Cornyn targets lawmakers’ airport fast pass as TSA lines grow during DHS shutdown
Source: Latest Political News on Fox News · Bias: Right
Summary
Sen. John Cornyn's, R-Texas, bill requiring lawmakers to use standard TSA screening passed the Senate unanimously amid the ongoing Homeland Security shutdown.
Cornyn targets lawmakers’ airport fast pass as TSA lines grow during DHS shutdown
Right
Sen. John Cornyn's, R-Texas, bill requiring lawmakers to use standard TSA screening passed the Senate unanimously amid the ongoing Homeland Security shutdown.
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.
Ever since a jury found President Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation in 2023, the Republican has vowed vengeance against the woman the court declared he forced himself upon in 1996. The Supreme Court has rejected Trump’s attempt to get the $5 million he owes Carroll overturned, and Carroll is now demanding that Trump pay her without further delay.In a new twist, a conservative legal group is attempting to punish the lawyer who successfully defended Carroll.“[National Legal and Policy Center] today filed a complaint with the Attorney Grievance Committee (AGC) of the New York State Supreme Court against Roberta Ann Kaplan for violating the Rules of Professional Conduct regarding the outside funding of E. Jean Carroll’s two defamation lawsuits against President Trump,” the NLPC announced on Thursday. “The lawsuits were funded by left-wing billionaire Reid Hoffman through a nonprofit called American Future Republic.”In their complaint, the NLPC claims that Carroll knowingly provided false information when she was asked during a deposition if her legal fees were bankrolled by outside sources. She said she did not, although she later said she made a mistake and her lawyers corrected the mistake as soon as possible. The NLPC also accused Kaplan of a having a “contingency fee she charged Carroll plus the legal fees she was getting from Hoffman” as being “‘excessive fees’ and thus violated New York ethics rules.”The NLPC described Hoffman as having “a near-pathological obsession with Trump and had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.” It omitted to mention that Trump was close friends with Epstein, a child sex trafficker, for decades and was accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in an encounter that Epstein facilitated. He is confirmed to have partied with Epstein privately, while young women were present, on several occasions.“As the complaint noted, it’s not clear Ms. Kaplan informed her client of Hoffman’s association with a sexual convict and his efforts to rehabilitate Epstein’s reputation to get Carroll’s informed consent to use Hoffman’s group to fund her lawsuits,” the NLPC added.Ironically, Trump himself has been accused of committing perjury during the case."That was his defense to sexual abuse. She's not my type," legal expert Adam Klasfeld explained in May. "And in this deposition, he was shown a picture that he was not aware included E. Jean Carroll, pointed to that picture, and confused her with Marla Maples. So clearly, she was his type. He confused her with his second wife."Another legal expert, Katie Phang, pointed out that it’s revealing that Trump and his supporters are not accusing Carroll of perjury regarding the substance of her claim — namely, that Trump sexually forced himself on her in a dressing room in 1996."But here's the thing: you notice how they're not going after her about the substantive testimony she provided about the sexual assault that she was victimized by Trump, right?" Phang observed. "They're not going after that. They're not going after the underlying facts of what she has alleged happened to her at the hands of Donald Trump. That is the tell."
As food, fireworks and festivities kick off in celebration of Independence Day 2026, frequent flyers in and around the Big Apple are likely to face nixed or postponed takeoffs.
Two federal courts struck down separate Trump administration voter citizenship verification efforts within the same week this June, and the wins for plaintiffs came with an asterisk neither side has fully reckoned with. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, sitting on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, vacated the administration’s overhaul of the SAVE database, […]
