Tag: wrongful arrest

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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Federal Appellate Court Rules In Favor Of AI Child Porn

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

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

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

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

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

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The Biden-Era C.B.P. Fabricated a Document Used to Imprison a Top-Level Brazilian Official. A U.S. Federal Judge Just Ordered Full Disclosure.

In a case with serious repercussions for U.S. national security and for Brazil, a Clinton-appointed U.S. federal judge concluded that an immigration record entered in the Customs and Border Protection system during the Biden administration was fraudulent. The fraudulent record reflected a non-existent entry into the U.S. by the national security advisor to former President Jair Bolsonaro. The fabricated entry was then somehow obtained and used by a controversial Brazilian Supreme Court judge to imprison that national security official.

Beyond concluding that the C.B.P. document was fake, the federal judge, Gregory A. Presnell of the Middle District of Florida, berated U.S. government lawyers for their refusal to produce all documents in the government’s possession concerning who was responsible for this fraudulent record and how it ended up being used in Brazil to imprison one of Bolsonaro’s closest advisors. I obtained a copy of the transcript from that U.S. judicial hearing and first reported the developments in Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, on Friday.

The judge’s orders were issued as part of a lawsuit brought in U.S. federal court late last year by Filipe Martins, the top Bolsonaro advisor on international relations who was preventively imprisoned for six months in 2024 based on this false C.B.P. immigration entry. At the time, Martins was awaiting trial on charges that he had participated with Bolsonaro in plotting a coup after Lula’s narrow victory over Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential election.

The judge overseeing the cases involving the alleged coup is Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has become a political lightning rod not just in his own country but also around the world. He has overseen a censorship scheme so severe that even The New York Times cited internet freedom experts calling it “a potentially dangerous, authoritarian expansion of power.” On other occasions, the Times — obviously hostile to Bolsonaro — raised serious questions about whether Moraes has become a grave threat to Brazilian democracy in the name of saving it.

This is the same judge who ordered both Rumble and Twitter be blocked across Brazil for refusing to comply with all of his censorship orders. When he was unable to collect a massive fine he had imposed on Twitter due to its lack of bank accounts in the country, he simply ordered the funds removed from Starlink’s accounts, a completely different Musk-linked company. Last year, the Trump administration imposed personal financial sanctions on Moraes, alleging that Moraes carried out tyrannical attacks on the free speech rights of U.S. companies and has corrupted Brazilian justice for nakedly partisan ends. The Trump administration appears poised to impose sanctions on him once again.

Moraes has repeatedly demonstrated a particular obsession with punishing Martins, who was appointed by Bolsonaro to be his national security advisor at the age of 31. Brazilian law is similar to American law when it comes to a defendant’s rights regarding pre-trial imprisonment: defendants are typically allowed to remain free prior to trial, absent very narrow circumstances (such as proof of witness tampering or a plan to flee the country). Moraes somehow obtained the false C.B.P. entry showing Martins left Brazil for the U.S. and never returned, and then used that false evidence to order his preemptive imprisonment before trial by claiming it proved Martins sought to flee justice. Moraes had Martins placed in a particularly harsh prison, clearly hoping to induce “confessions” that would implicate Bolsonaro and other political enemies of the judge.

One of the many questions that have never been answered — beyond the key question of who fabricated this document — is how this false C.B.P. entry fell into the hands of Brazilians attempting to imprison Martins. The first time this false C.B.P. record emerged publicly was when a Brazilian reporter known to be very close to Moraes, Guilherme Amado, published a news report full of falsehoods, clearly designed to implicate Martins, starting with the highly accusatory (and false) headline: “Under investigation, former Bolsonaro aide went to Orlando in 2022 and evaporated.”

Just two weeks later, the same reporter announced that Moraes himself had begun using this allegation, speaking off the record to various journalists and politicians to tell them that Martins had gone to the U.S. and “disappeared,” clearly laying the groundwork to order his arrest. Weeks later, Moraes did exactly that, issuing an order that relied upon a police report featuring the fraudulent C.B.P. record to claim that Martins had gone to the U.S. and never returned to Brazil (i.e., “evaporating”).

