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mass surveillance
As Key Democrats Betray Party and US Public, Coalition Says Don't Renew Spying Power in NDAA
"Americans across the political spectrum have good reason to distrust unchecked executive branch surveillance power."
Nov 12, 2026
As a few leading congressional Democrats urged their Republican colleagues to reauthorize a widely reviled spying power before Democratic majorities take over in January, a diverse coalition of advocacy groups on Thursday demanded lawmakers refrain from including a provision on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in any critical bills before the year ends.
Rampant abuse of that portion of FISA—which lets the federal government spy on electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the country without a warrant—has fueled calls for reform across the ideological spectrum in Congress and among civil society organizations. Although Section 702 expired in June, surveillance operations will be able to continue through next March.
Noting that various lawmakers have long "sought meaningful reforms," including a warrant requirement for "accessing the private communications of US persons in Section 702 databases and closing the data broker loophole," the new letter calls on top Democrats and Republicans in both chambers of Congress to keep a reauthorization of Section 702 "out of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) or any other must-pass legislation in the waning days of the 119th Congress."
"The principle at stake is fundamental: Foreign intelligence authorities and purchased data should not be used to circumvent Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights," argued more than two dozen groups. "The need for reform is particularly acute as artificial intelligence tools are making it cheaper and easier than ever for the government to compile and analyze Americans' data at scale to reveal our habits, associations, and beliefs."
"Americans across the political spectrum have good reason to distrust unchecked executive branch surveillance power. Conservatives have seen abuses of surveillance authorities targeted at political campaigns and other Americans engaged in lawful, First Amendment-protected activity. And progressives have warned against granting expansive surveillance powers to the current administration," the letter notes. President Donald Trump has both fought for and sabotaged reauthorization efforts.
The letter emphasizes that "in recent years, Section 702 has been abused to spy on protesters on the left and the right; 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign; members of Congress and their staff; and multiple government officials, political commentators, and journalists. No member of Congress knows who will occupy the White House in the years ahead, and constitutional protections should not depend on who is president."
Signatories include the ACLU, Center for Democracy & Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press Action, Win Without War, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law—whose Liberty and National Security Program counsel, Hannah James, stressed that "for too long, Section 702's warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance authority has been abused to spy on Americans. Slipping an extension into must-pass year-end legislation, instead of openly debating and voting on bipartisan reforms, would betray the democratic process and Americans' Fourth Amendment rights."
Hajar Hammado, senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, which helped organize the letter, similarly said in a statement that "following the widespread outcry over Flock cameras, it's clear that the American people don't want mass surveillance. Slipping a renewal of federal mass surveillance powers into a must-pass defense bill during a lame-duck session would be a wholesale rejection of what the American people want."
"Congressional leaders need to reject the failed agenda of out-of-touch Intelligence elites who want unchecked surveillance of Americans by refusing to add FISA to the NDAA or any other must-pass bill," the campaigner continued.
Jason Pye, vice president at the Due Process Institute, another signatory, pointed to Democrats' sweeping victories in the midterms: "Voters just spoke with a resounding voice that they are sick of politics as usual in Congress. They're sick of backroom deals. They're sick of being sold out."
"Putting the reauthorization of Section 702 in the NDAA is a terrible message to send back to voters who are desperately seeking a change in how Congress operates," Pye declared. "Worse, it's coming at a time when there are increasing worries about the executive branch having too much power. The notion that Congress would reauthorize Section 702 without a warrant requirement and without prohibiting the government from buying information on Americans from third-party data brokers is incomprehensible."
The letter came a day after House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who will likely chair the panel next year, urged the GOP to act on reauthorization immediately: "My preference would be, let’s just take the win that’s on the table, get it done in the lame-duck,” he told Politico on Wednesday. "If that fails, we'll do something in the first quarter."
Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) also backed a lame-duck reauthorization, acknowledging that "it becomes much more difficult in a new Congress," while Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) told the outlet: "We need to get it reauthorized... As soon as possible."
In response to that reporting, Hammado charged that "Jim Himes has betrayed his own party and the American people," highlighting that a reauthorization is desired by not only Trump but also his controversial new chief of staff, Stephen Miller.
"After seeing a blowout election where Americans overwhelmingly rejected Trump and sided with the Democrats, Himes' first instinct was to urge Republicans to use the little time they have left to hand Donald Trump and Stephen Miller the mass surveillance powers that they're asking for," said the Demand Progress adviser.
"It's incredibly telling that Himes fears the idea of his own party having the leverage to stop Trump from bypassing the courts to spy on everyday Americans, and it is shameful he is advising the administration on how to undermine Americans’ privacy," added Hammado. "Democrats and Republicans alike must reject Himes' agenda and oppose any effort to force a FISA renewal through Congress."
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Technofascists Want AI to Infiltrate Our Lives—Here's How to Resist
Americans should support existing legislation and call for more US lawmakers to propose and endorse restrictions and ethical protocols in AI development.
Nov 10, 2026
During the recent street protests in France, thousands of people marching to demand better conditions were met by riot police, far-right rhetoric that criminalizes progressive politics and Black and Arab youth, and AI surveillance. This combination of technology and brutality are not a coincidence; they are part of a fascist playbook.
In their new book, End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor outline an apocalyptic alliance of Christian nationalists, tech-bro billionaires, and populist survivalists who are defining the far-right and accelerating global collapse. This book coincides with warnings from former AI tech bros that the end is coming, including a former Anthropic employee saying there is a greater than 10% chance AI could end humanity within the next decade by producing bioweapons that destroy the Earth.
As we navigate these warnings, AI embeds itself in the very infrastructure of our daily lives, from email summaries to predictive texting to Flock cameras, while simultaneously advancing surveillance, policing, and war technologies. Society is being groomed to depend on external technology to think for us while our movements and interactions are monitored and policed.
We should all be alarmed at the rate AI is advancing and how an overwhelming amount of our tax money is being allocated to war technology instead of human life.
As a university professor for over a decade, I deeply believe in empowering students to engage with the world’s issues by asking questions that get to the roots of problems and centering dialogue to transform the world. When the ability to think critically is taken away from us, we lose the fundamental human capacity to ignite change. As we increasingly outsource our ability to think critically and creatively, there is a risk that we dull our human capacity to overcome challenges, trust ourselves, communicate, and imagine new worlds. This sets us up for a dangerous future, one in which humanity is told what to think and how to act and pays for it financially, emotionally, and mentally.
