Tag: technology

SELF-DEFENSE AGAINST THE MACHINE: Virginia Man Puts Warrantless Flock Surveillance on Trial

As millions of Americans passively consume state-sanctioned fireworks this Fourth of July, it is crucial to remember that Independence Day was not birthed from compliance, but from radical, unapologetic defiance against a monolithic empire. That raw spirit of 1776 has not been extinguished; it has simply shifted targets from a tyrant king to the digital panopticon. The surveillance state rarely takes kindly to those who blind its all-seeing eye, and the latest casualty in this modern war for liberty is a 41-year-old Suffolk, Virginia resident named Jeffrey Scott Sovern. Between April and October of 2025, local authorities allege Sovern channeled that revolutionary energy by systematically dismantling 13 Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras operated by the private surveillance behemoth Flock Safety.

Investigators claim Sovern separated the two-piece mounting poles and removed the tracking equipment with tools, targeting the $1,300 setups that include the camera, solar panel, and mounting hardware. For allegedly blinding the panopticon, Sovern now faces 13 counts of felony destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny, and six counts of possessing burglary tools.

The official narrative, conveniently laid out in a criminal complaint, asserts that after Sovern was arrested on October 17, 2025, on unrelated warrants, he outright confessed to disassembling the units. Police claim he admitted to keeping solar panels, batteries, and other hardware at his Nicklaus Drive residence, which culminated in a raid that allegedly recovered six of those stolen solar panels.

Unsurprisingly, a spokesperson for Flock Safety issued a statement expressing gratitude toward law enforcement for holding individuals accountable when their devices are damaged. Yet, this corporate applause completely ignores the glaring constitutional crisis created by the very existence of these devices on public roadways.

These ALPR networks act as an unconstitutional dragnet, indiscriminately logging the movements of innocent, peaceful individuals without a shred of probable cause. In fact, just a year prior in June 2024, a Circuit Court judge in neighboring Norfolk correctly ruled that collecting location data from the city’s 172 Flock cameras constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, accurately likening the vast database to warrantless tracking devices.

The state’s portrayal of a clean, by-the-book investigation is already facing heavy public scrutiny. Individuals claiming to have been inside Sovern’s residence during the raid publicly asserted that police stormed the home, forced a resident to cower in a towel, and threatened everyone with handcuffs while refusing to immediately produce a warrant.

While disabling a device that is actively executing an unconstitutional search on your person might seem like a righteous defense of liberty, bringing that dismantled hardware into your home is a fatal tactical error. By allegedly harvesting the state-contracted property for personal use, Sovern crossed the threshold into petit larceny, handing the monopoly on violence the exact legal pretext it needed to execute a traumatic raid and levy multiple felonies.

To enforce the protection of their massive surveillance grid, the state didn’t hesitate to escalate its own aggression against a citizen. Investigators openly admitted in the criminal complaint that they obtained a search warrant for a GPS tracker, slapping it onto Sovern’s vehicle prior to his arrest to secretly monitor his movements and place him near the scenes of the disabled cameras.

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Flock Safety CEO Says If You Don’t Like His Pervasive Surveillance Cameras, You’re A Terrorist

Garrett Langley is the founder and CEO of Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based public safety technology company specializing in automated license plate readers and drone surveillance. 

In the video below, Langley refers to the organization ‘DeFlock’ that works to stop the expansion of his products, as terrorists.

Langely also freely admits his company tracks people. In the video he admits his company uses AI to integrate massive amounts of data to track anything that moves in the view of his devices.

The Flock System has also been disclosed to contain microphones and other capabilities, to track audio, bluetooth, etc.

This is not freedom, this is Big Brother.

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Is Tesla About To Use Facial Recognition Before Activating Full Self-Driving

Tesla is reportedly preparing a series of updates, including one that would use a vehicle’s cabin camera to verify a driver’s identity before activating Full Self-Driving.

