Tag: mass surveillance

Father Forced to Move Where His Kids Sleep After Cop Used City Flock Cameras to Stalk Him 76 Times Over a Woman

A former Amarillo, Texas, police officer allegedly weaponized the city’s surveillance system to track a local father dozens of times after developing a personal interest in a female officer the man had previously dated.

Christian Eder, 29, was fired from the Amarillo Police Department on July 17 after an internal investigation found that he allegedly misused law-enforcement databases for personal purposes. He now faces 78 counts of tampering with a government record, ABC 7 Amarillo reported.

According to NewsChannel 10, an internal audit found Eder searched the father’s license plate through the city’s Flock automated license plate reader system 76 times between February and June 2026.

He also allegedly searched the man’s name twice through TLOxp, a law-enforcement database containing information such as addresses, phone numbers, vehicles, and businesses.

Investigators reportedly found no police calls, cases, or assignments that would have justified the searches. Eder allegedly entered false explanations, including “city planning,” while dozens of other searches were reportedly marked with the reason “want.”

The father, who spoke anonymously, said Eder became interested in him after pursuing a female APD officer whom the man had previously dated.

The victim said he later learned Eder had allegedly been using a department-issued phone to monitor the female officer’s active patrol-car and body-camera feeds.

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Digital Surveillance Is Becoming the New Form of Government Power

The latest revelations involving the Department of Homeland Security demanding Google surrender data tied to a Canadian citizen demonstrate just how far governments are pushing digital surveillance powers beyond traditional legal and national boundaries. According to reports from WIRED, DHS used a “customs summons” under the Tariff Act of 1930 to demand location records, account activity, and identifying information connected to a Canadian man who had criticized ICE online following controversial immigration enforcement incidents earlier this year.

The individual reportedly had not entered the United States in more than a decade, yet American authorities still attempted to access his digital information because the technology platforms involved operate under U.S. jurisdiction.

People need to understand the implications because this goes far beyond one investigation or one political controversy. Governments are increasingly treating access to private technology infrastructure as a gateway to global surveillance authority. If your information passes through American technology companies, authorities now appear willing to argue they possess legal grounds to access portions of that data regardless of where you physically reside.

According to the lawsuit described in the WIRED investigation, DHS issued what is known as a customs summons, which functions as an administrative subpoena that does not require prior approval from a judge or grand jury. The summons reportedly demanded records involving location history, account activity, and communications tied to “threatening or harassing language.” The government allegedly justified the request under customs law despite the fact the individual was not accused of importing goods or violating customs duties in any conventional sense.

Authorities rarely begin by openly announcing broad monitoring programs targeting ordinary citizens. They start with politically sensitive cases involving terrorism, immigration enforcement, extremism, sanctions violations, or national security concerns. Then the scope quietly expands over time until governments normalize monitoring broader categories of speech, behavior, and political activity.

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MASSIVE SPYWARE BREACH: Spain’s President Lost Millions of Messages, Emails, Photos and Audio to Pegasus

A new assessment of the Pegasus spyware attack on Spanish President Pedro Sánchez has revealed the extraordinary scale of information extracted from his cellphone, reigniting questions about who was behind the operation and what may have happened to sensitive government data.

Spain’s National Intelligence Centre, known as the CNI, has acknowledged that Pegasus extracted approximately 2.7 gigabytes of data from Sánchez’s phone during the 2021 cyberattack.

To illustrate the enormous volume of information represented by that amount of data, the CNI estimates it could correspond to roughly 5 million text messages, 100,000 emails, 1,200 photographs or 40 hours of recorded audio, according to reports published in Spain.

A Spyware Attack on the President

Sánchez’s phone was compromised by Pegasus in May 2021, with investigators determining that approximately 2.6 gigabytes of information were extracted during the first attack and another roughly 130 megabytes during a subsequent intrusion.

The phone of then-Defense Minister Margarita Robles was also targeted.

The Spanish government said at the time that the attacks were external and had not been authorized by Spanish authorities. But the identity of the person or organization responsible for the attacks has remained a major unresolved question.

Pegasus, developed by Israeli technology company NSO Group, is among the world’s most sophisticated commercial surveillance tools. Once a device is successfully compromised, attackers can potentially gain access to highly sensitive communications and information stored on the phone.

