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mass surveillance
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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We Need a Shoppers' Bill of Rights to Protect Us From 21st Century Price Gouging
New technology is enabling companies to reinvent the rip-off right under our noses; we need new laws to protect us.
Oct 02, 2026
Every day, companies find better, and sneakier, ways to reach deeper into our wallets.
They trap us in subscriptions, bury fees until checkout, use algorithms to collude with competitors, and mine our personal data to charge us the most we’re willing to pay. With each trick and tactic, companies are reinventing the rip-off right under our noses. And, as families strain under the rising cost of living, these practices are coming for every line of the household budget.
Algorithmic price-fixing is one of the most powerful tools in that arsenal. Price-fixing no longer requires a smoky back room. Today, technology can do CEOs’ dirty work for them. From rent to gasoline, this algorithmic price-fixing playbook is wreaking havoc on family budgets.
Putting food on the table and a roof over your head is hard enough without greedy corporations squeezing you for all you’re worth.
In June, a class-action lawsuit in California alleged that AI-powered pricing tool Kalibrate helped more than 1,700 gas stations coordinate and inflate prices at the pump. Drivers paid a hefty price, as Kalibrate allegedly pushed gas prices up by as much as 30 cents a gallon in some markets—a roughly $4 billion dollar dent in Californians’ budgets. Similar schemes could well be underway in other states.
Meanwhile, in the rental market, the blockbuster RealPage lawsuit alleged that the company’s leasing software pooled landlords’ data and spit out rent recommendations that helped landlords raise rents in lockstep. In some buildings using RealPage, rents jumped by as much as 33% in a single year—more than eight times the increase in a comparable building that didn’t use the software.
Another weapon in the gouger’s arsenal is dynamic pricing. Americans are familiar with prices that fluctuate when supply is scarce—say, seats on a plane or rooms at a hotel. But today, companies are pushing the practice well beyond contexts of scarcity.
For example, shoppers might find that sunscreen and bottled water have changed prices overnight in Las Vegas hotel lobby shops. And as stores like Walmart and Kroger install electronic shelf labels across thousands of stores, the infrastructure for high-frequency dynamic pricing in brick and mortar shopping is taking shape.
And companies aren’t just changing prices at high speed, they’re changing prices based on who’s shopping. Surveillance pricing, or the tactic of using personal data to squeeze each consumer to their breaking point, is being deployed all across the market.
Shoppers who are near a Target, for example, have been charged higher prices than those shopping at home. And on platforms like Booking.com, users from wealthier cities may see higher prices for identical hotel rooms. Companies have stopped merely pricing products. Now, they are pricing people, too.
Shoppers know the deck is stacked in corporations’ favor, and they’re tired of being spied on and ripped off.
A reckoning over what Americans are owed in the modern marketplace is long overdue. The market has changed at warp speed, but our guardrails haven’t kept up. Without new protections, the price tag we’ve taken for granted for more than 100 years is at risk of extinction.
In my new book Gouged, I offer one path forward: the Shoppers’ Bill of Rights.
From ensuring that the price you see is the price you pay to banning surveillance pricing to giving mom and pops on Main Street a fair shot against the big box stores and requiring AI assistants to act in shoppers’ best interest, it lays the baseline for a fair marketplace, putting simple guardrails around the technologies, tricks, and traps that companies are using to gouge us.
Lawmakers in some states are already taking strides independently, with roughly 90 bills introduced to counter these unfair pricing tactics in just the last two years.
But we shouldn’t settle for leaving shoppers vulnerable if they step across the street or cross state lines. Putting food on the table and a roof over your head is hard enough without greedy corporations squeezing you for all you’re worth. A Shoppers’ Bill of Rights would be a good place to start to restore the basic bargain between shoppers and corporations.
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'Historic': Seattle Passes First City Ban on AI-Enabled Surveillance Pricing
"The price you see shouldn’t be different based on who you are. Mayor Wilson and the City Council have made Seattle a leader on protecting shoppers from unfair grocery pricing tactics," one advocate said.
Sep 23, 2026
Seattle became the first city in the country to ban surveillance pricing on Tuesday afternoon after the City Council voted 7-2 to approve a measure co-sponsored and championed by progressive Mayor Katie Wilson.
