Billionaire technology Peter Thiel warned that AI company Anthropic could use its technological advantage to influence the 2028 presidential election in favor of Democrats.
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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.
Florida is taking action against nearly 100 organizations that will likely soon have a new "terrorist" designation under Florida law.On Wednesday, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that some significant legislation, which provides a stronger framework for declaring groups terrorist organizations, took effect on the first day of the month. 'We are not going to fund terrorism in our great state.'During his announcement, DeSantis said that officials "are not going to waste any time" before beginning the "initial tranche" of domestic terrorist designations in Florida, suggesting more to come in the future as well. "Based on the recommendations of Florida's domestic security professionals and the authority, the newly established authority in law, my office and the [C]abinet are poised to officially designate the first slew of terrorist organizations under the new law," DeSantis said in the announcement.RELATED: Florida AG calls for impeachment after judge acquits mother who killed baby and blamed COVID Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesAmong those organizations designated, DeSantis named familiar Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, but also mentioned the addition of Antifa to the list. He also named a couple of groups affiliated with drug cartels, like Cartel de Sinaloa and Tren de Aragua.Notably, DeSantis added that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran would also be added to the list among "more than 90 Foreign Terrorist Organizations."Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass, who also serves as the state’s chief domestic security officer, explained that the new law gives more tools to prevent taxpayer dollars from reaching those organizations that have been designated as terrorist groups, Florida's Voice reported."We are not going to fund terrorism in our great state," Glass told Florida's Voice. "We’re just not going to do it."Glass added that the new framework will allow greater transparency for the public to see where taxpayer dollars are being distributed: “It’s actually even a public service campaign to ensure that you know where you’re receiving dollars or you’re giving dollars."These actions, however, have been under legal threat for months, dating back to before the legislation was signed. DeSantis acknowledged to Florida's Voice that "we'll definitely get sued," though he believes the outcome "will be beneficial." The new law, which went into effect on Wednesday, builds upon an executive order from DeSantis on December 8, which laid the groundwork for legislation to be drafted and signed by the governor in early April. The December executive order singled out CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood. As a result, CAIR sued the administration over the executive order, arguing that its rights had been violated.On March 4, United States District Judge Mark Walker granted the motion for a preliminary injunction, freezing the use of the executive order. The DeSantis administration appealed the injunction two days later in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.The law, signed almost exactly a month later, will likely be used as a new legal support in the ongoing legal fight over the executive order. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