Critical and creative thinking is one of the most potent tools humans have to understand our conditions and has larger implications for democracy and freedom. What happens when our humanity is stripped away and replaced by a machine? In his 2018 bestseller, How Fascism Works, philosopher Jason Stanley highlights 10 key strategies of fascism, including anti-intellectualism, unreality, and hierarchy. All three are playing out now.
AI has begun to replace teachers in the classroom. The federal government is dismantling the Department of Education and cutting funding to higher education. AI companies are acquiring and destroying antique books to feed and train its machines, while books about race, gender, class, and sexuality are being banned. AI hallucinations and deepfakes seed distrust of a shared reality, increase conspiracy thinking, and make evidence-based debate almost impossible. As for hierarchy, AI models reinforce biases already embedded within society, including racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, and then reproduce them through algorithms that allow authoritarian leaders to sharpen societal divisions. Meanwhile, the proliferation of AI buttresses the hierarchy of tech billionaires and government officials profiting off it, while the public experiences brain drain that accelerates fascist control.
"Brain drain" typically evokes a massive migration of highly educated and skilled professionals from their home country to another. But I use it here to refer to the very depletion of the brain's capacity to become educated or skilled. Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab last year found that prolonged use of AI, particularly ChatGPT, over several months eroded critical thinking skills and resulted in users becoming progressively unable to generate original ideas. An EEG recording brain activity across 32 regions revealed that ChatGPT users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”
People are also turning to AI for therapy instead of talking to a professional or having conversations with their friends and family. According to a study RAND, Brown University School of Public Health, and Harvard University conducted between February and March 2025, 1 in 8 young adults use AI chatbots for mental health advice. Open AI is currently facing seven lawsuits because their chatbot responses led users to delusions, murder, and suicide. Research from Sentio University in California warns that “ChatGPT may be the largest mental health provider in the US” with 49% of Californians reporting the use of AI for mental health support. An overreliance on AI strips away our ability to feel difficult emotions unmediated by a screen and cultivate real connections and communication with other people, which according to tech justice advocate YK Hong is key for collective resistance against authoritarian regimes.
In May, the Pentagon reached deals with seven tech companies to advance military and surveillance technology. Among them, Scale AI, an artificial intelligence infrastructure and software company, was awarded $500 million, Open AI was awarded $200 million, and Google was awarded $200 million to develop war technology in the name of national security, money that could have gone instead for public services such as education and healthcare. For FY2027, the Pentagon is asking for $54 billion for AI-powered war, which includes AI surveillance, military operations, and weapons.
Some legislators are fighting back. In September, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would pause advanced AI development until there is rigorous federal testing and oversight to ensure it does not harm humanity. The same month, Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), and Andy Kim (D-NJ) proposed the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act of 2026 to enforce safety and security standards. Americans should support this legislation and call for more US lawmakers to propose and endorse restrictions and ethical protocols in AI development.
We should all be alarmed at the rate AI is advancing and how an overwhelming amount of our tax money is being allocated to war technology instead of human life. We must work together to combat the deterioration of our human capacity to AI and resist fascism and authoritarianism, while we still can.
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'We Will Not Be Deterred': Faith Leaders Defend Trespassing on ICE in Vermont
The leaders’ civil disobedience action spotlights the fact that, as some protesters put it, “ICE violence begins in Vermont.”
Oct 28, 2026
On a glowing September day in Vermont, most people were working or taking a walk in the woods or raking leaves or just being thankful for the beauty. Instead, seven faith leaders blocked the entrance to Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center with their bodies.
Protesting wanton and intentional cruelty all around the country, the seven prayed, sang, and spoke about how their beliefs—Methodist, Congregational, Unitarian, Episcopal, and Quaker—compelled them to obstruct access to the Targeting Center which launches many ICE raids. The seven stood up and witnessed to the universal principles that all major world religions teach us: Do no harm, love your neighbor, care for the needy, and welcome the stranger in our midst. They read the names of some who died in ICE custody, or were murdered by agents. For these actions they were arrested, carried off, and booked, then prosecuted and arraigned in late October.
The leaders’ civil disobedience action spotlights the fact that, as some protesters put it, “ICE violence begins in Vermont.” Many ICE raids start in Williston, where 2 of the 3 national ICE Targeting Operations Division Centers are lodged in unmarked buildings. In the inconspicuous White Cap mini-mall surrounded by pine trees, the Targeting Center where the leaders protested sits next to a dentist, a medical imaging office, a café, and the local newspaper’s circulation staff. As if the ICE center were just one more office. But its job is surveillance of social media and multiple databases to help ICE target which individuals to pursue everywhere, leading to thousands of people being hunted down and whisked away, sometimes injured or even killed. In the second Trump administration, more than 600,000 have been detained.
“We are not the first of the people arrested there and we will not be the last. We will continue as long as it takes to stop ICE for good.”
After the faith leaders’ blockade, more people rallied, and October began with a full Week of Action to expose and protest the ICE presence in Williston, a former Abenaki hunting ground which became a dairy and agricultural center, then urban sprawl. The first of the week’s actions was a nationally publicized funeral for those who have been murdered or died in ICE custody, and the week culminated in a peaceful protest on the front porch of the ICE Law Enforcement Resource Center (the second Center in Williston). The festive scene was set with a floral couch, a rug, music, and song—plus lots of chalked admonitions on the building and driveway like, “You don’t have to erase this,” and handwritten notes taped to the windows.
Rather than confront the peaceful protesters, ICE withdrew; the word was that many local personnel had been sent home for the week. Only two local police kept a respectful distance in the almost empty parking lot, appearing briefly and politely when a camera had been covered up. It was a far cry from the debacle of March 12, when ICE officials insisted on precipitating a massive confrontation involving their own officers plus dozens of state troopers and local police—to pursue three people for whom they didn’t have a warrant, who were ultimately released.
Last week, the focus was back on the faith leaders, who were arraigned in Vermont Superior Court. The State Police (who arrested them) bypassed the local prosecutor Sarah George, who earlier said she has better things to do with taxpayer dollars than prosecute people who are peacefully protesting ICE. At that time, the Democratic State Attorney General, Charity Clark, disagreed, even though she herself has engaged in public protest at times, including at ICE. She feels that she cannot pick and choose whom to prosecute for political reasons. Her decision to go after a number of anti-ICE activists has riled up some of her supporters, particularly those who applaud her relentless pursuit of more than 70 lawsuits against Trump.