The Fair Pricing and Transparency policy bans big retail outlets—both online and brick-and-mortar—from using customer data such as race, gender, employment status, internet or social media history, and conversations with chatbots to charge different shoppers different prices for the same products.
“Food is an essential good that’s getting more expensive all the time,” Wilson said in a statement celebrating the win. “People have been clear: They don’t want their data fed into algorithms that decide how much they pay at the grocery store. Everyone deserves transparent pricing and equal treatment, not hidden systems that charge some shoppers more than others.”
“I don’t think we could do that without the kind of mayor that was elected and the moment that we’re in."
Surveillance pricing is the practice of feeding shopper data to artificial intelligence, which then sets distinct prices for different customers based on what the AI thinks they can afford. A 2025 investigation from Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative, and More Perfect Union found that the practice could add $1,200 a year to the average Seattle family’s grocery bill.
“This is a huge win for consumers against companies that abuse their personal data to rip them off,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said on social media in response to the news.
Seattle just became the first city in America to ban grocery stores from engaging in surveillance pricing.
This is a huge win for consumers against companies that abuse their personal data to rip them off.
Watch former FTC Chair Lina Khan explain. pic.twitter.com/TxAJGFy7H2
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) September 23, 2026
Grace Gedye, a senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports, said in a statement: “Nobody should pay more for basic necessities because a data broker is quietly collecting information about what they’re searching for online, what they hover over, what their income is, or where they go. The price you see shouldn’t be different based on who you are. Mayor Wilson and the City Council have made Seattle a leader on protecting shoppers from unfair grocery pricing tactics with this bill. We commend this work.”
The Seattle ordinance comes amid an ongoing affordability crisis as grocery prices spike while President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have slashed the budget of crucial federal programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). At the same time, there is a growing national backlash against AI and Big Tech, with 78% of Americans favoring mandatory regulation of the technology. The ban on surveillance pricing follows a data center moratorium passed by the Seattle City Council in June.
Maya Morales, the founder of WA People’s Privacy and one of the organizers mobilizing grassroots support for the measure, told Common Dreams that harder day-to-day living conditions were leading to a "national shift” in awareness of how Big Tech and Big Retail make life even more difficult, likely enabling a major tech city like Seattle to take a stand against surveillance pricing.
“People are feeling the heat very intensely all over the nation, so in many ways it doesn't surprise me that this would be the moment that we could get this done, because the harms are so obvious,” she said.
Progressive City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, another co-sponsor of and key advocate for the bill, also emphasized the importance of food security.
“Groceries are getting more expensive for everyday Seattleites, while the buying, selling, and leveraging our private information to manipulate prices is making big national grocery corporations millions in profit,” Rinck said in a statement. “This legislation is intended to put some guardrails on what big businesses can do with our personal information. At a time when SNAP reductions have rocked our community and people have less to spend on food, this is an important step we can take to prevent AI-assisted price gouging and ensure fair discounts for everyone.”
The measure was also co-sponsored by Councilmembers Dionne Foster and Rob Saka and backed by labor and community groups including WA People’s Privacy, Washington Working Families Party, Transit Riders Union, Lavender Rights Project, Queer Power Alliance, Washington Fair Trade Coalition, The Nexus of Privacy, MLK Labor, Consumer Reports, and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) 3000.
Grocery workers supported the measure in part because they would be likely to take the brunt of customer complaints if a shopper sees that they are being charged differently than the person next to them at the self checkout. They were also concerned about their own food bills remaining affordable.
“Passing the strongest ban on AI-powered price gouging on groceries feels historic,” Seattle grocery store worker Kristen Wilder said in a statement. “My coworkers and the customers we serve proudly stood together to stop the grocery industry from imposing this scheme here in Seattle. Today that worked paid off for families who just want to know they’re paying a fair price and for workers who want to focus on customer service instead of defending some algorithm making decisions in a black box.”
In addition to fighting food insecurity, Morales emphasized that the measure “takes a little bit of a crack” at the privacy violations enabled by AI and embraced at the federal level as a way of targeting people of color, immigrants, sex workers, low-income and LGBTQ+ people, and other vulnerable groups.