Not only is it now indisputable that the document on which this story was based was fraudulent, as even the C.B.P. admits, but it was so obviously fraudulent from the start. Indeed, within two days of investigating the case back in 2024, I had obtained so much definitive proof that Martins had never left Brazil that not even my meticulous editors at Folha de S.Paulo attempted in any way to dilute the strong language of my reporting — published shortly after Moraes’ original order of imprisonment — stating that Martins had been imprisoned based on clear fraud.

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Flock Camera Mix-Up: Wisconsin Woman Pulled Over Twice at Gunpoint Due to Error

A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice in one week after Milwaukee Police Department staff failed to remove a vehicle alert from the Flock license plate camera system.

Fox 6 Milwaukee reports that on Thursday, police in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield, Wisconsin, conducted a high-risk traffic stop on Interstate 94 after a Flock camera flagged a vehicle in connection with a Milwaukee homicide investigation. Video footage from the incident shows multiple officers with weapons drawn and a passenger extending their hands out the car window in compliance with police commands.

The vehicle’s driver, Amber Newell, and her passengers were detained during the stop. However, when Brookfield Police contacted the Milwaukee Police Department to coordinate the arrest, MPD informed them they no longer needed the vehicle or its occupants. The officers immediately released Newell and the other individuals.

According to the Milwaukee Police Department, the incident resulted from a personnel error rather than a technological malfunction. MPD staff had failed to remove the wanted vehicle alert from the Flock system after the investigation no longer required monitoring that particular car. Brookfield Police Chief Christopher Garcia stated that his officers’ actions were consistent with the information available to them at the time of the stop.

In an interview with FOX6 News, Newell described the emotional impact of the experience. “I haven’t been asleep since this has happened,” Newell said. “Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is guns.” Newell recounted the terrifying moments when police surrounded her vehicle. “My momma is like my go-to person, I wanted to call her so bad yesterday, but I’m like, if I make a sudden move, it’s gonna be over, it’s going to end my life,” Newell said.

What makes the situation even more disturbing for Newell is that this was not an isolated incident. She reported that Milwaukee police conducted a similar stop on Monday, also with guns drawn. According to Newell, officers provided no explanation, towed her vehicle, and released her without charges.

“It was very embarrassing because after they put us in cuffs, they walked us to the car, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m scared, all you see is people in they cars recording,” Newell said.

Milwaukee police declined to provide an interview regarding the incident. The department emphasized the error was related to data entry procedures rather than the Flock camera technology itself, but has not publicly addressed how similar mistakes might be prevented in the future.

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Radical Obama Judge Mehta ‘Reluctantly’ Dismisses Oath Keepers Case With Prejudice – Injects Unconstitutional Guilt Dicta

On August 4, 2026, in a ruling that closes the book on one of the most high-profile January 6 prosecutions/persecutions, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta (an Obama appointee) on August 4, “reluctantly” granted the Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss with prejudice the indictments against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and seven other Oath Keepers: Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, Robert Minuta, Edward Vallejo, Joseph Hackett, and David Moerschel.

Those eight Oath Keepers were among the fourteen Oath Keepers and Proud Boys whose sentences were commuted rather than pardoned by President Trump on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025. Their sentences had been reduced to time served, but they remained “convicted felons.”

As we previously reported, on April 14, 2026—three days before the defendants’ appellate briefs were due to be filed in the D.C. Court of Appeals—the Trump DOJ filed an unopposed motion to vacate their convictions and remand their cases to the District Court for dismissal with prejudice. On May 21, 2026, the Court of Appeals granted that DOJ motion (as well as a nearly identical motion in the Proud Boys case).With the convictions now vacated, all that remained was for the D.C. District Courts—the trial courts—to grant the DOJ’s unopposed (meaning the defendants agreed) motions to dismiss the charges with prejudice.

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Egyptian Police Arrest Four Christians Who Complained About Being Beaten By Muslims

A Coptic Christian church in Egypt endured an attack by an Islamic mob earlier this month — resulting in the arrests of four Christians who endured beatings.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide reported that according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a church faced a horde of Muslims — mainly women and children — throwing stones at the building on July 8.

Some of the believers were injured, while the priest’s car and the church building were damaged.

Tal Al-Quiblya, a province in upper Egypt, did not have a church for many years, but Christians started “organising prayers and regular masses in their homes on a rotating basis,” per the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

“The varying distances involved in traveling to different homes affected some residents’ ability to attend regularly,” the organization added.

“Consequently, the villagers decided to designate an existing building located amidst their homes as a church — a move made with the knowledge of both security authorities and the village’s Muslim residents.”