For a sitting president, that could include private conversations, diplomatic communications, government documents, photographs, contacts and information involving national-security matters.

One of the most troubling questions surrounding the case is not simply how much data was extracted, but what the attackers obtained.

Spanish authorities have previously acknowledged that forensic investigators could establish the amount of data removed from the devices but could not necessarily determine exactly which documents or pieces of information were taken.

That means the 2.7-gigabyte figure provides an indication of the scale of the breach without answering the more consequential question: What did the attackers actually see?

The uncertainty has fueled political controversy in Spain and prompted renewed scrutiny of the government’s handling of sensitive communications.

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Normalizing Constant Surveillance

This is completely unacceptable. We have reached the point where you can purchase a television for your own home, pay for the television with your own money, put it in your living room, and discover that the damn thing may be capable of collecting information about you, your network, the devices around you, and what you are watching. An investigation by Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers found LG televisions scanning local networks for phones, smartwatches, computers, and other devices, collecting information about nearby Wi-Fi networks, location and IP information, and using Automatic Content Recognition to identify what appears on the television, including content coming through HDMI. Researchers also reported finding evidence of microphone audio being captured while a television was in standby and stored locally while offline.

LG acknowledges that its televisions can scan for compatible devices on the same network, describing this as ordinary smart-TV functionality, and says its ACR advertising feature is opt-in. Researchers nevertheless demonstrated just how much information modern televisions are technically capable of seeing around the household. LG Ad Solutions boasts of reaching hundreds of millions of “addressable secondary devices,” and LG advertising executives have used phrases such as “we own the glass” when describing the company’s relationship with the television screen. Excuse me? You sold me the glass. YOU DO NOT OWN IT AFTER I BUY IT. That mentality is precisely the problem with the modern technology industry. You think you are purchasing a product. Increasingly, corporations look at the product as a permanent doorway into your life.

I have written extensively about Flock cameras and the government’s expanding surveillance machinery. I have written about commercially available location information, license-plate databases, facial recognition, and the gradual destruction of privacy. Now look around your own house. Your television, refrigerator, doorbell, phone, smart gadgets, laptop, and any other device connected to the internet is capable of watching you.

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Trump Says He Likes Flock Cameras for Law Enforcement – “I Sort of Like Them”

President Trump on Sunday told reporters that he likes the controversial license plate-reading Flock cameras on roads across the country. 

Concerns have been raised by Americans about the right to privacy and unwarranted surveillance on ordinary motorists, tracking their every move and storing the information in a database.

Several Republican lawmakers and state officials have also expressed opposition to the technology.

When asked about the cameras on Sunday, Trump said, “I sort of like them because of that,” noting that law enforcement uses them to apprehend suspects.

“I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump said.

“They think it’s an infringement, but I like them.”

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Flock surveillance cameras and Second Amendment rights clash at gun shops across America

It’s widely known, certainly among my readers, that Atlanta-based Flock Group Inc. is violating the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans on a mass scale, and any local politicians or sheriffs who don’t realize that clearly don’t have even a basic understanding of what those rights consist of.

The Fourth Amendment protects the right of all Americans to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. It also requires warrants to be based on probable cause and to describe the place and things to be searched or seized.

But a less recognized clash is taking shape between Flock’s AI surveillance grid and the Second Amendment, which gives citizens the right to keep and bear arms, part of which the courts have generally agreed forbids the creation of a national gun registry.

But what if every gun purchase is logged on a video and stored somewhere in a central database?

The Washington Times is reporting that gun shops are pulling down their Flock cameras following a growing number of complaints from customers who believe the cameras have turned into a monitoring network that threatens their gun rights.

Michael Carter, owner of Gun Commanders in Cleveland, Georgia, installed Flock cameras two years ago to combat burglars and help law enforcement nab illegal gun buyers.

He told the Times that he recently took down the cameras, which record license plate numbers and other data such as make, model, color, and even scratches, dents and bumper stickers to track vehicles entering and exiting his parking lot. He pulled the cameras after his customers complained and posted their criticisms on social media.

This is the latest component of a nationwide privacy-rights backlash against​ Flock’s AI-powered surveillance cameras popping up on street corners, in parks, parking lots, neighborhoods or on drones buzzing overhead.