It sounds a bit dystopian, but this is likely the direction that connected smart-car brands are headed. As vehicles become more autonomous, automakers will increasingly need to verify who is behind the wheel before unlocking FSD functions.

The X account Tesla App Updates penned a new report outlining a series of changes possibly headed to the mobile app, including deeper FSD integration, more owner-facing controls, and expanded software monetization infrastructure.

What stood out to us is the possibility of a new FSD identity-verification layer tied to the cabin camera. If the system cannot verify that the driver matches an authorized profile, FSD could be blocked.

Here’s the full report:

Native Support for “Coastal Blue” Paint

Tesla has added support for a new paint color called Coastal Blue, currently exclusive to the base Model Y Rear-Wheel Drive built at Giga Berlin for the European market.

The strings COASTALBLUE, getCoastalblue, setCoastalblue, clearCoastalblue, and hasCoastalblue show that the app is being updated to properly render this color in its 3D vehicle models. The app can now dynamically load the correct material and shading when a vehicle with this paint code is detected, ensuring accurate representation on the home screen, climate menu, and widgets.

In-App Searchable Video Tutorials

Tesla is building a native, searchable video tutorial library directly into the mobile app. Users will have access to a dedicated tutorial hub (VideoTutorialContent and VideoSearchPanel) with a search bar (VideoSearchBar) that returns relevant results (VideoSearchResultItem). This allows owners to quickly find how-to videos for features like FSD, wiper blade replacement, or PIN to Drive without leaving the app.

Users can also pin important tutorials (setPinnedVideo, pinnedVideo) for quick access. These pinned videos are expected to sync across devices via mergePinnedVideos. The interface uses a clean card-based design (VideoListCard) with pagination (VIDEO_SEARCH_PAGE_SIZE) for better performance.

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China-Linked Socialist NGO Derailed $23.6 Billion In Data Center Buildouts: Report

Our note on Thursday titled “World’s Largest Data Center Project On Verge Of Collapse After Blackstone Unexpectedly Pulls Out” detailed Blackstone dialing back its presence from Northern Virginia’s data-center alley, raising questions about whether the AI infrastructure buildout, colliding with local resistance movements, has begun to hit hard limits.

Just days after agreeing to sell stakes in three Virginia data centers to Digital Realty Trust for $3.5 billion, Blackstone’s QTS Realty Trust is reportedly abandoning plans for its portion of the massive Prince William Digital Gateway project. The 2,100-acre campus was expected to include as many as 37 data-center buildings and require city-scale power supplies.

“For community organizers and residents that spent the last five years opposing the Digital Gateway, QTS’s pullout will now validate a playbook that involved pressure campaigns on local politicians and legal attacks. It will also unleash even more powerful blowback nationwide against these unwanted developments,” we noted.

That brings us to the composition of the local resistance. Multiple reports suggest data center opposition is not entirely organic.

In fact, one familiar player appears to be involved, a name our readers know well, and the U.S. government certainly recognizes because a China-based billionaire funds the socialist NGO network.

Y Combinator founder Garry Tan, also founder of Garry’s List, a civic engagement organization, cited the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s recent report on how a “coordinated foreign influence campaign against American AI — running through CCP state media, a Shanghai-based Marxist’s nonprofit network, and foreign billionaire dark money that has funneled $2B+ into US advocacy infrastructure.”

Garry’s List noted, “AI doomerism isn’t as organic as it looks.“

That China-based Marxist’s nonprofit network spreading across the US is supported by Neville Roy Singham, who has reportedly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, media operations, and activist networks that seek to sow chaos and spread communism inside the US.

Earlier this week, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, was authorized to examine whether Singham, NGOs he funded, or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, or other financial crimes.

Given that federal investigators are circling the socialists in the Singham NGO network, Garry’s List noted that Singham’s Party for Socialism and Liberation has “run 21 campaigns across 14 states that delayed, scaled back, or blocked $23.6 billion in AI infrastructure investment.”