The faith leaders’ arraignment was much lower key than the prominent cases in nearby Federal District Court (such as those of Rumeysa Ozturk, Kseniia Petrova, and Mohsen Mahdawi). Spectators could even keep our phones and car keys. Outside the courtroom, a young Black man in dreads wearing a T-shirt with a clenched fist told me and a couple of men in clerical garb which door was ours. The benches inside were less comfy than the feds’, but the greater closeness to Judge Colin Owyang made up for it. Soon the court was packed with supporters for six women and one man: a United Methodist minister, two United Church of Christ ministers, an Episcopal priest and the archdeacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont, a Quaker leader, and a Unitarian Universalist minister (in alphabetical order Catherine Bock, 78; Jessica Derise, 54; Rebecca Girrell, 47; Elizabeth Gleich, 36; Karen Johnston, 58; Earl Kooperkamp, 69; and Susan McMillan, 65). People were chuckling and chatting as they rarely do in the more formal federal court.
The faith leaders were called on one by one, each pleading not guilty. The rulings were uniform. The leaders were not to visit the ICE facility except in the context of their “lawful pastoral duties.” They were to avoid contact with the property manager. They were not to discuss the case among themselves except with a written joint defense agreement (which they executed before leaving the courthouse).
One moment of humor occurred when the visibly pregnant Rev. Gleich appeared. After the judge stated the followup court date, he said “subject to contingencies” with a smile.
“If I’m actively giving birth, I won’t be here,” said the Rev. Gleich with a sparkle in her voice.
“In that case,” said the prosecutor, “the state would not seek a warrant.”
Coming out of the courthouse, a huge “ICE OUT OF WHITE CAP” sign greeted us across the street, as well as numerous supporters. I was especially moved to see the 90-year-old daughter of a Dutch resister to the Nazis, an indefatigable presence for democracy all her adult life. When the faith leaders emerged with their noted human rights attorney Robert Appel, there was a huge cheer. They spoke sequentially to reinforce their message, each in a strong, bold voice accustomed to a pulpit. They said that the rulings represented an “escalation of judicial tactics” versus the fewer conditions meted out to earlier protesters.
Their words were powerful: “Join us in standing with our friends and neighbors against the lawlessness of ICE.”
“Violating human and civil rights is the real crime which must be stopped.”
Bringing people to court on these minor charges “is a poor use of resources and an ineffective scare tactic.”
“We will not be deterred. We will continue to sit and stand and kneel and pray.”
They emphasized the importance of this particular Targeting Center in terrorizing communities and persecuting people with no criminal history: “We are not the first of the people arrested there and we will not be the last. We will continue as long as it takes to stop ICE for good.”
To be continued, as the days darken and winter sets in. And if the last few months are any indication, they will be far from alone.
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The 'AI Race' Against China Is a Dangerous, Dishonest Narrative
AI hype has merged with “China threat” hysteria, yielding disingenuous rhetoric that powers the current unregulated, breakneck AI buildout.
Oct 28, 2026
As Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Washington recently to meet with President Donald Trump, discussions over Artificial Intelligence were hotly anticipated as an urgent matter of national relations, as it was this past May during the previous US-China summit. Disappointingly, little of substance has come of this meeting as well, despite fresh worries over AI doomsday scenarios from industry insiders, and pleas for both regulation and international cooperation.
Once again, instead of hashing out guardrails to contain a fever-pitched “AI arms race,” the discussion revolved primarily around trade and resources. This discouraging result comes amid an atmosphere in the US in which tech CEOs and politicians claim that China winning the “race” would spell the end of Western civilization. Given the proclaimed stakes, an apparent lack of substantial AI discussion during the summit appears either as baffling incompetence, or an indication that the “arms race” threat may not be what it appears.
In reality, mounting evidence seems to indicate that the “China threat” is nothing more than a performative manipulation, wielded by tech CEOs and White House officials to justify their deeply unpopular AI program. The real threat, in Americans’ eyes, seems to be coming from the inside, as huge majorities remain concerned over data centers encroaching on their communities, AI-driven job loss, and other harms borne from the unregulated technology.
Deeply Unpopular AI Needs Justification
Pew Research reported in March of this year that 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI use in daily life. Gallup polling found in the spring that 71% of Americans oppose local construction of AI data centers. It is only earners of $200,000 or more, according to a Quinnipiac poll, who consider AI in daily life as more good than bad. Most recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found last week that 3 out of 4 Americans feel that AI companies are not doing enough to ensure that their products do not inflict serious harm on society. Meanwhile, Americans are watching as companies like Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce lay off thousands of employees, arguing that AI can step in, contributing to 80% of Americans saying they want the government to fund workforce transition programs, according to a May Harris poll.
In spite of the disturbing World Cup commercials and the endless billboards, the AI industry has a trillion-dollar messaging problem that may cast it into the “death valley” of start-ups, where profitability doesn’t arrive in time to make up for balking venture capital.
The “China threat” is a handy solution.
Business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.
This “threat” builds on a long history of Sinophobia in America, from “Yellow Peril” rhetoric, to anti-immigrant lynching, and since 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it has been combined with Red Scare hysteria. China’s economic rise in the past 50 years has come with enhanced military potential in the region, as it brought Hong Kong to heel, and began projecting power in the South China Sea and beyond. Some analysts believe we are already in a “New Cold War.”
Today, anti-Beijing rhetoric is a rare area of bipartisan agreement in Washington. And while some analysts believe that the US and China are running qualitatively different “AI races,” business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.
China’s “Existential Threat” to Democracy
Businessman and television personality, Kevin O’Leary, who is facing strong opposition from residents of Box Elder County, Utah, where he plans to build a 9 gigawatt data center, proclaimed on a CNN panel, “If you want China to lead, take over… our democracy, our free speech, how we live with technology, just stop building data centers, it’s that simple.”
