Tag: ai

The High Cost Of The Automated Flock-Camera Surveillance State

Flock cameras, and the online surveillance network behind them, offer many ways for law enforcement officials, and other government bureaucrats, to abuse their access to information about the personal lives of the taxpayers. 

For example, a Kentucky police officer has been caught using the surveillance network to stalk women. Another officer in Massachusetts has been accused of using Flock cameras to track her ex-girlfriend. A police officer in Indianapolis was using Flock camera data to track his own wife and friends, checking up on them “3,759 times over a 10-month period – an average of about 12 lookups per day.”

These are just some of the ones who have been caught or accused of abusing Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), the most well known of which operate under the “Flock” brand. It’s impossible to say how many other taxpayer-funded offenders are out there using the surveillance state to serve their particular personal grudges, perversions, and agendas. 

In other cases, Kansas police used the surveillance system to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department, while a Colorado police officer wrongfully accused a woman of theft based on a Flock hit and then refused to look at evidence proving her innocence. A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen. The cases in which police use incorrect Flock data to abuse the innocent are myriad, and researchers are just now starting to document the known cases.  

There are very few controls on how police can use the surveillance databases that underlie the data collection. Records have shown that police can put out a “Flock alert” to track a private vehicle without the vehicle owner or operator being the target of any legitimate investigation. 

Not surprisingly, government agencies appear highly motivated to set up these cameras and use them prolifically. As of this week, there are more than 110,000 confirmed Flock cameras installed in the United States. The company itself states a plan for more than 120,000 cameras. That’s just the flock-branded cameras. At least 135,000 ALPR cameras, overall, have been independently documented in the US. All of these are funded by the taxpayers of course, and are installed with the enthusiastic support of government law enforcement agencies. This has all happened in just a few years. 

Naturally, much of it being funded by federal dollars. These spy camera programs receive funds from a variety of federal grant programs via the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA. None of this is surprising. Since 9/11 “local” police has relied heavily on federal dollars for equipment and other types of spending. “Support your local police” rarely has any meaning anymore. Most police agencies are adjuncts of the federal government, and most willingly share their surveillance data with federal agencies. The potential for abuse is immense since the license-plate data is open to countless users who have access to the network nationwide. The Governor of Utah, for instance, recently noted that 10 Flock cameras in a single county of Utah were searched more than 5 million times “between February 2022 and July 2026, with the vast majority of those searches (nearly 97%) coming from police agencies outside of Utah, from 45 states.” 

Many people wrongly think that these are just ordinary surveillance cameras that can be accessed piecemeal by actual humans. In reality, these are AI-assisted automated systems designed to provide easily-accessed tracking data on the movements of any American who drives a car on America’s streets. 

Tax-funded uniformed bureaucrats—i.e., “police officers”—have been “all in” on spying on Americans using taxpayers’ own hard-earned cash. Knowing that many citizens might object, police agencies have attempted to keep it all as secret as possible. This is how tens of thousands of cameras just suddenly seemed to appear in many American communities without a public vote or announcement. In at least some cases, police have used obviously deceptive methods to get their cameras. All at taxpayer expense. In Tennessee, the Mayor of Knox County, Mises Institute supporter Glenn Jacobs, found that police carefully staggered payments to ALPR corporations so that each payment fell under totals that would trigger review from elected officials. The police don’t just lie to the public. They lie to their own bosses in the elected government 

It’s all just a reminder that if government bureaucrats are given new tools for surveilling the public, those bureaucrats will certainly abuse those tools. 

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Flock Is Losing Dozens of Contracts as Controversy Grows

The outrage is surging.

Mass surveillance technology might be popular with police departments, but for the US public, it’s becoming an increasingly difficult sell.

At least 54 cities across the US have voted to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPRs) since the start of the year, according to data collected by the Washington Examiner. That comes after reporting in February that some 30 cities had done the same since 2025, indicative of the rising backlash against the tech.

In all, the Examiner reports cities in 23 states have shredded their Flock contracts so far this year, led by California and Wisconsin, which each have seven rejections, cancellations, or deactivations. Other heavy hitters include New York, Washington, and Massachusetts with four each, and Virginia with three.

Though Flock has its cameras in over 5,000 US cities as of July 2026, the rise in rejections at the municipal level comes amidst a tidal wave of outrage around issues of privacy and civil rights.