“AI harms are generally privacy and surveillance harms,” Morales said, because “AI needs data in order to work. Mass commercial data surveillance is the reason we have AI and vice versa, and that is an infinite loop.”
However, from a privacy standpoint Morales said there was one disappointing aspect of the bill: an amendment passed to specify that nothing in the law prohibited “technology used solely for security, loss prevention, safety, fraud prevention, fraud detection, or compliance with law.” Morales said this provision was unnecessary because the bill’s language had been very clear that it was focused on pricing. She was also concerned it could open up loopholes, as it is difficult to prove a given technology is only being used for one purpose, and a grocery store might then be able to introduce an invasive surveillance technology—such as shopping baskets that track customers—under the guise of fighting shoplifting.
Because of that amendment, Morales told Common Dreams, “we managed to get a privacy win on pricing but not a privacy win at the grocery store.”
That said, five other corporate “bill-gutting” amendments were voted down, which Morales called a “spectacular win,” and the overall bill was itself an important victory.
Both Morales, and Jon of The Nexus of Privacy, credited the bill’s strength and ability to resist watering down in part to Wilson, who worked with stakeholders including smaller grocery outlets, labor, and community groups to build a coalition and write a strong ordinance from the get-go. Morales noted that Wilson came to office from an organizing background, and that she and Rinck did a good job of bringing grassroots organizations into the process to secure a victory, allowing Seattle policymakers to counter powerful local technology and retail interests.
“I don’t think we could do that without the kind of mayor that was elected and the moment that we’re in,” Morales said.
There is now hope that the bill would have statewide and even national implications. A surveillance pricing ban was introduced into the Washington Legislature in 2026 but failed to advance.
Morales said a legislative win at the local level can show state lawmakers: "This can be done. You don’t have to cave to the Big Retail and Tech lobby, and you can protect people.”
On a national level, Jon of The Nexus of Privacy wrote:
This huge win will help organizers in other cities and states... across the country. Industry had killed a surveillance pricing bill in California just a couple of weeks ago, and they've stalled New York's surveillance pricing bill for months... but guess what, they're not invincible! And as well as the strong legislation providing... a model of what's possible, the Seattle coalition's very successful tactics can hopefully be adapted by organizers elsewhere to reflect the dynamics wherever they are.
As Morales told Common Dreams, “I hope every city will pass something like this.”
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25 Years After 9/11, the Deportation Machine Has Exploded
Rights that apply to some people are not rights. They are privileges with an expiration date, and that date moves every single time this country gets scared.
Sep 15, 2026
For my family, the story of September 11 didn’t end when we went to bed after a day of fear and confusion.
We were attacked during what was my first week of 9th grade. I was looking out my classroom window at the Twin Towers with a classmate as we inadvertently witnessed the first plane hit the building. We were in shock. More kids gathered at the windows as a particular silence fell over the group. We eventually moved to a bigger room with more students, but with blinds pulled down. The sound of the second plane hitting the building made the blinds pop.
I don't remember much else about that day except that the room went quiet in a way I'd never heard a room go quiet before. But I vividly remember what would happen in the days after.
The city's grief curdled into something else for people who looked like me. Harassment on the streets. Windows broken. Women with their hijabs pulled off on the street. Fathers, brothers, grandfathers were pulled out of homes and businesses across the city and questioned like suspects, not for anything they'd done, but for what mosque they prayed at or what their passport said.
Twenty-five years later, the machine that was built to watch a few of us is watching most of us.
By the following year, tens of thousands of other men were required to register in person at the immigration office because of where they were born. Between September 2002 and 2003, 83,519 men registered at intake windows across the country. Of those, 13,799 were placed in deportation proceedings. Yet, only 11 were found to have any connection to terrorism, by the government's own count at the time. A program that processed 83,000 people and tried to deport almost 14,000 of them.
Six months into that registration program, on March 1, 2003, the federal government opened the Department of Homeland Security, which folded 22 agencies into a single new department built to do that kind of work at scale. But this mandate’s impact on communities wasn't an abstraction to me. It was the agency that had just decided my brother didn't belong in our city, with a budget line and a headquarters and a mission that would live long past our nation’s trauma.