Carter has taken the hint. If he values his customers, he had better ditch the AI surveillance cameras documenting everyone who comes to his shop to buy a gun.

“I installed the system with the best of intentions — to protect the people who walk through our doors every day,” Carter told Now Georgia. “After listening to my customers, I realized that maintaining their trust is more important than any piece of technology.”

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America After 9/11: 25 Years of Fear, War, Surveillance, and Permanent Emergency

“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in  –  and the West in general  –  into an unbearable hell and a choking life.” – Osama bin Laden (October 2001)

“GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.” – President Donald Trump (September 2026)

Days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, President Trump flooded his Truth Social account with AI-generated fantasies of himself commanding armies of giant, red-eyed robots.

In one, Trump strides through a darkened Washington surrounded by robotic soldiers beneath the words, “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.” Another declares, “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.” A third depicts Trump seated on a mechanical throne, surrounded by an army of robots and the presidential seal, beneath the warning: “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.”

Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: has the nightmare ever really ended?

For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the next emergency.

That fear has given us endless war, mass surveillance, militarized police, secret courts, indefinite detention, government watchlists, domestic military deployments and an imperial presidency armed with powers that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.

Now the man entrusted with the imperial powers of the modern-day presidency is publicly imagining himself enthroned over robotic armies, raining destruction on his enemies and promising nightmares.

The imagery may be unhinged from reality, but the powers of the presidency are not.

Neither are the questions raised by Trump’s increasingly unhinged public behavior about whether any president – especially one armed with the accumulated powers of the post-9/11 national-security state – is mentally and temperamentally fit to wield them.

That is where America’s two great anniversaries of 2026 collide.

On July 4, America celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, born from a revolt against King George III and a system in which too much power rested in the hands of one ruler. At its heart was the radical proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.

On September 11, we mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, shattered the nation’s sense of security, and set in motion a massive expansion of presidential, military and national-security power.

America began by rebelling against a king.

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A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over

Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found.

The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In one case, a PITT analyzed the financial activity of a man who was driving across Montana, and local authorities stopped him under the pretense of an obstructed license plate and charged him with a DUI.

404 Media identified one PITT in the Spokane Sector, Washington, which polices the U.S. border with Canada, and another in the Laredo Sector, Texas, which polices the border with Mexico. The findings add to an Associated Press investigation from last year which found Border Patrol was using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program.

“The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in an email. Here Border Patrol seems to be “using parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy. If we can’t meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can’t trust them,” he added.

Predictive policing is a highly controversial practice that police departments and federal agencies are increasingly turning to. The practice is designed to find people who may have committed crimes, but at the moment, no evidence of them doing so exists. Broadly, law enforcement may analyze data — such as a person’s movements, where they are at a certain time, or the roads they drive — then create or find another pretense to pull them over.

At around 9:30pm one night in May, Kyle William Olson was driving his black Chevy SUV on Interstate 90, with his dog Ducky in the backseat, according to police reports and an interview Olson gave to 404 Media. In Olson’s vehicle were marijuana edibles, marijuana cuttings, and butane hash oil. He works on a licensed cannabis farm in California, where he had picked up the weed, and was transporting it home to Wisconsin, he told 404 Media.

Olson drove past Sergeant James Beck of the Montana Highway Patrol who was sitting in his police car along with a colleague. When Olson passed, Beck noticed the vehicle’s license plate was obstructed by what he described as a tinted cover and the luggage holder, according to a police report. Beck pulled out, caught up to Olson, and pulled him over.

“Nothing major,” Beck said once he approached the passenger side window and exchanged pleasantries with Olson, according to bodycam footage. Beck said Olson’s license plate was “a little bit obstructed.”

“Just so you know, that’s our reason for stopping you,” Beck said. In the end, the officers demanded Olson step out of the vehicle, they tested his blood and charged him with a DUI. Authorities later charged Olson with possession with intent to distribute because of the marijuana in his vehicle, Olson told 404 Media.

But that wasn’t the real reason for stopping Olson.

During discovery in his case, Olson was provided a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document that explained how Border Patrol instigated his traffic stop. Written by Border Patrol Agent Matthew Phelps, the document said Phelps was assigned to the “Spokane Sector Border Patrol Targeting & Intelligence Division (TID) — Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team (PITT).” Olson shared the document with 404 Media.