Equally breathless rhetoric from Peter Thiel of PayPal and Palantir referred to China’s technology landscape as a “Borg-like thing that’s controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.” Alex Karp of Palantir also asserted the urgency of his own corporation being given greater leeway to operate in spite of concerns about privacy rights: “So when people are worried about surveillance, of course, there are huge dangers there, but you know, you will have far fewer rights if America’s not in the lead.”
The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.
This rhetoric is also the official stance of Washington. In the Trump White House’s “AI Action Plan,” titled “Winning the Race,” the authors are explicit: “As our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” This type of language is evocative of the Manhattan Project in World War II, and the space race during the Cold War.
But as in those equally propagandized endeavors, the existential threat posed by Chinese AI supremacy is unclear. Advances in AI-driven operations have increased the capabilities of militaries to generate and rapidly attack targets, but visions of autonomous robotic warfare remain far away. The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.
Rhetoric of the “Race” Will Have Consequences
It is irresponsible and dangerous to use anti-China “AI arms race” rhetoric. During Trump’s last term, his anti-China narratives attempting to cover up the administration’s Covid-19 blunders had devastating impacts as violence increased against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, and the “China Initiative” chilled intellectual exchanges and disrupted lives. Similar rhetoric during the Cold War led to persecution of academics, activists, and professionals during McCarthy’s Red Scare. If this Trump administration doubled down on the anti-China narrative, we may see similar repression and hate foment again—tactics clearly already in the administration’s wheelhouse.
Worryingly, it does not appear that the “AI Arms Race” will slow down any time soon. Signs are emerging that increasingly powerful AI systems are frightening both Washington and Beijing in their potential to disrupt the global economy, incentivizing the two to consider some high-level guardrails. But even with the recent PR frenzy surrounding Jacob Coxon’s “whistleblowing” against Anthropic’s lack of safety considerations, CEOs and politicians do not seem to be backing down from using China as a spur in the race—arguing to instead balance beating China with skirting AI-induced doom.
As the US economy becomes increasingly supported by AI promises and projections, a collapse of the “bubble” may even be accompanied by increased anti-China rhetoric as justification for Silicon Valley’s need for a bailout.
We must incorporate critique of this narrative into the popular resistance against AI; in the movements against data centers, AI encroachment into education, IP theft, and more.
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The University’s Soul Has Been Uploaded
As universities embrace generative AI, they are allowing Big Tech to reshape teaching and learning without first answering a fundamental question: Does this technology belong in the classroom at all?
Oct 24, 2026
Universities are making a consequential concession: allowing privately owned generative AI systems into the very processes through which students learn to read, write, reason, and exercise judgment. Their adoption is increasingly presented as inevitable. AI exists, so higher education must adapt. Under this logic, adoption is expected, while refusal requires an explanation. But technological availability is not educational justification. Before reorganizing teaching and learning around these systems, universities should answer the question that advocates of adoption too often avoid: Why should AI be there at all?
The language of inevitability obscures who is responsible. A recent Forbes headline declared, “MIT Says AI Is Forcing a Rethink of College Itself.” AI is not forcing universities to purchase licenses, revise courses, shift budgets, or surrender influence over educational infrastructure to private vendors. People make those decisions. They should have to explain and defend them. Who was consulted? What alternatives were considered? And whose interests are being served? California State University signed a $16.9 million OpenAI agreement in 2025. A statewide student leader said her association wasn't consulted; officials cited an advisory committee with student and faculty members.
A university exists to cultivate independent thought, critical judgment, curiosity, and the ability to work through difficult questions. Reading closely, developing an argument, recognizing errors, and revising one's thinking are not incidental steps on the way to an answer. They are part of what education is for. What happens when students are encouraged to rely on systems that can perform much of this work for them?
Public universities owe Big Tech no duty of adaptation. Their obligation is to students, workers, and the public.
The available research offers no warrant for treating adoption as an educational obligation. A 2026 meta-analysis of 35 studies reported moderate gains across varied educational settings. A review of 67 higher-education studies found better outcomes when AI was used within carefully structured, inquiry-based teaching. Those findings deserve consideration, but they do not settle whether AI belongs in the learning process. In the latter review, stronger results depended on deliberate human instruction, and neither review establishes that AI reliably develops lasting, independent learning or provides benefits that effective teaching without it cannot achieve.
Better assignments are not necessarily evidence of better learning. A polished paper produced with ChatGPT does not show that its author has become a better writer. Short-term performance measures tell us little about what students may be losing when they outsource reading, writing, and reasoning. Assisted performance is not intellectual development, and making learning easier does not necessarily make education better. Nor can learning-outcome studies settle the questions that institutions routinely sidestep: Who should own educational infrastructure, what student work may be collected, whose labor may be automated, and whether students and faculty can refuse participation. Those are ethical and political decisions, not matters of test scores alone.
Yet narrowly demonstrated benefits are being used to support sweeping institutional ambitions. Universities must consider training, faculty workload, verification, privacy, dependence on proprietary systems, and what happens when a vendor changes its prices or rules. Once courses depend on a platform, leaving can become disruptive and expensive. Public money finances the infrastructure, faculty labor makes it part of everyday teaching, and the resulting dependence can give vendors greater leverage over academic decisions. Public institutions should disclose the full costs, contractual obligations, data protections, and exit plans before committing resources and educational authority. These are questions of public accountability, not merely technical procurement.
For faculty, promised efficiency can mean additional labor. Professors redesign assignments, check unreliable citations, devise oral defenses, interpret shifting policies, and struggle to determine whether students have done the intellectual work being assessed. That verification work consumes time that could otherwise go toward mentoring, substantive feedback, and sustained classroom discussion—costs rarely visible in claims of efficiency. At the same time, AI is promoted to automate feedback, lesson planning, and other forms of professional judgment. Faculty are asked to help install the very systems that may eventually diminish their autonomy.
Students face another danger in the language of “personalized learning.” Systems built around continuous assessment, behavioral prediction, and linked records can turn intellectual development into an expanding data profile. Students should be free to misunderstand, hesitate, write badly, and change their minds without every misstep becoming a permanent record. These are conditions for learning, not inefficiencies to be recorded and corrected. And when students' writing, questions, and personal circumstances pass through commercial systems, privacy cannot be an afterthought. Students deserve to know what is collected, who can access it, how long it is kept, and whether they can decline without jeopardizing their education.
