Some Americans who have always celebrated the anniversary of our country's independence see us losing independence and so much else on the eve of our 250th. They aren't in the mood for a parade.
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.
As triple-digit temperatures engulf much of the United States, the Trump administration wants grid managers to require the use of backup power that often goes unused.
Four months after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes, Iran is preparing for a massive multi-day funeral. It’s a calculated move by the regime to project strength and unity during a shaky peace deal with the U.S.
The mother of a boy at the center of a landmark Supreme Court Decision is being blasted for an article she wrote that neglected to mention a shocking detail about her son.
The post Mom Neglects to Mention a Chilling Detail in Glowing Article About Her Trans Child, Who was at the Center of Landmark Supreme Court Case Involving Boys in Girls’ Sports appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Today, Marta Norton, chief investment strategist at Empower, discusses the underwhelming June jobs report and that means for the Fed's next move. Then, Stuart Paul, Bloomberg Economics US and Canada economist, talks oil prices and what a permanent toll on the Strait of Hormuz would mean for oil prices. Plus, Robin Wenzel, head of the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute, breaks down the cost of fourth of July barbeque and where americans are feeling pinched at the grocery store. Finally, 'Bloomberg Business of Sports' co-hosts Vanessa Perdomo-Maglione and Randall Williams, discuss the United States' World Cup win over Bosnia-Herzegovina in the round of 32 and how a controversial red card may cost the US its leading scorer in the next game. (Source: Bloomberg)
The White House is facing the prospect of a summer slowdown in the job market, with economic issues top of mind for voters heading into November’s midterms. NBC News correspondents Kelly O’Donnell, Brian Cheung and Keir Simmons report on renewed economic concerns. Oil industry expert John Kilduff discusses what consumers can expect to pay at the gas pump heading into the fall.
The Kennedy Center is offering VIP tickets for a rooftop celebration on the Fourth of July, a move that comes after a federal judge sidelined the venue’s plans to start a two-year renovation on July 5. Prospective patrons can purchase the “Presidential” package for $25,000, with $18,912 of that cost being tax-deductible, according to the…