In cities where civic leaders have been slow to respond to these anxieties, citizens have moved quickly to take matters into their own hands by damaging, obscuring, or stealing the surveillance cameras in order to stop them from recording footage. A rise in official cancelations or rejections shows municipal leaders are catching on to the reality that the American populace broadly disproves of the technology, and they aren’t afraid to show it.

Arguably the highest-profile contract cancellation for Flock came when the Los Angeles Police Department decided to non-renew its years-long contract with the company, a decision motivated by a searing internal audit of the company’s technology. The internal report found that, in just two months, Flock’s ALPRs contributed to 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts, resulting in a false-positive rate of 32.3 percent.

With no sign of the outrage settling anytime soon, it’s likely these 54 cities could just be the start.

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It’s Not Just Flock. Police Can’t Be Trusted With Our Data.

Agrowing movement has been campaigning against surveillance cameras from companies like Flock Safety, which allow local police to gather mass surveillance data, often citing the possibility of misuse of that data. But for years police have steadily been building a digital infrastructure with personal information on people with criminal backgrounds in the name of public safety — and often without proper digital security

Since 2020, the state police in Illinois have maintained a publicly accessible online map of 30,000 people that it has labeled as “offenders” in 685 nursing homes across the state. The map included the first and last names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, FBI numbers, and Social Security numbers of people listed. These are elderly people who are vulnerable to scammers. It’s not stated what they have been convicted of. They may have a drug charge from decades ago before marijuana was legalized in Illinois, but their past still follows them.

Matt Chapman, a researcher with the Chicago-based Lucy Parsons Labs, stumbled across the map when he was researching license plate readers maintained by the Illinois State Police (ISP). “Anybody can find this,” Chapman told Truthout. “Anybody can use this for nefarious purposes.”

“Why do these agencies have all this information?” Chapman questioned. “Why are they not protecting it? It really speaks to the lack of care that Illinois State Police have for the information of sensitive folks — the people they’re supposedly supposed to protect.”

Registries, Databases, and Shackles

As police build an increasingly sophisticated surveillance apparatus, they have been shown to be poor stewards of the mass amounts of information they collect on the public. Police have also wrongly entered people into gang databases. In 2020, a scandal erupted in Los Angeles after cops there falsified records in a gang database, which led to the suspension of several officers with the city’s police department. Last year, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to CECOT, the mega-prison in El Salvador, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accessed information from a disgraced Maryland cop who put him into a gang database linking him to M-13 for wearing a hoodie and Chicago Bulls baseball cap.

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RFK Jr.’s “Gold-standard Science” Runs Into Another AI Citation Scandal

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent years denouncing the federal health establishment. And as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, he promised to replace its failures with “gold-standard science.”

Now his department appears to have replaced some of the science with AI hallucinations.

Earlier in August, a federal judge rebuked the Department of Health and Human Services for using scientific citations that either do not exist or do not support the claims attached to them. The citations appeared in official funding notices used to reshape the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP).

The episode is especially damaging because it is not the first. In 2025, the Kennedy-chaired Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released a major report on children’s health that contained invented studies, garbled references, and visible fingerprints of artificial intelligence.

Phantom Studies Behind a Real Policy

The latest controversy comes from Hennepin County, Minnesota v. HHS, a lawsuit challenging Kennedy’s overhaul of the TPP.

Congress created the program to fund local initiatives shown to reduce teen pregnancy, along with “promising” approaches that could be tested. HHS took a much narrower approach in 2026.

The department issued new grant notices that pushed recipients toward abstinence, “body literacy,” reproductive-goals counseling and sexual-risk-avoidance education. A separate HHS policy notice barred programs from “encouraging, normalizing, or promoting sexual activity for minors” and required compliance with administration policies against “gender ideology” and DEI.

HHS also terminated virtually all existing TPP awards, according to the court.

That prompted Hennepin County, King County in Washington, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States to sue.

On August 19, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper granted a preliminary injunction against implementation of the new policy and funding notices. He found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that HHS acted arbitrarily and capriciously.

Then came the largely overlooked part that made national news this week.