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Anthropic Moves To Shut Loopholes Letting Chinese Tech Firms Access Claude

Days after the Commerce Department lifted three-week-old export controls on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos AI models over national security concerns, a new report says the company is moving to close loopholes that have allowed Chinese firms to access its most advanced models.

The Financial Times cites people familiar with the matter who say Chinese companies, such as Ant Financial, used overseas subsidiaries, cloud providers, and internal corporate networks to access AI chatbots such as Claude Code.  

To note, Alibaba owns about one-third of Ant Financial. Alibaba was recently blacklisted by the US Government over concerns that it was effectively an arm of the Chinese military.

Ant reportedly provided employees with corporate Claude accounts routed through its Singapore-linked intranet, while ByteDance employees have used VPNs and expense reimbursements for personal Claude subscriptions.

The workarounds do not appear to violate US or Chinese law, but they breach Anthropic’s terms of service, which ban Chinese companies and Beijing-controlled foreign entities from using its models.

Anthropic said it prohibits access from unsupported regions, including China, and continuously updates enforcement systems to detect evasion.

FT provided more details on its crackdown:

As part of its efforts to crack down on unauthorised access, Anthropic has targeted “transfer station” services, which relay requests from users in mainland China through Claude accounts registered overseas before returning the responses.

However, larger Chinese AI groups generally avoid transfer stations because the services’ operators are widely suspected of storing or reselling prompts. Executives worry rivals could analyse those requests to understand how they are using advanced models to improve their own systems.

What’s ironic is that a company behind one of the world’s most advanced coding models apparently failed to build the proper guardrails needed to keep Chinese firms from accessing it, even as it works to close those loopholes.

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Billionaire Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Warns Woke AI Company Anthropic Could Rig 2028 Election for Democrats

Billionaire technology Peter Thiel warned that AI company Anthropic could use its technological advantage to influence the 2028 presidential election in favor of Democrats.

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Thiel suggested that Anthropic, which he described as a “woke liberal company,” was “winning the AI race” and could use its advanced AI models to “rig the elections in 2028.”

Thiel, who co-founded both PayPal and Palantir, argued he company would be able to “completely outwit” any efforts by Elon Musk to counter it through X because of the power of its technology.

Anthropic has declined to comment, referring reporters to a previous blog post on election integrity and political bias.

The company has clashed with the Trump administration, which has even designated it a “supply chain risk” because of the restrictions it wants to place on military programs.

CEO Dario Amodei is known for his left-wing views and has likened President Trump to a “feudal warlord.”

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Ukraine Plans To Hyper-Innovate Humanoid Robot Soldiers

At the start of February, we pointed out that “humanoid warfare nears” and suspected these war bots were headed for Ukraine for testing. 

That hunch was confirmed by early March, after a TIME Magazine article reported that Foundation Robotics, a U.S.-based startup developing humanoid robots for industrial and military applications, had recently sent two Phantom MK1 robots to Ukraine for testing. 

Mike LeBlanc, co-founder of Foundation… 

The modern battlefield across western Eurasia has become the world’s AI weapons lab, where drones, autonomous systems, electronic warfare, and ground bots are being stress-tested in real time. 

For any ‘war unicorn’ startup trying to validate AI-enabled killing machines, Ukraine has become the proving ground, and soldiers on the front lines will quickly tell these startups whether their products work or not – that’s the part of hyperinnovation that people aren’t seeing yet, but it is becoming visible as low-cost AI killing systems begin to spread across the world. 

Last month, we were the first to debut a new video showing the Phantom MK1 robot operating a mobile light mortar system during a live-fire training exercise in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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New EU proposal aims to stop drivers from speeding using satellites

According to the proposal, every new car would be equipped with a device that can limit the engine’s power for drivers who are speeding. This would be done remotely, based on their speed and location.

The system would use a combination of GPS technology, satellite data, and cameras to identify speed limits and monitor vehicle speed.

