Data centers emerge as growing wedge issue in midterm races
Source: The Hill News · Bias: Center
Summary
The tech industry’s expansion of data centers is emerging as a wedge issue in the midterms, as candidates weigh economic opportunity against the associated strain on voters’ utility bills. In the Michigan governor’s race, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D), whose husband is a top executive at a company pressing for a new data center, wants regulations addressing related water usage and energy costs. Other candidates like Republican Tom Leonard are going even further, pushing for a temporary mortarium on building…
Data centers emerge as growing wedge issue in midterm races
Center
The tech industry’s expansion of data centers is emerging as a wedge issue in the midterms, as candidates weigh economic opportunity against the associated strain on voters’ utility bills. In the Michigan governor’s race, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D), whose husband is a top executive at a company pressing for a new data center, wants regulations addressing related water usage and energy costs. Other candidates like Republican Tom Leonard are going even further, pushing for a temporary mortarium on building…
A Fox News host uncorked a bizarre on-air tirade against Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, calling him a "demon in human skin."Emily Compagno appeared to lose her composure on Friday's edition of "Outnumbered" while discussing Talarico, a 37-year-old state representative now in a statistical tie with embattled Republican nominee Ken Paxton. Compagno was reacting to a conservative PAC attack ad featuring Talarico calling the American flag a "complicated" symbol for many Americans."Every single voter [in Texas] needs to understand exactly who they would vote into office, which is an anti-business, anti-commerce, anti-capitalist, anti-Texas Texan," Compagno railed.She then escalated sharply."This person is a demon in human skin, and they need to make sure he does not go anywhere — to the nation's capital, where he can actually do some real damage other than his horrible words that he keeps spewing," she said.A Talarico spokesman responded that the campaign could confirm the candidate is "in fact a human, and not a demon in human skin."The outburst lands as the race tightens into a genuine toss-up. A New York Times/Siena survey released Monday found Paxton and Talarico deadlocked at 47 percent among likely voters, with Talarico leading 58-31 among independents and 61-29 among Hispanic voters.Paxton defeated four-term Sen. John Cornyn in a May 26 primary runoff after President Donald Trump threw his backing to the state's scandal-plagued attorney general. Paxton was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 before being acquitted by the state Senate, and he has faced years of criminal securities fraud allegations and accusations of abusing his office.Trump himself has appeared unsettled by Talarico's rise. In a Truth Social post after the runoff, the president refused to use the Democrat's name, instead branding him "Alfred E. Neuman" and "the worst TEXAS candidate I have ever seen."On "Outnumbered," Compagno added that Talarico's past remarks were "patently disqualifying for any American senator."Compagno on Talarico: This person is a demon in human skin pic.twitter.com/BM5nohCvxT— Acyn (@Acyn) July 3, 2026
Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.
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