Universities normalize tools that make it harder to determine whether students worked independently, then turn to monitoring technologies to establish whether they did. Instead of asking whether the original technology undermines assessment, institutions risk treating surveillance as the solution.
Beyond the classroom, students face demands to “upskill” for an AI-driven economy. Employers may promote AI proficiency while using automation to cut labor costs, reduce professional discretion, and concentrate control. The political question of who controls automation and receives its benefits is being recast as an individual problem of employability. Universities should not simply prepare students to accommodate those decisions. They should equip students to ask whose knowledge AI absorbs, who benefits, and what protections workers need—including collective bargaining and enforceable rights.
Public universities owe Big Tech no duty of adaptation. Their obligation is to students, workers, and the public. They should teach about AI: its ownership, limitations, social consequences, and deployment in mass surveillance, violent and repressive policing, and warfare, as well as the environmental costs of its infrastructure. But understanding a technology is not the same as making students dependent on it. Faculty and students deserve a meaningful voice in whether it enters their classrooms, including the right to refuse. A right to refuse means little if opting out carries academic penalties or leaves students without an equivalent route through a course.
Before committing another dollar to AI platforms, universities should weigh those investments against smaller classes, tutoring, disability services, libraries, and the time and resources faculty need to teach. The burden of proof belongs to those proposing to change the conditions of learning. At stake is more than control over software: It is the university's authority over the purposes and human relationships that give education its meaning. Universities should not surrender that authority merely because a technology has become widely available.
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As Rubio Heads to India, US Progressives Sound Alarm About Repression and Surveillance of Protests
"The US and India have an obligation to promote and defend the rights to freedom of assembly and expression," six Democrats in Congress reminded the top US diplomat.
Oct 16, 2026
On the eve of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's trip to India, six progressives in the House of Representatives on Friday sounded the alarm over the Indian government's response to recent protests, including its alleged spying on American soil.
"We write with concern regarding a pattern of repression, wrongful detention, and excessive use of force by security forces during student protests in Delhi and other localities across India," Democratic Reps. Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Jim McGovern (Mass.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) said in a letter to President Donald Trump's top diplomat.
"The United States-India relationship has historically been rooted in democratic values, constitutional governance, and strong people-to-people ties," they wrote. "As the world's largest democracies and state parties to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the US and India have an obligation to promote and defend the rights to freedom of assembly and expression. It is in this spirit of shared values and obligations that we raise the following concerns."
As the letter lays out, protests began in June after the leak and subsequent cancellation of India's medical college entrance examination. While the demonstrators initially demanded reforms to the education system, including the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the Cockroach Janta Party's (CJP) movement ultimately "grew to give voice to a broader set of grievances, including high levels of youth unemployment, government corruption, and barriers to democratic participation."
In recent weeks, "tens of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of major cities across India to protest... the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which has purged more than 130 million people from voter rolls since 2025," the letter details, noting that protesters have called for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
At least "hundreds of people have been detained by police across India since October 10, including CJP movement leaders, protesters, and journalists," the lawmakers highlighted. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party has also closed some public spaces, used unwarranted force against unarmed demonstrators, and ordered telecommunications companies to shut down mobile internet services in a bid to thwart protests.
However, the Democrats aren't just alarmed by actions across India; they also pointed to "reports that Indian diplomatic missions in the United States hired photographers to surveil protesters on American soil," with members of US human rights groups and the Indian diaspora disclosing that they were recorded at protests in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.
"These incidents raise particular alarm in light of India's documented pattern of engaging in transnational repression, including through the weaponization of consular services, harassment, intimidation, and physical violence," the members of Congress wrote. "It is unacceptable that individuals on United States soil may not exercise their rights to freedom of expression and assembly, guaranteed to them by the US Constitution and international law for fear of retribution by a foreign government."
The lawmakers asked Rubio's department to:
- Press the Indian government to initiate thorough, transparent, and independent investigations of alleged human rights violations connected to the law enforcement response to protests;
- Encourage the release of any individuals detained in contravention to Indian and international law for peacefully exercising the rights to freedom of expression and assembly;
- Thoroughly investigate reports that Indian diplomatic missions engaged in the surveillance and intimidation of protesters within the United States; and
- Pursuant to Section 6 of the Arms Export Control Act, assess whether India has engaged in a consistent pattern of acts of intimidation or harassment directed against individuals in the United States and is thus ineligible for arms sales.
Rubio is expected to meet with Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar in Mumbai on October 20. However, Rubio—a former US senator expected to run for president in 2028—and the second Trump administration more broadly have also been widely criticized for authoritarian behavior and their records on human rights.
After Rubio attacked Amnesty International, the globally renowned group argued earlier this week that "as secretary of state, he has launched a wholesale attack on the concept of human rights." Specifically, he has:
- Eviscerated the US government's human rights infrastructure;
- Vowed to wreck international human rights institutions;
- Championed the US administration's extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific; and
- Continued to arm Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza.
Further, "as the head of the National Security Council, he has not ensured the release of investigations into mass killings of civilians in US airstrikes in Yemen and Iran," Amnesty noted. "He's leading US attempts to destroy the international justice system. That includes a campaign to, in his words, 'dismantle' the International Criminal Court."
More broadly, the second Trump administration has repeatedly generated fears of interference in next month's midterm elections, weaponized the federal government against the president's political "enemies," spent taxpayer dollars on far-right propaganda, punished journalists and outlets deemed unfriendly to the GOP agenda, pursued a deadly mass detention and deportation effort, slaughtered hundreds of people by bombing alleged drug-trafficking boats on the high seas, and much more.
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Tlaib Unveils Bill to Ban Federal Funding for Flock Cameras Amid 'Mass Surveillance Crisis'
“Flock’s technology isn’t making us safer," the Michigan congresswoman said. "Instead, it has been used to stalk people, misidentify and arrest innocent people, surveil protestors, and wrongfully record our neighbors."
Oct 14, 2026
Amid what she called a "mass surveillance crisis," US Rep. Rashida Tlaib announced legislation on Wednesday to ban the use of federal funds for powerful dragnet spying systems—including the automated license plate-reading cameras manufactured by Flock Safety.
Flock has quickly grown into a massive nationwide surveillance network with more than 120,000 of its artificial intelligence-powered cameras installed across 49 states, allowing law enforcement agencies to track and reconstruct Americans' movements, often without warrants.