A “Hallmark of AI-generated Citations”

HHS tried to support its new emphasis on “body literacy,” which it defines as understanding how a healthy body functions, including reproductive anatomy, physiology and hormonal patterns, and interpreting biological signals to make informed health decisions.

The problem was that much of the cited “science” could not be found.

 Cooper wrote:

On the topic of body literacy, the notices (remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited — a hallmark of AI-generated citations.

He continued:

Two out of the seven appear to be completely made up. Three of the seven did not publish in the cited journals but appear to have similar titles to articles published in completely different journals.… And according to the early-stage factual record, there seem to be no pregnancy prevention curricula and programs that “center [on] body literacy” and other newly-imposed TPP requirements.

HHS did not bury the questionable references in a stray litigation brief. They appeared in government notices telling applicants what “science” federal money would follow.

The court found a deeper problem. HHS itself acknowledged a “near absence of body literacy education standards nationwide.” Yet the agency made “body literacy” a central requirement for grantees.

Cooper said HHS offered no adequate explanation for imposing that approach across the program.

HHS funding materials nevertheless tell applicants that eligible programs must reflect “high-quality evidence of effectiveness” and align with its “commitment to gold-standard science.”

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Local Mom Dragged Into Court For Trying To Obtain Info On Secret Data Center Deals

An Arkansas mom and healthcare worker obtained a trove of documents about a data center deal between a local energy company and Google. Now, she is caught in a legal fight between the energy company and the news outlet she shared the documents with, with video surfacing of her being dragged into federal court Tuesday, weeping and scared.

Jessica Kivell recently sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Arkansas Public Service Commission, which regulates state electricity prices, regarding a data center deal between Entergy Arkansas and Google, according to the Arkansas Times. The government appeared to have mistakenly handed Kivell the documents, which she then sent to a reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The documents purportedly revealed that Google will not be paying the entire cost of infrastructure upgrades needed to power a new data center in West Memphis, despite claims to the contrary, according to the Arkansas Times. Google will only pay a third of the cost, $526 million, of a new solar array required to power the data center, the outlet reported.

Entergy sent attorneys and officials to a federal courthouse Tuesday to prevent the documents and information from remaining public, according to the Arkansas Times. The company sued the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and requested a restraining order on Kivell, arguing the documents contained trade secrets, the publication of which might violate state and federal laws.

Kivell was “visibly scared” when she arrived in court in her work scrubs after she arranged for her husband to pick up their daughter, according to the Arkansas Times, which was also listed in Entergy’s restraining order request. Throughout a closed-door portion of the hearing, Kivell wept loudly and continued to sob when she returned to the courtroom, the Arkansas Times reported.

U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky issued a ruling Wednesday that denied Entergy’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have prohibited the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from publishing information about the deal. He also denied the restraining order on Kivell.

Entergy disputed the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s reporting and called for a retraction Wednesday.

“The information first published in the Aug. 31 Arkansas Democrat Gazette contains a serious and careless mathematical error,” Entergy alleged. “The calculation accounts for only 12 months of payments rather than the full twenty-year term of the agreement — a fact that was known to the paper but not included in its math.”

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AI Warfare & AI Bubble?

The front in Ukraine is largely positional. A wide “kill zone” created by drones makes massed Russian assaults costly and difficult to sustain. Ukraine is closer to collapse for they lack the soldiers and have been turning to drones and robots. Russia has manpower depth and a wartime economy that, while strained, continues to function. Ukraine faces manpower, ammunition, and sustained Western support challenges but has improved its technological edge (especially drones) and defensive effectiveness. Peace negotiations remain stalled, and a protracted conflict remains the most likely near-term trajectory.

What is changing the way wars are fought is the experiments going on in Ukraine. Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for first time. Ukraine is also looking at Humanoid Robots. A US startup, Foundation, sent two Phantom MK-1 humanoid combat robots to Ukraine for trials in early 2026. These are designed to operate conventional weapons like rifles.

Ukraine has become a leader in using unmanned and autonomous systems in warfare, the focus remains on specialized vehicles and drones. The concept of humanoid robots like the “Terminator” is still in its infancy in this conflict, with only early tests having been reported.

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Pennsylvania Data Center Project Offers Residents $10,000 “Benefits Package” For Community Rebuilding

With half of all proposed data centers unlikely to materialize amid mounting local resistance, potentially amplified in some cases by foreign influence operations, and intensifying power-grid constraints, developers are adopting more creative strategies to secure community support.

