vast majority online, and the true figure is closer to 40 a day. Russia, incidentally, is thought to arrest around 400 people a year for similar offences.
Of those 62,199 people, 18,520 were charged and 12,292 were convicted. That’s more than 12,000 people with criminal records for speech offences in five years. And that number is likely to go up if the proposals to curtail the right to trial by jury, first put forward by David Lammy when he was Justice Secretary, become law. Research by the Free Speech Union found that in the year to June 2025, 14% of people tried for speech offences in a magistrates’ court were acquitted, compared with 33% in the Crown Court, where the case was heard by a jury. Twelve ordinary men and women, it turns out, are less likely than a district judge to conclude that an intemperate tweet merits a criminal conviction. Leave the decision to them and more people will be convicted.
Is it getting worse?
But is the number of people being arrested for speech offences actually increasing? Yes, it is, as a similar piece of research by the Times established last year. It FoI’d every police force in England and Wales and asked how many arrests they’d made relating to just two of those three offences: section 127 of the Communications Act and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act.
Missouri AG Launches Investigation into ActBlue Over Foreign Money, Gift Cards, and Fired Staff
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway opened a consumer-fraud investigation Friday into ActBlue, the liberal fundraising machine that processed nearly $1.8 billion in 2025 for about 23,000 Democratic candidates and progressive groups.
Hanaway’s office says it is looking at possible violations of the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, including fraud, misrepresentation of foreign contributions, and unfair practices.
According to a press release from her office:
Political contributions from foreign entities in any form are strictly prohibited by federal law. After investigating ActBlue, the U.S. House Committee on Administration forwarded information regarding its conduct to the Attorney General’s Office for potential investigation. The Attorney General’s investigation will examine whether ActBlue sent any funds raised through fraudulent contributions to a Missouri political office, campaign, or committee. ActBlue is a fundraising platform widely used by almost 23,000 Democratic candidates and groups. In 2025, they raised nearly $1.8 billion for progressive causes across the nation.
Recent reports indicate that through faulty, potentially deliberately unsound, donation verification processes, ActBlue could have received and used money directly from foreign sources. It is also suspected that ActBlue receives donations by way of prepaid cards or gift cards, a difficult-to-trace method that has been used by foreign donors to conceal contributions. Additionally, there is reason to believe fraudulent contributions are being made to ActBlue under false identities or on behalf of other individuals without their knowledge.
The Attorney General’s Office is also inquiring about multiple resignations, terminations, and whistleblower complaints. Employees who may have flagged weaknesses in fraud-prevention systems, objected to internal decisions, or believed ActBlue was not properly addressing fraud risk were potentially suppressed or punished for speaking out.
“When political fundraising is compromised, public trust and the foundations of our democracy are put at risk. Missourians deserve a political system built on honesty and confidence that campaigns are not being financed through unlawful foreign sources,” said General Hanaway.
“Political fundraising must never become a pathway to deception, influence, or special treatment,” Hanaway added.
Mystery Deepens As Spy Aircraft Disappears From US Air Base Without Explanation
An SR-71 Blackbird parked for years on an outdoor display at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is no longer visible in commercial satellite imagery, and the agency has offered no public explanation of where it went.
The spy aircraft, the NASA 844, has been absent from its pad since at least May 17, according to Aviation Week.
Sources told the publication that the plane was moved into a hangar earlier this year for an inspection, though NASA has not described what that inspection involves, why it is taking place, or how long it will last.
The Serial 61-7980 was the last SR-71 built and the last to fly, completing its final flight in 1999 after the Air Force had already retired the type and NASA had retained a few surviving airframes for high-speed research.
Lockheed Martin produced 32 of the reconnaissance aircraft, 12 of which were lost in accidents and none to enemy action.
Questions about the disappearance of the SR-71 come a week after NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman discussed plans for a new high-altitude, high-speed X-plane and displayed images of silhouette that closely resembled a Blackbird at annual the All-In Summit in Los Angeles.
“In the service of the first A [aeronautics] in NASA, we are rebuilding our X-plane fleet. The X-59 is researching quiet supersonic flight, but it’s just the beginning,” the NASA head told attendees.
“As NASA recommits to flight test and works alongside industry to push the boundaries of airframe and propulsion design, it will not be long before NASA once again is flying as high and as fast as we had in decades past, and then even more.”
Israel and the US have battered the international legal order. The impunity must stop
The international legal order is in shambles. But from the ruins of impunity and lawbreaking, a group of nations is working to enforce accountability.
On Monday, the UN general assembly’s high-level meetings opened to news that Washington had drawn up sanctions against the international criminal court, targeting its bank accounts, software, insurers and staff.
On Tuesday, the US president stood at the podium and threatened Iran with annihilation. On Thursday at the same rostrum, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC for war crimes, cast all those seeking accountability as “barbarians who threaten our common civilization”. Palestinian officials were absent, denied travel visas by the United States.
Netanyahu has never pretended to respect international law. When South Africa brought its Genocide Convention case against Israel’s actions in Gaza, Netanyahu declared: “Nobody will stop us – not The Hague.” This summer, he mused on American television that, should his plane ever be forced down in a country that honours the warrant, Israel’s special forces could be given “a new task”. The American president has promised he will not be arrested on US soil “in any way, shape, or form”.