I started organizing more deeply because of what happened to my neighbors and family that year. Twenty-five years of doing this work has taught me one specific thing: The machine doesn't stay pointed where it started. It isn't only Arab and Muslim families anymore who get treated as a threat first and people second.
This year, Congress gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement $45 billion just for new detention spaces, a 265% jump that gives ICE a bigger detention budget than the entire federal prison system, plus another $30 billion for enforcement operations on top of that. No one has properly enumerated what threat justifies a budget that size. I don't think there is one. Rather, it's a machine that's been fed for 25 years and has simply gotten larger with more zeroes attached.
What happened to Muslim and Arab families after 9/11 is not identical to what's happening to immigrant families now. But what I recognize is narrower than that. It’s how a government decides that fear of a few individuals justifies suspicion of entire communities, and how fast the list of suspects grows once the infrastructure to monitor and process them is in place.
After 9/11, I learned the difference between charity and power. Charity helps people survive a system. Power changes what the system is permitted to do to those in society. I've spent my adult life on the side of building power, not because immigrants are just useful, exceptional, or because of their economic contributions, but because rights that apply to some people are not rights. They are privileges with an expiration date, and that date moves every single time this country gets scared.
Twenty-five years later, however, it's landing on more doors than it did in 2002. Others have said it countless times, but if some of us don't have rights, none of us do. It's the exact lesson this country refused to learn in 2002, when 11 real cases were enough to justify tracking 83,000 people, and the tracking was made permanent instead of undone. Twenty-five years later, the machine that was built to watch a few of us is watching most of us.
We must fight for every single one of us because we have all witnessed what happens when we do not. I watched it through a classroom window when I was 14. I have spent every year since making certain that the next community in the crosshairs does not face it the way mine did, alone and expected to be grateful for whatever protection somebody decided to spare us.
This anniversary is absolutely a time when we need to reflect on what we lost that day as New Yorkers and as Americans. It's also about whether we're finally willing to notice what we built right after it, and this time agree not to let it keep growing.
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What the Flock? Exposing Big Tech’s Surveillance State
As spying becomes big business, more people are mobilizing to resist mass surveillance.
Sep 03, 2026
For many, Labor Day signifies a time of transition, the end of summer and the return to business as usual, whether it be school or work. But the holiday weekend was born out of a more radical past, and at a place charged with a history of protest and free expression.
On September 5, 1882, more than 10,000 workers sacrificed a day’s pay to march on Union Square and demand an eight-hour workday and an end to child labor. The success of their protest paved the way for Labor Day to become a federal holiday in 1894.
Initially a gated garden enclave for New York’s wealthiest, architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux redesigned Union Square in 1872 as an open plaza for public assembly and patriotic demonstration.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Union Square became the epicenter of radical American politics, a setting for protests by anarchists and socialists. Noted activist Emma Goldman frequently used the public plaza to challenge government censorship and advocate for women’s reproductive rights and free speech.
Fenced in by Surveillance Technology
Today, however, Union Square has been fenced in by a barricade of a different sort. Ringing the plaza is a spiky array of cameras, installed on streetlights by a New York Police Department seeking to surveil New Yorkers and anyone else who happens by the square.
The cameras include automatic license-plate recognition technology, which captures data on every car that passes the square down Broadway or across busy 14th Street.
Whether you’re driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk or attending a local No Kings protest, odds are that law enforcement has recorded, processed, and archived your activities for future reference.
Such setups are so ubiquitous to cities and major intersections that they’re easy to dismiss as normal features of a busy streetscape. But that’s changing.
The company that produces many of these surveillance cameras—Flock Group Inc.—has become a focus of concern among activists, advocates, and people of every political stripe who don’t want law enforcement documenting and archiving their every activity.
Spying on the Haystack
But Flock is not alone. Surveilling everyday Americans is now a multibillion-dollar business that’s growing fast.
Flock has struck license-plate reading camera contracts with 7,000 law-enforcement agencies, accounting for 40% of all such departments nationwide. There are more than 130,000 of these cameras deployed across 49 states, likely at a busy intersection or gathering point near you.
Whether you’re driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk or attending a local No Kings protest, odds are that law enforcement has recorded, processed, and archived your activities for future reference.
