Tag: ai

Missouri Rep. Burlison TEARS INTO The Surveillance State – Should Flock Cameras Be Abolished? Is China Spying On Us Through Our Cell Phones?

Rep. Eric Burlison, R-MO, blasted the Surveillance State that exists within our federal government, an ongoing debate that has existed for decades.

Following the devastating 9/11 attacks just 25 years ago, the U.S. government has ramped up efforts to spy on it’s own citizens, with most common argument in favor of this is being  that it keeps the American People safe and prevents something like 9/11 from ever happening again.

In 2026 new debates surrounding the use of flock cameras and their expansion have raised concerns that this violates our 4th amendment rights to privacy, while supporters continue to argue that it ensures public safety.

Flock camera across the country are being sabotaged in response to their expansion.

Burlison and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY, introduced a bill known as the “Flock-Off Act,” which would cut off federal funding for flock camera expansion and address the growing concerns in the American public over their usage.

The bill has six additional cosponsors.

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The Soft Antichrist Of The AI Age: What Everyone Is Missing About The US-China Arms Race

I. The word

Peter Thiel spent the back half of last year giving private lectures on the Antichrist, and the word has been loose in the discourse ever since. His political reading is the old one. The Antichrist is not a cartoon devil. He is the figure who arrives offering peace and safety, and who uses the fear of catastrophe to install one universal order. In Thiel’s telling that figure is a regulator. He stops technology in the name of survival. The price of the peace is stagnation.

I want the frame. I do not want his conclusion.

The more probable figure is not the one who promises safety. It is the one who promises growth. Most of the world does not lie awake about existential risk from machine intelligence. It lies awake about electricity, logistics, credit, tax collection, and a median citizen who is twenty four and needs work. To that world the universal offer is not a moratorium. It is a stack. Cheap. Financed. Hosted. Present. Already attached to the handsets, the ports, and the power.

That is the soft Antichrist. It does not arrive with a speech about ending history. It arrives as the only AI that can grow your GDP.

I am not writing theology. I am writing underwriting.

II. The comforting story

The market is telling itself a story. The AI race is a contest of models. America builds the best systems. China copies. Europe regulates. Capital therefore clusters around closed labs, chipmakers, and hyperscale cloud. The scoreboard is a benchmark table.

That story is not false. It is incomplete in a way that misprices power. It treats the richest customers as the only customers that matter. It treats evaluations as destiny. It treats national power as a software demo.

I disagree.

The race will be decided by who becomes the default operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left. Those economies will not adopt AI as a lifestyle product. They will adopt it as a growth tool. They will take the stack that is cheap, present, financed, and attached to what they already run. If that stack is Chinese, Beijing does not need to conquer anyone. It only needs to become expensive to leave.

III. Where the mass actually is

When Sargasso maps AI adoption across emerging GDP rather than across model releases, the picture is not the one the market is priced for.

Start with the denominator. On purchasing power terms, IMF projections for 2026 put China at about $44.3 trillion against $32.4 trillion for the United States. India is near $18.9 trillion. Indonesia clears $5.4 trillion and Brazil $5.2 trillion. Turkey is at $4.0 trillion, Mexico $3.6 trillion, Saudi Arabia $2.9 trillion, Egypt $2.6 trillion, Nigeria $2.4 trillion. Nominal dollars still flatter America, and by a wide margin. China’s nominal print is about $20.9 trillion against the same $32.4 trillion for the United States. Both numbers are true. They answer different questions. Nominal tells you who can buy foreign assets. PPP tells you how much physical and administrative activity there is to automate. For an adoption thesis, the second number is the one that matters.

Ray Dalio has been describing the political consequence in plain terms. He calls it a tribute system. A hierarchical order in which leaders travel to Beijing to acknowledge relative power in exchange for access and stability. He ties it to a growing view abroad that American security guarantees will not be honored under stress. I take the framing seriously. I do not treat it as scripture. Ports and rail were the first set of rails. Models will be the next set.

IV. The evidence is already in the download data

This part of the argument is no longer speculative.

Over roughly four years, the American share of model downloads on Hugging Face fell from about sixty percent to the mid teens by late 2025, according to reporting in The Wire China. Hugging Face’s own one year review of the DeepSeek moment is blunt on the composition shift. DeepSeek R1 became the most liked model on the platform in its history. The top of that list is no longer majority American. Baidu went from zero public Hugging Face releases in 2024 to more than one hundred in 2025. ByteDance and Tencent raised their release counts eight to nine fold. Of newly created models under a year old, downloads for Chinese models surpassed any other country, including the United States. Western startups and researchers now routinely fine tune Chinese base models because those are the largest open weights available.

The Wire China’s Southeast Asia reporting puts the commercial logic in local language. A Jakarta lab head said developers will always pick the cheapest one. A Malaysian founder said he wants the biggest model and there is no Western open source offering at that size. Chinese cloud providers were running thirty seven availability zones across six Southeast Asian regions against thirty across four for the Western field.

None of this shows up cleanly in a frontier benchmark table. All of it shows up in switching costs three years from now.

V. The institutional layer

Beijing is not leaving the volume layer to price alone. In July 2026 it stood up the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, with twenty nine founding members. Public reporting names Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, and a broader set spanning Africa and Latin America among the signatories. The five year commitments attached to the body, as reported by Caixin and The Diplomat, are unglamorous and therefore serious. Training placements. Joint application centers with regional blocs. A weather early warning system deployed into dozens of countries.

Read that list as an underwriter. Training placements create the administrators who will write the next procurement. Application centers create the reference deployments. Weather systems create dependency inside a ministry that cannot afford an outage. Standards get set that way. Not with a better model. With a bureaucracy that has already learned one.

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This Red State Is Betting It Can Abolish Its Income Tax

The data center debate isn’t going so well for the builders, as Americans far and wide seriously oppose the construction of new data centers near where they live. One state, however, thinks it can incentivize residents. 

Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (R) has unveiled seven principles aligned with 2025 legislation to reduce and eventually eliminate state income tax. Under the plan, West Virginia would set aside 50% of its revenue from approved hyperscale data center projects towards the elimination of the state personal income tax – though let’s be clear: the poor, rural residents they’ll be building the DCs next to don’t pay income tax – so no benefit to them. Middle class voters (and up), however, will have all sorts of reasons to support the move. 

“Today, as the world stands on the cusp of a new digital and economic frontier, West Virginia is stepping forward once again to lead, not by repeating the mistakes of other states, but by implementing a proactive, 20-year development strategy on our terms,” Morrisey said in a statement obtained by Fox News. 

The second listed “principle” in Morrisey’s plan says all West Virginians should benefit from data center projects approved through Charleston’s “High Impact Data Center Designation (HIDC)” process and the revenue they generate. The process was established under a separate 2025 state law.

Morrisey’s plan includes “direct tax relief for citizens,” with none of the HIDC revenue entering the state general fund.

“By law, 50 percent of project revenue is dedicated directly to reducing and ultimately eliminating the State Personal Income Tax,” reads the plan. 

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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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