Tag: police state

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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Mom Rages After Pennsylvania Borough Criminally Charges Her 10- and 12-Year-Old Daughters Over a Broken Playground Swing — Then Threatens to SUE After the Judge Throws the Case Out

The girls were hauled into court after their mother refused to pay a repair bill without first seeing evidence that her daughters intentionally damaged the swing.

This is bureaucratic insanity.

Two young sisters, ages 10 and 12, were criminally charged after a playground swing broke while they were playing with other children in Springdale, Pennsylvania.

The ordeal began on May 21 at Veterans Memorial Park, northeast of Pittsburgh, when a group of children decided to twist the swing’s chains tightly and release them so the riders would spin around and become dizzy, according to WTAE.

It was the kind of playground stunt children have performed for generations.

But this time, one of the chains snapped.

According to their mother, Katie Huss, her daughters immediately told her what had happened when she arrived to pick them up.

Approximately two weeks later, a Springdale police officer reportedly arrived at the family’s home carrying surveillance photographs and seeking payment for the damaged swing.

Huss said the photographs showed numerous children participating, prompting her to question why police were approaching her family alone. The borough later maintained that five juveniles were identified and that the approximately $295 repair bill was divided equally, about $59 per child.

Three families reportedly paid their shares.

Huss refused, saying she wanted evidence that her daughters had intentionally broken the swing and information showing when the playground equipment had last been inspected or repaired.

Then the situation escalated dramatically.

The borough pursued criminal-mischief charges against her 10- and 12-year-old daughters.

“They were super scared,” Huss told WTAE. “They’re good little girls. They go out, and they play.”

Springdale officials denied giving the family a direct “pay or your children will be charged” ultimatum. Officials argued that restitution had been offered as a way to resolve the matter without continuing juvenile proceedings.

But when Huss declined to pay, her daughters still ended up as defendants in court, Triblive reported.

At the hearing, a Springdale police officer testified that the children had violated a posted playground rule instructing visitors not to twist the swing chains.

Borough Solicitor Craig Alexander reportedly argued that people sometimes break rules for the thrill of it.

There was just one enormous problem with the borough’s case: Criminal mischief requires evidence of criminal intent.

The judge determined that the children’s conduct caused the swing to break but found insufficient evidence that the girls intended to damage it. They were consequently found not responsible.

In other words, the children were playing recklessly, not carrying out a calculated attack against municipal playground equipment.

Common sense finally prevailed in the courtroom, but only after two little girls were subjected to criminal proceedings over a broken swing and a $59 repair dispute.

Huss said she would have understood a warning or a conversation explaining how the equipment should be used. What she never expected was for ordinary childhood misbehavior to result in actual criminal charges.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t. Now they want to sue the mom over pocket change

Even after the acquittal, borough officials have vowed to file a civil complaint to recover repair costs. Huss says she is “still waiting to find out if they’re going to escalate it further as they promised.” Her answer: “I’m not going to give in.”

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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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Hong Kong Court Upholds Cardinal Joseph Zen’s Conviction over Protester Relief Fund

A Hong Kong court on Thursday upheld a ruling against retired bishop and democracy advocate Cardinal Joseph Zen and four co-defendants for failing to register the humanitarian fund they created to help protesters arrested during the pro-democracy uprising of 2019.

Zen and his co-defendants were arrested in 2022 on “suspicion of colluding with foreign forces” under the odious “national security law” China imposed on Hong Kong in 2020.

The law was tailored to crush the pro-democracy movement by criminalizing all resistance to the Beijing-controlled city government. One of its provisions made “collusion with foreigners” into a crime, giving the government an easy way to throw protesters in jail by accusing them of colluding with foreign governments and media organizations.

The Vatican expressed deep concern about Zen’s arrest and human rights groups around the world were outraged. Cardinal Zen was 90 years old at the time and needed a walking stick to make his court appearances.

The cardinal and his colleagues were never actually charged under the national security law invoked as a pretext for arresting them. Instead, they were convicted in November 2022 of failing to properly register their organization, the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which they established to pay medical and legal fees for protesters who were arrested during the uprising. The fund was created in June 2019 and operated until September 2021, when the Hong Kong police threatened to investigate it under the National Security Law.

The charges were brought under the Societies Ordinance, a seldom-invoked 1949 Hong Kong law that requires organizations to either register or apply for an exemption from registration within one month of their creation. According to the Associated Press on Thursday, Cardinal Zen and his co-defendants are the first people to be convicted under the Societies Ordinance.

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Tyranny by Technicality: The Supreme Court Will Not Save Our Republic

“The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people.”—Justice William O. Douglas

For years, we have been warning that the U.S. Supreme Court would not save us from the American police state.

That warning has not grown less urgent. It has simply become more complicated.

The danger today is not merely that courts will favor order and procedure over freedom. It is that by the time justice makes an appearance, it will arrive so narrowly, so procedurally and so late that the government will already have prevailed.

Consider the fight over President Trump’s massive $400 million White House ballroom.

Lower courts found serious reason to doubt Trump’s claim to unilateral authority to tear down the historic East Wing and proceed with the project without congressional approval, and they ordered above-ground construction halted.

Those orders were stayed while the administration appealed.

Construction continued.

Then the administration argued that the project had progressed so far that stopping it had become impractical.

On August 31, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, allowed the construction to continue—not because it determined that Trump had acted legally, but because the majority concluded that the preservationists challenging the project likely lacked legal standing to sue.