Their efforts to coordinate the worship of the Triune God appeared to incense the Muslim locals.

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Pirro Dismisses Lincoln Reflecting Pool Vandalism Criminal Case Against Former Olympian David Hearn

The Justice Department on Friday dismissed the Lincoln Reflecting Pool vandalism case against former Olympian David Hearn.

David Hearn, the former Olympian who was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for destruction of property for vandalizing the Lincoln Reflecting Pool last month, was indicted by a grand jury on felony charges earlier this month.

Hearn is a three-time Olympic canoeist.

David Hearn denied any wrongdoing.

Hearn was charged with felony destruction of government property. He was facing 10 years in prison.

A grand jury in the DC Superior Court returned the indictment.

During a press conference earlier this month, US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro said Hearn “violently and forcefully” ripped up the sealant.

However, on Friday, Pirro said the damage to the Lincoln Reflecting Pool was the result of “flawed installation by the contractor.”

“It was not until after the return of the indictment [of Hearn], that the [Department of Interior] provided additional documents to the [US Attorney’s Office in DC] indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026,” Pirro’s office wrote.

Hearn’s attorneys said in a statement to CNN reacting to the decision:

“The Trump administration’s case against David Hearn should never have been brought.

Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong.

The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.”

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Revenge of the Bidens?: Troubling Questions Swirl Around the Murder Prosecution of Jill Biden’s Ex-Husband

Bill Stevenson was once married to Jill Biden. “No one f**ks with a Biden,” Joe Biden said on a hot mic on October 5, 2022.

During a recent phone call, one of Bill Stevenson’s longtime friends told me, “Delaware is not a state – it’s a corporation.”

Her point was that Delaware’s political, legal, and law-enforcement establishment is unusually close-knit, with influential figures often knowing one another personally, and that longstanding relationships carry significant weight. Joe Biden spent more than fifty years at the center of that political establishment.

On the night of December 28, 2025, New Castle County police responded to the Wilmington-area home of Bill and Linda Stevenson after receiving a call from Bill shortly after 11:00 p.m. Officers found Linda Stevenson, 64, unresponsive in the living room. Despite life-saving efforts, she was pronounced dead at the scene.

An initial autopsy reportedly found no evidence of foul play and could not even identify a cause of death. Authorities then ordered a second autopsy.

Following that second examination, a New Castle County grand jury indicted Bill Stevenson, 77, on February 2, 2026, charging him with first-degree murder. He was arrested without incident, plead not guilty, and initially held on $500,000 bail, which was quickly increased to $2 million cash bail.

To date, prosecutors have not publicly disclosed a motive, released autopsy reports, nor any evidence underlying the indictment. Stevenson, who lacked the financial resources to hire private counsel, is represented by the New Castle County Public Defender’s Office.

Bill Stevenson and the Bidens

Stevenson believes the roots of his current legal troubles stretch back more than fifty years.

In a series of media appearances beginning in 2023, most notably on Newsmax’s Greg Kelly Reports, Stevenson challenged the long-accepted public account of how Joe and Jill Biden met.

The Bidens had publicly said they were introduced on a blind date in 1975. Stevenson disputed that account, alleging that he and Jill had known Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia, since 1972, when Biden was beginning his political career in Delaware.

Stevenson says he supported Biden’s first U.S. Senate campaign and contends that Joe Biden and Jill began an adulterous romantic relationship at some point while Stevenson and Jill were still married.

According to Stevenson, the oft-repeated blind-date story was created later by the Bidens to conceal the true timeline of the relationship.

Jill Biden’s Bitterness over the Divorce Settlement

In her recently released memoir, View from the East Wing, Jill Biden reflects on her marriage to Bill Stevenson and the couple’s divorce. She recalls seeking an ownership interest in Stevenson’s successful ‘Stone Balloon’ nightclub during the divorce proceedings, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Jill Biden herself. As she recounts the story, her voice becomes noticeably more emotional, even angry. In fact, Stevenson told Greg Kelly he believed his federal tax prosecution in the 1980s was due to his divorce dispute with Jill. He was prosecuted over approximately $8,200 in payroll taxes that were only one week overdue.