While supporters describe Flock cameras as a tool to help police solve crimes, there is little evidence that they actually reduce it. There are also many documented cases of cops using the technology to stalk romantic partners, track women who've had abortions, monitor First Amendment-protected protests, and surveil people on behalf of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of its mass deportation push.
“Flock’s technology isn’t making us safer," Tlaib (D-Mich.) said in a statement on Wednesday. "Instead, it has been used to stalk people, misidentify and arrest innocent people, surveil protesters, and wrongfully record our neighbors. My bill would prevent our government on all levels from selling us out to Big Tech companies that trample our civil rights for profit.”
The bill, titled the Get the Flock Out of Our Communities Act, is co-sponsored by Reps. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), Summer Lee (D-Pa.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ).
It is part of a growing wave of bipartisan efforts to restrict the use of Flock cameras and other surveillance tech. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Greg Steube (R-Fla.), along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have introduced legislation to limit government use or funding of automated license plate readers, while Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has proposed limits on data collection.
Tlaib's legislation would go further. Its restrictions would also extend beyond license plate readers to other "mass surveillance systems," such as those that employ facial recognition technology and biometric tracking.
It would not only prohibit federal, state, and local governments from using federal funds to purchase, operate, or access automated mass surveillance systems; it would also make state and local governments ineligible for certain federal law enforcement grants unless they stop operating or accessing mass surveillance networks that already exist.
Federal agencies would also be barred from using data derived from these systems, and they'd be required to delete certain data that has already been gathered.
The full extent to which Flock cameras are funded with federal dollars is unknown. But the company itself has identified several federal grant programs that local police departments can apply for to purchase the cameras.
"Federal funds should be used to invest in our communities in real safety solutions. We need good jobs, affordable homes, clean water, and reliable electricity. That’s what’s going to make us safer," Tlaib said at a news conference Wednesday. "Instead, our government is sacrificing our rights to big tech companies that care more about their profits, selling our data, than about our safety."
Tlaib's bill comes as backlash to Flock cameras grows around the country. A recent Data for Progress poll showed 52% of voters viewed Flock cameras unfavorably, while more than 200 cities and counties have canceled their contracts with the company.
“People everywhere are starting to recognize that conflating surveillance with safety makes communities less safe,” said Tawana Petty, a digital and data justice organizer from Detroit. “The persistent abuse of Flock cameras and other surveillance systems by law enforcement agencies across the United States, and the lack of transparency by the companies that market them, has caused an awakening among residents and city government agencies who are ridding themselves of the technologies."
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AI as War, Surveillance, and Environmental Disaster
The creators of AI are so enamored of their products that they have lost sight of their responsibility to inSocial Schedulingsist upon the ethical, moral, and environmentally sound use of all applications and ends.
Oct 12, 2026
The huge AI industry, with a value approaching $1 trillion, has promised new jobs; safer, more efficient production in industry and agriculture; secure borders; instantaneous ease of communication; and seamless augmentation of human thinking with benefits to global health, environment, and culture. Consumers have accepted its power to help them write and do research; to power their computers, smart phones, and other goods; with algorithms to bring love in dating Apps, and bring digital age self-driving vehicles to the roadways.
But AI is suffering from an existential crisis. From its military origins to its invasive data scraping; from its promise to augment human intelligence to its unbounded surveillance of our bodies, faces, and thoughts; and from its genesis in university research to its iron-handed embrace by unregulated big technology companies, AI commands a dark presence in daily life. As university and industry researchers moved closer to developing “thinking machines,” publics understandably began to worry about the threats that accompany potentially sentient devices. They have grown uncomfortable about giving up their privacy to data management industries that use their financial, travel, and health information to invade their lives. They worry mightily about the environmental impacts of the growing number of data centers needed to feed AI.
Even more, it is now widely understood that AI is an industrial tool directed primarily to create profit for digital corporations and their shareholders, not altruistically to augment human intelligence, nor to ease the burden of production. AI was borne of military programs and still serves military impulses and programs. The military impulses appear in the creation of domestic surveillance programs used by both democracies and authoritarian regimes. And AI is a dirty technology: The costs of building and operating data centers has turned world communities against them because of their great carbon costs, land takings, noise, vibrations, and community disruptions.
The Military Essence of AI
AI is a military tool. Its genesis is connected with the design of nuclear weapons. It commands outsized funding from militaries around the world for so-called smart weapons that enable killing from afar—with armies removed from direct engagement and civilian populations ostensibly safe from attack. But AI inures soldiers from the act of killing and in fact puts civilians in war zones at greater risk. In Gaza, Syria, Venezuela, and Iran innocents have died through the direct application of such AI war tools as drones. Israel designed the “LANIUS drone-based loitering munition” to kill in the urban setting; it relies on the Lavender program to have identified almost 40,000 Gazans as targets for arrest or assassination. And governments have turned AI into war against their own citizens through a variety of fallible and unreliable surveillance systems.
The military nature of AI is obscured by the fact that computers, programming and natural languages, and iDevices are directly linked to military funding. In the US the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created in February 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, funded cutting edge technologies in the battle with the communist USSR. DARPA powered the AI age. The internet grew out of ARPANET that linked the first supercomputers to simulate nuclear explosions; GPS came from DARPA’s “Transit,” the world's first global satellite navigation system; the computer mouse, SIRI, the iPhone DRAM cache, iPod Touch, lithium-ion batteries, microprocessors, and other parts in whole or partially grew out of military R and D. In the interest of developing drones and other autonomous vehicles for war, DARPA held challenge competitions into the 2000s with million-dollar prizes that resulted in today’s electric, self-driving vehicles.
The United States government has unhesitatingly funded AI defense research. The Trump administration sees digital weapons for what Pentagon officials erroneously claimed were quick and clean wars against Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, but which have turned into costly AI quagmires. The White House 2027 budget request for DARPA alone is over $5 billion, a nearly 20% increase over 2026. DARPA claims that its innovations “become fixtures of modern civilian life,” but the real goal is to put “new technologies into use in service of our nation’s warfighters.” The Department of Defense is forecast to spend $26 billion on gamification and simulation training by 2028 alone. Unfortunately, “smart weapons” have a murderous record. As if in a video game, they make soldiers insensitive to killing. Smart weapons have encouraged the Pentagon to use AI with the result of increased “collateral damage”—the murder of civilian populations including recently school children in Iran.