In Pennsylvania, one proposed data center campus is offering $10,000 payments to residents, alongside broader investments to rebuild local communities, strengthen public services, and reduce household costs.

Local outlet PennLive recently reported that NorthPoint Development is offering $10,000 to every eligible Hazle Township household to help revive the 1,300-acre data center project, which was rejected last November.

The $10,000 grants are part of a $165 million offer made by NorthPoint Development to establish a township police department, lower garbage-collection bills, fund community programs, and pay residents directly, the local outlet reported.

Residents would receive the money after the first data center building secures an occupancy certificate, potentially by late 2027.

“The $165 million community-benefits commitment represents an unprecedented level of direct financial investment in a Pennsylvania municipality,” Missouri-based NorthPoint said in a recent press release.

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Second Largest US Grid Operator Proposes Reliability Rules For Data Centers

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator – the second largest US grid operator after PJM Interconnection – on Friday proposed a set of requirements large loads must meet before they can connect to the grid, including ramping and ride-through specifications.

The “interconnection reliability requirements” framework aims to improve MISO’s visibility into large load “characteristics and behavior, support reliable planning and operational decision-making, and establish scalable and technically justified expectations proportional to demonstrated reliability risk,” the grid operator said in its filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The proposal is a part of MISO’s response to FERC’s mid-June “show cause” orders requiring major grid operators to set rules that meet certain criteria for adding data centers and other large loads to the grid. MISO said it plans to make additional proposals by a Nov. 16 deadline.

MISO’s proposal follows similar actions at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and the PJM Interconnection aimed at setting reliability standards for large loads after several incidents where data centers suddenly tripped offline, raising concerns about grid stability.

On average, electric demand was relatively flat between 2009 and 2024, growing by about 0.5% a year, MISO told FERC. Now, the grid operator expects 1% to 2% annual growth through 2044, with higher growth rates in the near term, according to MISO, which runs the grid and wholesale power markets from Louisiana to Minnesota.

MISO’s proposal defines “large loads” as those larger than 50 MW, and “computational loads” as large loads that include at least 25 MW of demand from information technology equipment, such as servers, storage and networking hardware.

The separate computational load classification will allow MISO to target certain requirements just to data centers, the grid operator said.

“Computational loads may exhibit rapid and coordinated changes in demand, significant power-electronic behavior, and distinct responses to transmission system disturbances,” MISO said.

MISO’s proposed reliability framework sets requirements for its transmission customers that take service on behalf of large loads. It covers four main areas:

  • Visibility requirements

To improve MISO’s visibility into large loads on its system, transmission customers must provide MISO with basic information and modeling data on large load facilities, according to the proposal. They must also provide real-time and day-ahead load forecasts for the facilities.

The information is needed “to support planning studies, operational assessments, and accurate representation of large loads behavior and system impacts,” MISO said.

  • Phasor Measurement Unit requirements

The PMU requirements set monitoring expectations for computation loads through high-resolution, time-synchronized measurements, according to MISO.

“PMU data provides MISO with greater visibility into facility behavior during system disturbances and rapid operating changes, supporting model validation, performance verification, disturbance analysis, and identification of potential dynamic interactions with the transmission system,” MISO said. 

  • Ramp requirements

MISO said its proposed ramp requirements address the rate at which computational loads may increase or decrease electric use during stable-state transitions. 

“Managing rapid changes in demand helps reduce real-time supply-demand imbalances, sudden change in transmission power flows, and associated operational impacts, while supporting more reliable system operation,” MISO said.

  • Ride-through requirements

The proposed measures set minimum disturbance performance requirements for computational loads during voltage and frequency disturbances to reduce the risk of unnecessary disconnection or customer-initiated rapid reductions in demands during system events, MISO said. 

MISO’s proposal includes grandfathering provisions to provide certainty to existing and nearly complete commercial arrangements for large loads. MISO asked FERC to let its proposal take effect on Dec. 4.

MISO plans to file additional large load-related proposals, including for additional transmission products and associated study processes, protections against cost shifts and the treatment of generation service to “electrically proximate” large loads, MISO said.