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Judge Denies Immunity to Texas Cops in Meme Arrest Case

A federal judge has refused to throw out the civil rights lawsuit filed by a Texas journalist arrested over a satirical Facebook meme and declined to grant qualified immunity to the sheriff and investigator who put him in jail.

Chief US District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled on July 20 that Kolton Krottinger’s suit can move forward against Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds and former deputy James Luckie.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

O’Connor wrote that Krottinger “sufficiently alleged that Luckie and Sheriff Deeds violated his clearly established rights to be free from arrest without probable cause, malicious prosecution, and First Amendment Retaliation.”

The ruling keeps alive claims of First Amendment retaliation, unlawful arrest, malicious prosecution, and Fourth Amendment violations.

Qualified immunity shields officers from suit unless they broke rights already clearly established in law, and it ends most cases of this kind before they reach discovery. O’Connor found that Krottinger cleared that bar.

Krottinger, a 36-year-old Navy veteran, runs several Hood County news pages on Facebook and a nonprofit, Anxiety Solutions of America, that operates a 21-acre ranch for veterans and first responders. Governor Greg Abbott named him an honorary admiral of the Texas Navy in January 2025.

His arrest traces to a satire image posted to a satirical page called Hood County Sheepdogs during a Granbury school board race. The meme made it look as though Tina Brown, a regular speaker at county commissioners’ meetings, had endorsed a candidate she actually opposed. Brown reported the post on October 6, saying she had not made it.

C.J. Grisham, a First Amendment attorney representing Krottinger, said the meme was meant “to poke fun at the two people who can’t stand each other…endorsing that person. That’s the joke of it.”

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Flock Safety Defends Cameras After AI System Triggers Wrongful Police Stops Of Two Journalists

Plymouth, Minnesota – Automotive journalist Joel Feder and his wife were detained by multiple police officers in a coordinated stop while driving a Jaguar Land Rover press vehicle, after Flock Safety’s automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras flagged the car based on a flawed database entry.

According to Feder’s detailed account in The Drive, officers boxed in the $155,000 Range Rover in a Kohl’s parking lot after the vehicle triggered alerts via Flock’s network. Police had been tracking it for days, believing the New Jersey manufacturer plate (34 10 DTM) was stolen. Officers approached with hands on their weapons, ordered the couple out of the vehicle, and conducted pat-downs before verifying the car’s legitimacy through Jaguar Land Rover. Feder subsequently obtained and published the body camera footage of the encounter.

The incident stemmed from an incomplete report of a similar plate (34 03 DTM) lost during a photo shoot in California, which was entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database simply as “34 DTM.” Flock’s AI system matched Feder’s plate – ignoring the smaller middle digits – and generated alerts. Local officers did not fully verify the complete plate visible in Flock’s own images.

The problem was not confined to one vehicle. Last Wednesday, fellow auto journalist Tim Esterdahl, publisher of Pickup Truck + SUV Talk, was pulled over by two officers in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, while driving his 14-year-old child in a $105,000 Range Rover Sport loaned to him by Jaguar Land Rover for review. Its plate: New Jersey 34 08 DTM. Jaguar Land Rover has been working to correct the underlying reports.

Flock Safety maintains that its cameras performed as designed, matching partial plates per law enforcement preferences for hotlist alerts. Chief Communications Officer Joshua Thomas told The Drive the system was asked whether those characters were present and correctly answered that they were – it simply was not built to flag that additional characters existed. He conceded that for alerts originating from NCIC rather than an individual agency’s custom list, the system arguably should test for an exact match rather than mere presence, and called that fair feedback to take back to his team.

Thomas said Flock is working to get the original police report corrected and is meeting with the FBI officials who curate NCIC to develop a way for incomplete data to be flagged as such for officers seeing automated alerts in the field. He emphasized that a camera alert “does not equal probable cause,” comparing it to an alarm going off, and stressed that the system depends on both valid inputs and humans verifying outputs.

But the scale is what makes the error rate consequential. Thomas said the system is roughly 99 percent accurate while performing approximately 20 billion reads per month – arithmetic that leaves on the order of 200 million misreads every month. How many of those escalate into armed stops is unknown.

Plymouth police acknowledged shortcomings in verification but pointed to the challenges of varying license plate formats nationwide. According to the department’s Flock transparency portal, the city operates 18 cameras that read more than 580,000 license plates in a recent 30-day period, generating over 14,800 hotlist hits – one of which was Feder.

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