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Doctor Doom Thanked Seattle for All the Surveillance Cameras

Doctor Doom took the podium at a Public Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday to thank the council for covering the city in surveillance cameras. “Doom took over Axon enterprises […] and now Doom will be watching you. Your continued cooperation expanding Doom’s surveillance network is required,” the Marvel supervillain said.

“This is the first of Doom’s gifts to the city of Seattle. The second gift is this: Doom will expand the real-time crime center to all neighborhoods with over 1,000 cameras watching every move,” Doom said. “Doom has total dominion over the city of Seattle. Doom will be behind the cameras watching those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. Doom will be able to find your immigrant neighbors and Doom will be able to ensure the safety of the women of Seattle alongside officers that stalk their exes.”

Doom is actually Clifford Cawthon, a policy advisor for the Washington State Department of Commerce. Cawthorn donned the silver mask and gloves to draw attention to tech-driven mass surveillance in Seattle, an issue he’s been passionate about for years. Cawthon is also a member of Community Not Cameras, a local activist group that’s attempting to reign in Seattle’s use of surveillance systems sold by Flock and Axon.

Seattle’s PD has access to 62 surveillance cameras around the city, many of them hooked up to a real-time crime center (RTCC). “The RTCC takes in information from a vast pool of sources, including CCTV, [body-worn camera], geolocation data, automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), alert sources like shot detection or alarm systems, and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) software,” according to a description on the surveillance company Axon’s website.

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Texas Police Used AI to Write Report About Using Flock to Search for Woman Who Had Abortion

The Texas sheriff’s office that used Flock to search more than 80,000 cameras nationwide for a woman who had a self-administered abortion used Axon’s Draft One AI tool to help write a police report about the incident, documents shared with 404 Media show. The tool was used in part to summarize a discussion of “the legal implications of the situation.”

404 Media first reported on the incident in May 2025 in which the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched Flock’s nationwide network for the whereabouts of a woman who self-administered an abortion, highlighting the threat of this AI-powered surveillance system being used to criminalize or track women seeking reproductive healthcare. The use of both Flock and Axon’s Draft One, which uses audio from body camera footage to automatically draft police reports using artificial intelligence, shows how quickly police departments have come to use AI surveillance tools even in critically sensitive cases.

“I acknowledge this report was generated using Draft One by Axon,” a section of the report reads.

The abortion case has since become a flashpoint in the controversy over the use of Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, has repeatedly and erroneously suggested that 404 Media misreported the case and that the search was done only for the woman’s safety because her family was worried about her. 404 Media previously reported that the entire police investigation was done at the behest of the woman’s abusive partner and that police discussed whether they were allowed to charge her with a crime: “It was discussed at the time with the District Attorney’s office and learned the State could not statutorily charge [the woman] for taking the pill to cause the abortion,” a police report previously obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media said. Concern from her family is never mentioned in that earlier police report or in the AI-generated police report used to write this article.

The AI-generated incident report was obtained by journalist Cameron Probert of the Tri-City Herald and shared with 404 Media. The report shows there is extensive body camera and audio evidence that would clarify what happened in the case, and that at least one police officer, sergeant Damien Bethel, used Draft One to write his report on the incident. Parts of a police incident report show that Draft One was used to summarize a discussion between police over “the legal implications of the situation” and other investigative aspects of the case. The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has repeatedly refused to release body camera footage from the case, including in response to 404 Media’s public records requests.

“Deputies discussed the legal implications of the situation, noting that while the girlfriend self-administered the abortion pill, there were no criminal charges applicable under current Texas law,” Bethel’s report states, providing no more details about the specifics of the discussion. “Deputies also considered the possibility of a civil lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company that supplied the pill.”

Bethell’s Draft One report further states, “There is digital multi-media evidence from Body Worn Camera footage of this call for service in the AXON Evidence Library. There is digital multi-media evidence of In-Car Camera footage of this call for service in the AXON Evidence Library or the WatchGuard Evidence Library. There were digital images captured while on the scene.” The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has thus far refused to release even redacted versions of this evidence that the EFF and 404 Media have separately requested.

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