The Supreme Court expressly declined to decide whether the project itself was lawful.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joining the Court’s three liberal justices in dissent, warned that allowing the project to proceed was “no victory for the separation of powers.”

Therein lies the problem with justice in the age of the American police state: by the time the courts finally decide whether government officials have overstepped their constitutional authority, the deed may already be done, the right already violated and the damage already inflicted.

The building is already gone. The troops are already deployed. The surveillance system is already operating. The people are already detained. The agency is already dismantled. The data is already collected. The war is already underway.

And whatever constitutional principle eventually emerges from the litigation arrives too late to undo the damage.

At what point will “We the People” be told that we, too, lack standing to object to the destruction of our republic?

The Founders built safeguards into the constitutional system to guard against any one branch of government becoming all-powerful: If the president overreaches, Congress is supposed to stop him. If Congress fails to do its duty, the courts are supposed to intervene. If a lower court gets it wrong, the Supreme Court will set things right.

That is how the system is supposed to work.

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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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Documents reveal why the Canadian military was asking soldiers about ‘extremist’ hats

In December 2024, Harrison Faulkner of True North broke the story: a questionnaire went out to soldiers asking if they’d ever “liked” an extremist post on social media, donated to an extremist cause, or purchased “extremism merchandise — such as a Make Canada Great Again hat.” 

Rebel News filed an access to information request the day it went viral. Twenty-one months later, the answer came back: 2,688 pages, most of it useless — the actual survey questions are blacked out entirely, withheld under the Access to Information Act’s trade-secret provisions. A hat questionnaire, apparently, is a trade secret.

When the story broke, National Defence’s approved line for reporters was: “DND/CAF is not funding this research, nor has it contracted this research.” But the consent form every soldier signed lists, at the top: “External Funder/Sponsor: Department of National Defence (DND).”

In fact, DND signed a $49,995 funding agreement with Ontario Tech University, five dollars under the disclosure threshold, and later paid $250,000 more to Dr. Barbara Perry’s “Network for Research on Hateful Conduct and Right-Wing Extremism in the Canadian Armed Forces.” She is getting rich off of calling our soldiers racist.

The whole thing traces back to General Jonathan Vance ordering the study in 2019 — not long before resigning over his own conduct scandal. DND then rewrote the survey questions, pushed it down the chain of command, and leaned on a reluctant Navy — already suffering “severe staff shortages” — to participate. The consent form warns soldiers that “incriminating” answers get reported to military police, who can in turn notify their commanding officer. Risk to a career, for a hat.

Ezra is more worried about left-wing violence in the CAF — like Gabriel Lepage, the Antifa extremist who threw incendiary devices into a crowded Montreal church while working at a Canadian Forces base, exposed by Rebel’s own Alexa Lavoie.

Internally, DND tracked the media fallout using MediaBiasFactCheck.com, grading True North as low-credibility and “part of the right ideology perspective,” while noting with relief: “We have not observed any articles from mainstream media.” When reporters pressed on the funding, staff wrote plainly: “I don’t think we touch it at this point.” They knew, and they chose not to tell you.

The study’s own vetted webpage admits the number of CAF members holding extremist beliefs is “comparable to the general population.” No epidemic. Just a headline, and a professor with a grant.

This was a loyalty test, not a research project. If you were nineteen and thinking about enlisting, and you saw this — would you?

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You Could Be Next: Trump’s Gestapo Tactics Are Getting Worse

Imagine living in a country that can arrest and imprison you whenever it wants, without any judge or jury deciding you did anything wrong. It can call you a “domestic terrorist” and put you in prison for life. It can even execute you on the basis of nothing more than its own decision that you’re dangerous.

Well, I have bad news for you. You’re living in that country right now.

As he loses power and popularity — and faces mounting resistance abroad and at home — Trump is enlarging his police state.

His regime is having ever more people arrested, imprisoned, and deported without any judge or jury deciding they did anything wrong. It’s using racial profiling in deciding whom to target. It’s making warrantless searches and seizures of people, their cars, and their homes. All of this violates the US Constitution.

According to a new analysis by The New York Times, the regime’s surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people, most of whom have not been charged with or convicted of a crime (less than 4 percent had a past violent criminal conviction).

Those being arrested, imprisoned, and potentially deported include some married to US citizens, others who entered the US legally and are pursuing asylum claims, and some who came here with temporary legal status that the Trump regime has decided to revoke.

In other words, they were all here legally.

If you have temporary protected status because you escaped from inhumane conditions in another country, ICE might now summon you to an ICE office and put a monitor around your ankle — even if you have no criminal history and are in full compliance with your immigration status. The Trump regime has unilaterally revoked temporary protected status and claims the ankle monitors are necessary to track people whom it may want to deport at some point.

You’re not even safe if you’re a US citizen born in America. ProPublica has found that more than 170 US citizens have been wrongfully detained by ICE agents in raids and protests over a recent nine-month span. It described cases involving alleged force and multiday detention without access to counsel or communication.

Some estimates put the number of US citizens subjected to ICE as much higher, but there’s no way of knowing because there’s no legal process for filtering out and protecting American citizens, just as there’s no legal process for protecting anyone else who’s here legally. Trump’s police state is extrajudicial, and it’s being done in secret.

You might even be murdered, without a trial finding you guilty of anything. In addition to Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota last January, ICE agents have murdered two others just this summer.

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