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Trump says communities that reject data centers ‘want to end up being backwards and poor’ — President claims China ‘could not be happier’ with AI data center backlash in the US

Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be a fan of the data center backlash that has swept the nation. Posting on his Truth Social platform, the President said that communities that reject data centers only do so because “they want to end up being backwards and poor,” and posited that China “could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.” The comment comes amid a wide, albeit unorganized, pushback to data center buildouts in the United States that’s left local communities and municipalities reckoning with an unanticipated and rapid infrastructure buildout.

Local pushback has been widespread and consistent across the country. Earlier this month, an Amazon data center came under fire for circumventing public feedback based on old laws. Since April, leaders across the nation have received an elevated number of credible death threats related to data centers since April. And last month, the number of local bans on data center developments crossed over 500 within the United States.

The President says to “let Data Reign” if communities “want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place.” Presumably, the President missed a comma after “taxes” and does not mean that data centers will lower the number of jobs available. The economic argument surrounding data centers is a tough issue to quantify, though it’s not completely detached from reality.

A July study from Georgia Tech found that data center developments increase local employment by 3.5%, total wages by 5%, business establishments by 4.7%, and median household income by 1.9%. Further, the developments reduce unemployment rates. Critically, however, the study found that these benefits mainly show up in metropolitan areas, calling the benefits in rural areas “negligible.” The study also highlights that data centers often employ fewer than 100 permanent workers, with specialized services “imported from outside the country.”

The research also looked into trade-offs with electricity prices, finding that prices rise an average of 5% after a data center is built in a community.

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Federal Appellate Court Rules In Favor Of AI Child Porn

While proponents of artificial intelligence (”AI”) paint an idyllic picture of how the groundbreaking technology is poised to eliminate the ills plaguing society, their unbridled optimism continues to be met with skepticism by their opponents. From fears over the economic repercussions of the rapid loss of jobs that advancements in AI may not be able to outpace to the technology’s applications as the framework for the apparatus of a panopticon surveillance state, concerns over the impact of AI mar the utopian vision its advocates have with an even more dystopian outlook of the future it will usher in. A look inside of the Pandora’s Box being opened by AI was glimpsed following a decision by a federal appeals court ruling in favor of protecting AI-generated child pornography.

On August 25th, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled thatthe First Amendment protects an individual’s right to privately possess images and videos of child sexual abuse created using AI, so long as the child sex abuse material (”CSAM”) does not depict a real child and remains in the privacy of the possessor’s home. The federal appellate court issued the unanimous ruling from a panel of three U.S. circuit judges: Judge John Z. Lee, Judge Doris L. Pryor, and Judge Joshua P. Kolar. The case came to the court in the matter of U.S. v. Anderegg, a title that now stands poised to challenge longstanding Supreme Court precedent governing how the law addresses CSAM.

The pivotal case centers on Steven Anderegg, 42, of Holmen, Wisconsin. Anderegg was arrested in May 2024 on suspicion of mass production of AI-generated CSAM. Prosecutors alleged that he used an AI image generator called Stable Diffusion to create over 13,000 images depicting child sex abuse by entering prompts into the platform, including thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors. In a press release announcing his arrest, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed Anderegg described how he created the AI CSAM through the text-to-image generative AI model in a chat with a 15-year-old boy on the social media platform Instagram. The DOJ press release chronicled how Anderegg not only described how he generated the images to the minor, but that he sent the boy several AI-generated images of minors displaying their genitals. Following their exchange, Instagram reported Anderegg’s account to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (”NCMEC”) through its CyberTipline. The NCMEC followed suit by alerting federal authorities.

On May 15th, 2024, a federal grand jury in the Western District of Wisconsin returned an indictment against Anderegg, charging him with producing, distributing, and possessing obscene visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and transferring obscene materials to a minor under the age of 16. Under those charges, Anderegg faces a maximum penalty of 70 years in prison and a mandatory minimum of five years.

Ahead of his trial originally scheduled to begin on February 18th, 2025, Anderegg’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the four counts brought against him on September 23rd, 2024. His defense counsel cited a myriad of federal cases in support of their argument that the statutes Anderegg was charged under were unconstitutional because the AI CSAM he created, possessed, and shared did not depict any actual children, thus the charges violated his rights under the First Amendment.

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