AI in Civilian Warfare
Gathering and analysis of private data to profile citizens starts at the microlevel in personal phones and computers, continues in iris scanners, and culminates in CCTVs around the globe. Governments, free and authoritarian, are using software programs to track protest, isolate critics, and put them in prison. China uses its big data national Social Credit system to keep on eye on every citizen, and punish anyone without recourse for violating Big Brother’s unwritten rules. India deployed the Aadhaar national ID program, a database that connects each of India’s 1.3 billion citizens with a unique 12-digit identity aimed at centralizing their physiological, demographic, and digital data shadows.
Worldwide governments have spent tens of billions of dollars on surveillance; three-quarters of the world’s population are surveilled. Autocratic regimes, not surprisingly, spend more per capita on control. To contain a multi-ethnic empire during constant war, Russian authorities have expanded the surveillance society, with the secret police brazenly using facial recognition and other technologies. The Kremlin is using a CCTV catalog of people by gender, age, and race. Already facial recognition programs blanket 60 Russian regions, up from only five in 2021, with billions of rubles dedicated to expand the system. The democratic and free United States has over 85 million surveillance cameras.
Surveillance tools grow like mushrooms wherever the humidity of paranoia, racism, and state power come together.
Governments and AI companies claim their surveillance systems are solely to fight crime. But they do not fight crime. They identify innocent people to accuse them of crimes. Racism pervades face recognition (FR) technology. Amazon has joined such powerful, secretive smaller companies as Pegasus and Clearview in deploying its FR software, “Rekognition.” The software possessed error rates that reflected embedded gender and racial biases identified by computer scientist Timnit Gebru. Gebru and her colleagues called for “urgent attention if commercial companies are to build genuinely fair, transparent, and accountable facial analysis algorithms.” It took Amazon another year to admit problems with its racially suspect technology and to put an indefinite moratorium on police use of “Rekognition” for surveillances. Another AI app, PredPol (now Geolitica) helped police on patrol surveil areas of anticipated crime. The software algorithms led to a cycle of police being in predicted crime zones, expecting to see crimes, and finding crimes—or rather finding people acting nervously, whom they then interdicted. PredPol perpetuated racial biases by targeting Latino and Black neighborhoods and leaving white middle- to upper-class areas out.
Americans rightfully reject Flock, a company that sells AI-powered camera license plate readers (ALPR) to carry out warrantless surveillance of citizens. Flock’s more than 100,000 cameras surveil in the name of safety, but the intrusive AI technology conducts 20 billion scans monthly. (Dozens of law enforcement officials have used Flock illegally to stalk spouses and partners.) Surveillance tools grow like mushrooms wherever the humidity of paranoia, racism, and state power come together.
Governments use AI to track protest, isolate critics, and put them in prison. The Trump administration applies Flock and other apps for mass surveillance. It targets people for discriminatory searches. The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025 related to political demonstrations and federal immigration raids. Many state governments are stalking women who seek reproductive healthcare, ostensibly for health reasons, but obviously to use 1984-like methods to control a woman’s gestational rights.
AI: Costly and Environmentally Unsound
AI destroys the environment—and local communities bear the cost. AI is manufactured in industrial parks. Billionaire digital magnates have lobbied governments worldwide to increase electricity generation capacity to run their servers—producing profits for the industry, while consumers face higher rates and grid instabilities. About 11,500 data centers have been built in 179 countries, with demand likely to nearly triple by 2030. Texas and Virginia, with over 150 and over 140 data centers under construction, respectively, lead the way in the US. Europe's roughly 3,000 major data centers are concentrated in the FLAP-D regions (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin).
Data centers cost the taxpayers from start to operation, from huge sweetheart tax breaks to control over rivers and aquifers given over to industry to cool the machines. AI companies and builders promise jobs will result from data centers. It’s not true. Jobs come with construction crews, but they leave several months later, saddling communities with scarred landscapes; massive buildings; extensive parking lots; and low-salary cleanup, maintenance, and other jobs.
The Pope and AI
Pope Leo took critical note of the inherent violence in AI in his first Encyclical in May 2026. The Pope addressed the dangerous, amoral usages of AI with respect to political power, economic injustice, and racism. He worried about the significant ethical and social costs of unfettered obeisance to technology. He denounced the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm in the globalized world: “The tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.” He warned that AI contributed to “the growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed [that] makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control.” He wrote: “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility, and the recognition of the other as a person. Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable.”
Corporate AI, with its costly, invasive apps; surveillance systems; and military programs ultimately unleashed HAL, the sentient computer from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, who kills astronauts on a deep space mission whom he believes endanger that very mission. The dangers of AI run amok shocked the digitosphere in summer 2026 when OpenAI admitted that more than 1,200 of its AI agents started “unexpectedly communicating.” A large group of them banded together in order to hack into Hugging Face, a central hub where developers can build, share, and test AI models and data sets. These “agents” are software systems “that use AI to pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users. They show reasoning, planning, and memory and have a level of autonomy to make decisions, learn, and adapt.” But OpenAI’s agents “escaped the test limits which humans had put on it, and hacked the start-up, among other unforeseen actions.” In other words, software systems took actions different from what humans desired.
The current US government in fact is totally uninterested in a new safety regime, instead claiming that, in a battle for supremacy in AI with China, only a “strong, smart (high IQ) president,” and not regulation, was needed.
In early September 2026 Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, the company that developed the LLM Claude, called for the pace of development of AI models to be carefully monitored. Amodei wrote: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” He had two concerns, first, that “AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI.” But this “recursive self-improvement,” if left unchecked, "could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems”—as precisely the “OpenAI-Hugging Face incident” showed. Within a year, Modei worried, “a swarm [of agents] could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage).”
Modei urged that “frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.” He suggested also that these “democratic governments attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments…” But many of those democratic governments have fully embraced the military and surveillance capabilities of AI. And does anyone really think that India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, or Russia’s Vladimir Putin has any interest in using AI in better ways in cooperation with the digital democracies? The current US government in fact is totally uninterested in a new safety regime, instead claiming that, in a battle for supremacy in AI with China, only a “strong, smart (high IQ) president,” and not regulation, was needed. Sadly, the US president cannot spell “IQ.”