I was arrested protesting Netanyahu’s New York visit. Here’s why we took a standRead more
The message to the world is plain: crimes committed by the allies and acolytes of power will never be punished.
This impunity is not limited to Gaza. It’s playing out in the accelerating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. It has travelled to Lebanon, where Israeli strikes have killed more than 4,000 people this year and displaced more than a million. In southern Syria, Israeli troops shell and raid villages in the countryside around Damascus. In Sudan, massacres are carried out with arms, technology and financing of the United Arab Emirates, an ally of the Israeli government.
Every commander with a patron has learnt the lesson of the past three years. Mass atrocity carries no price if your friends are strong enough.
States that resist encounter punishments in dizzying varieties – sanctions, tarriffs, threats and isolation. South Africa lost US aid after bringing its genocide case to The Hague. Colombia’s president had his visa revoked after speaking out on Gaza in the streets of New York.
This too will not remain confined to the global south. Instruments built for terrorists and drug cartels are now pointed at judges. More than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, including the court’s president, already live under US sanctions. A designation of the whole institution would reach every European bank, insurer and technology supplier serving a court that sits in the Netherlands.
Tools like these, once deployed, are never put back in the drawer. Governments in Europe that shrug today should ask how long before the same instruments are turned on their regulators, their competition authorities, their own courts.
What can countries do? History points to some answers.
New evidence on the Bucha Massacre
The Bucha Massacre, which occurred in March 2022, remains one of the main tragedies of the Ukrainian conflict. Shortly after the Russian strategic retreat and the entry of Ukrainian troops, the narrative quickly began to spread that Russian soldiers had committed a massacre in the city, murdering hundreds of people.
The news spread around the world and was broadcast by all major media aligned with the Atlantic West. Even in spaces that declare themselves neutral, such as Wikipedia, the entry on the Bucha Massacre narrates it as a slaughter perpetrated by Russian soldiers before they retreated from the city. This is, therefore, the “official version” of the story in the Western world and its satellites.
Ukrainian authorities speak of 509 innocent civilians who were allegedly assassinated by the Russians, and indeed Bucha has been used as one of the main arguments to vilify the behavioral standard of the Russians in the special military operation. It seems peculiar to us, however, from the outset that this event was so singular. In general, armies that commit atrocities commit them at various moments and in different places of the conflict, but Bucha constitutes a singular, totally unique, and so far unrepeated instance of an alleged massacre of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians by the Russians.
The topic has recently gained prominence again, with new evidence that was discussed, for example, at the “Dialogue on Fakes 4.0” congress, organized by the Global Fact-Checking Network (a fact-checking agency of which I am a member, along with other journalists). There, Minister Sergey Lavrov mentioned the findings of the report “Heirs of Goebbels: Falsification of the Events in Bucha and Staged Bloody Performances by the Kiev Regime,” produced by a team from the International Public Tribunal on the Crimes of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, and published on September 17, 2026, on the Russian Federation Ministry of Foreign Affairs site. (https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/reports/2142212/)
According to the report in question, it was possible to gather sufficient material evidence indicating that the Ukrainian regime manipulated the facts about Bucha in various ways, one of them being the inclusion of Ukrainian military and paramilitary personnel killed in combat as victims of an alleged “massacre” committed by the Russians. Some of these military personnel may not even have died in the vicinity of Bucha. Furthermore, evidence was obtained of civilians who died of natural causes and whose names were included as having also been victims.
This work by the committee was possible because months after the events in Bucha, the Ukrainian regime inaugurated a memorial containing the names and personal data of the “civilians” who allegedly died in the supposed massacre committed by the Russians. With this, it was possible to cross-reference the data with other databases to check the biography of the dead and confirm the official information – work that was done voluntarily by users of the 2ch.su forum. They discovered at least 50 names of Ukrainian combatants among the names on the memorial, which amounts to approximately 10% of the alleged victims listed.
Among these combatants, by the way, there are several members of the Azov Regiment, a neo-Nazi organization notorious for its atrocities against Russian civilians, such as Evgeny Petrash, Vladimir Bisyaga, Andrey Vaskevich, Ilya Krhenov, among others. Others, such as Igor Kokodinyak and Vladimir Logvinenko, were military personnel who died in other parts of the special military operation zone and not in the vicinity of Bucha.
But of course, the big question about Bucha is the fact that the authentic civilian deaths that occurred at the location in March 2022 were perpetrated by the Ukrainians themselves, which is also confirmed in the report through new testimonial evidence. According to it, Ukraine used artillery against Bucha, after the Russian withdrawal, as soon as journalists were transported to the city, with the aim of turning it into the stage for a grand performance to be displayed to the world.
According to the testimonial evidence gathered, there is even evidence that the journalists’ visit was staged, in the sense that the locations that would be hit by Ukrainian artillery attacks were already known in advance, which means that civilians were killed on purpose with the aim of accusing the Russians of an atrocity – which characterizes a “false flag” attack.
Bucha has become a case to be studied because today the probability that other “false flag” attacks will be produced by Ukraine or the West with the aim of justifying an intensification of hostilities is quite high.
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