How would this work? First, satellites pinpoint the car’s location and determine its speed. Next, the car’s onboard cameras spot traffic signs that indicate the maximum speed. If a driver is speeding, the car’s built-in computer forces it to slow down to the maximum speed limit.

Safety campaigners believe the technology will significantly reduce casualties by 20%.

If approved, the system could be mandatory for all new vehicles in the EU by 2030.

The United Kingdom would be exempted because of Brexit. However, experts expect that car manufacturers will introduce the proposed technology in the UK as well, as it would be too expensive to build cars just for the UK market.

Shadow Transport Secretary Richard Holden has raised concerns about the technology’s reliability, fears of hacking, and doubts about drivers’ privacy.

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Your Car Was Never the Target

For years, governments assured the public that license plate readers were simply tools to catch stolen vehicles, fugitives, and dangerous criminals. That was always the sales pitch. Now the mask is coming off. According to reports, a new surveillance platform called SignalTrace is being marketed to law enforcement and government agencies that goes far beyond reading license plates. The system can collect identifiers from smartphones, smartwatches, Bluetooth devices, vehicle infotainment systems, Wi-Fi hotspots, tire pressure sensors, RFID devices, AirTags, and even pet microchips. They are no longer interested in tracking your car. They are interested in tracking you.

The frightening part is how openly this is being discussed. The stated goal of the technology is to “bridge the gap between vehicle and occupant.” In other words, the authorities no longer want to know where a vehicle traveled. They want to know who was inside, where they went, who they met, and how often they traveled together. The system creates a unique electronic fingerprint based on the collection of devices surrounding a person. Your phone, your watch, your headphones, your car, and even your dog’s microchip become pieces of a digital identity that can be followed everywhere you go.

This is exactly how governments always expand surveillance. They begin with a limited purpose that sounds reasonable. Then the technology advances and suddenly the scope becomes limitless. License plate readers were sold as crime-fighting tools. Then they became databases of vehicle movements. Now they are evolving into systems that can reconstruct an individual’s entire pattern of life. Privacy advocates have warned that these systems can reveal where people work, where they worship, where they seek medical treatment, and who they associate with. Once that information exists in a searchable database, every government agency will want access.

What is unfolding is part of a much broader trend. Governments around the world are building digital identification systems, expanding financial surveillance, monitoring communications, and centralizing personal data. At the same time, law enforcement agencies are seeking nationwide access to license plate reader networks that provide near real-time tracking capabilities across the United States. The infrastructure is being assembled piece by piece. Most people only see each individual step. They fail to recognize the larger picture until the system is fully operational.

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4Chan trolls UK government with another AI hamster as fines hit $800k

4Chan has continued to troll the UK government and Ofcom after they hit the website with fines of over $800,000, and they’re answering with more AI hamsters.

Over the last year, a number of governments have been cracking down on what online content can be accessed by children under the age of 18. That includes the United Kingdom, which is working on a social media ban similar to the one that Australia implemented. 

The UK has implemented age safety verification checks for certain material too and has hit a number of websites with takedowns, as well as fines. 4Chan has been caught up in the latter, being issued with fines that now total over $800,000.

While Ofcom, the UK regulator, is still seeking payment from 4Chan, their lawyer has once again responded with an AI hamster.

4Chan hits back at UK government’s latest fine

“Ofcom wrote. Again. Demanding that 4chan pay its fine. Sent us bank details and everything. Oh no. Super scary. We replied with a hamster. Again,” Preston Byrne, the website’s lawyer, posted on X. 

Byrne also showed off the email response he sent to the regulator. “You want money, huh? Come get it,” he started, with an AI hamster wearing a Thug Life hate being surronded by mountains of dollar bills.

“As 4Chan has no assets in the United Kingdom (given that it has no connection to the United Kingdom), that would require you to show up in a US court as a platiff, waive soreign immunity, and overcome existing U.S. doctrine regarding the non-enforcement of foreign regulatory penalties. 

“We suspect that isn’t going to happen. We suspect you know it isn’t going to happen, too.”

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