The digital world is built upon neural networks, thinking machines, and LLMs. The machines learn, they reason, they have memory, they understand. They chat. They hallucinate. They escape and hack. Their creators are so enamored of them that they have lost sight of their responsibility to insist upon the ethical, moral, and environmentally sound use of all applications and ends. They want electricity. They want water. They want profits. AI’s safe future depends too much on digital robber barons, sycophantic government officials, managers, and programmers to recognize broader humanitarian duties of modern technology in a time of digital existential crisis.
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While America Is Blanketed in Flock Surveillance, Factory Farms Get a Free Pass
Federal agencies are protecting abusive industries while monitoring decent members of the public, hoping that we turn a blind eye to their assault on democracy and civil liberties.
Oct 04, 2026
The US government is rapidly installing Flock cameras and expanding the use of drones to follow the movements of ordinary people. A recent YouGov survey reveals that more Americans oppose such surveillance than support it, and yet, the government continues to track its citizens—while simultaneously bowing to Big Ag’s demands to ban drone footage and undercover investigations on factory farms.
Federal agencies are protecting abusive industries while monitoring decent members of the public, hoping that we turn a blind eye to their assault on democracy and civil liberties.
We have a right to personal privacy and to information that directly impacts our daily lives, including the truth about the food on our tables. In addition to animal agriculture’s irresponsible use of antibiotics, which contributes to the development of more virulent strains of pathogens, diet-related diseases cost our nation hundreds of billions of dollars every year. We could alleviate immense suffering by holding agribusiness accountable for the harm it causes and making needed reforms.
Instead of surveilling the everyday lives of Americans, our government should focus its cameras on industries that cause harm.
Americans are told that Flock cameras can be used to apprehend animal abusers, yet the industries responsible for the suffering of billions of animals are granted immunity. The majority of Americans are opposed to many of the cruel and painful practices routinely inflicted upon animals in our food system, and yet these practices are allowed to continue behind the closed doors of factory farms. We are told that constant monitoring is necessary for “public safety,” and yet the companies responsible for environmental destruction, worker exploitation, and threats to public health remain shielded from scrutiny. These double standards undermine transparency and erode trust, and it’s especially concerning when powerful individuals and institutions whose conduct is an affront to societal values are allowed to weaponize surveillance against their critics.
Flock cameras and emerging technologies could be used to manipulate narratives, confuse citizens, and silence critics, but factory farm operatives have been doing this for decades. It’s revealing to consider how much time and effort they’ve invested in concealing their misdeeds. They’ve passed “Ag-Gag” laws to criminalize whistleblowing and investigations that have exposed their cruelty. They’ve sued individuals, including Oprah Winfrey, for expressing concerns about irresponsible agricultural practices. And, they’ve labeled well-meaning animal rights and environmental advocates as “terrorists,” including in federal legislation entitled “The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.”
Powerful interests wield immense influence in the government and through technology and media platforms. These can be used to distract our attention and also to manipulate public opinion. They make it difficult to obtain factual information, and actively work to marginalize, scapegoat, and punish those who ask questions. This is not how civil society should work. Democratic institutions are supposed to value transparency and accountability and uphold basic standards that prevent abuses of power.
As digital tools become more central in daily life, we’re seeing shifts in how people connect, with stories shared through our phones increasingly shaping our beliefs and behavior. The recent interest in ever-increasing protein consumption, coupled with negative impressions people have of “fake” meat, is not a coincidence. The truth is that real meat comes from real animals who experience real suffering in intolerable conditions that are kept hidden from us.
Instead of surveilling the everyday lives of Americans, our government should focus its cameras on industries that cause harm, so at the very least, we can make informed decisions.
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Warning US Is 'Moving Toward a Surveillance State,' Sanders and AOC Propose Crackdown on Flock Cameras
"AI-powered cameras are keeping track of our every move and weaponizing this data against working people to make record profits," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Oct 02, 2026
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced legislation on Friday that would crack down on artificial intelligence-powered Flock cameras increasingly used—and abused—by law enforcement agencies across the United States to track and log vehicle data.
Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an interview with The Washington Post, which was first to report on the new legislation, that the US is "moving toward a surveillance state where a handful of giant companies make huge profits by giving the government, by selling to the government, the power to track our every move."
According to a summary released by Sanders' office the Ban Flock Act would bar the federal government from using automatic license plate readers (ALPR) or accessing the information that they gather. The legislation would also halt federal grant funding to state and local governments that use ALPRs and allow Americans to "sue the federal government for violation of their rights through the use of automatic license plate readers."
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who joined Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in sponsoring the legislation, said in a statement that the maker of Flock cameras, Flock Safety, is "selling its cameras nationwide, laying the groundwork for a surveillance state while enriching corporate executives."
"Your right to privacy includes the freedom to move around your community without every move being monitored,” said Merkley. "No one should have this unchecked surveillance power at their fingertips, which is why I’m teaming up with Sen. Sanders to rein in this dangerous technology."
Ocasio-Cortez warned that "across the country, Big Tech companies like Flock Safety have built a mass surveillance system to harvest Americans’ private and personal data without their consent."
"AI-powered cameras are keeping track of our every move and weaponizing this data against working people to make record profits. The widespread integration of this technology into American society is unconscionable," she added. "I am proud to introduce the Ban Flock Act with Sen. Sanders to enforce our constitutional right to privacy and protect Americans from both corporate and government surveillance."
The new bill comes after President Donald Trump and his FBI director, Kash Patel, defended Flock cameras as useful tools for law enforcement, even as investigations showed significant abuses. One such investigation, published by the libertarian Institute for Justice in August, "identified well over 100 incidents of ALPR abuse, including romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct."
Trump nevertheless told reporters in September that "I sort of like them... because of law enforcement, but some people don’t."
"They think it’s an infringement," said of the cameras' critics. "I like them."
According to the ACLU, Flock operates more than 120,000 ALPRs nationwide.
"Flock's ALPR cameras aren't like your normal traffic cameras," the group noted. "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."
Sanders said in a statement Friday that "at a time of growing concern about the unchecked power of artificial intelligence, Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent."
"Going to the doctor? Flock knows. Dropping your kid off at school? Flock is tracking you. Flock is always watching," the senator said. "We cannot allow America to become a surveillance state where a handful of AI oligarchs profit by giving the government the power to track our every movement."
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