The philosophy behind such mass surveillance is that authorities need to capture data on everyone’s movements to identify those few who step out of line. It’s as though you need to know the habits of every blade of grass in the haystack to cull out the one wayward needle.
If that’s not disturbing enough, there have also been extensive reports of abuse, including local police officers deploying department surveillance technology to stalk romantic interests—including strangers—while innocent people have been thrown in jail based on a misread license plate or an inaccurate biometric scan.
“The constant and ongoing surveillance of people in public places raises serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns,” says Jenna Ruddock, Free Press’ advocacy director. “Even decisions about where to install these cameras map onto well-established practices of racist policing, aside from the fact that facial-detection technology has an alarming track record when attempting to identify people of color.”
Mass Surveillance Is Big Business
Still, more major tech companies are getting in on the expanding surveillance business. Powerful artificial intelligence companies are marketing AI-enabled video analytics with facial-recognition capacities for real-time threat detection (think Minority Report).
And while Meta doesn’t directly market its Ray-Ban smart glasses to law enforcement, local police departments and immigration agencies have been buying them in bulk via Amazon.
For its part, Amazon is chasing multimillion-dollar contracts to provide law enforcement with cloud infrastructure for data storage, analytics, and biometric systems, including more than $250 million from the Department of Homeland Security to host many of the databases and systems used to track, monitor, and deport immigrants.
Though he once promised that he wouldn’t allow anyone to use company technology to harm people, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is now seeking to profit from mass surveillance. The company is already doing business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement while vying with Amazon and other tech giants for government cloud-computing contracts. Google is also under contract to provide the tech at the center of federal projects to upgrade the “virtual wall” that surveils US borders.
Lost to the Surveillance State
As more cameras sprout up in more locations, the movement to oppose such government spying is spreading. Dozens of cities across the country have cut ties with Flock over their residents’ data-privacy concerns. People have flocked to public hearings and city council meetings to pressure local elected officials to turn the cameras off. Some have taken matters into their own hands, covering nearby Flock and other surveillance cameras with trash bags—or even cutting down camera-attached light poles with electric saws.
DeFlock, an anti-surveillance activist group, has been mapping locations of Flock and other cameras nationwide. (This author used this tool to identify the many non-Flock surveillance cameras surrounding Union Square).
In August, privacy advocates organized the DeFlock National Week of Action, which featured a series of protests, town halls, and informational events to oppose automated license-plate readers and other mass surveillance technology.
The pushback against local surveillance cameras is occurring alongside the fast-spreading movement to stop the unchecked construction of data centers. There’s a common culprit in both popular uprisings: the unholy alliances struck between Big Tech and government. Others are rightfully suspicious of the billionaire class pushing the rapid, reckless development of advanced AI and surveillance tools without first seeking the consent of surrounding communities.
In Union Square on a recent Monday, I asked local busker Lawrence Kidwell whether he knew what all of the nearby police cameras were about. “The NYPD just wants to listen to my music,” he said.
Perhaps. But the cameras are also in place to discourage other forms of expression and muzzle voices of dissent. Something that Union Square has long welcomed may become lost to the new deprivations of the surveillance state.
This piece was originally published at Pressing Issues.
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Finding Hope in Community Pushback Against Data Centers
Despite billions of dollars put into trying to change individuals' opinions to fit the needs of corporations, people continue to hold onto values of health, well-being, community, mutual aid, and democracy. This is true power that can be harnessed.
Aug 30, 2026
This summer, over 100 community members gave public comments against Project Taurus, an AI data center proposed by the tech and real estate company, Raeden, near Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. Despite only 15 comments in favor of the project, the city planning commission voted 6-2 to move forward with the project.
As a youth environmental and social justice organizer who sat through hours of the hearing and spent much of my past week encouraging community members to join me, I left the hearing devastated by the commission’s decision. Building a data center at a site already facing a water crisis and next to a National Natural Landmark felt like just one more step toward a society that has lost all care and consideration for communities and nature.
But the next day, as I discussed the hearing with one of my roommates, I found myself trying to convey the energy, hope, empathy, and deep care that had filled the hearing room. I explained my admiration for the dozens of working-class community members who sat for hours in a windowless room just to give a two-minute comment or simply support the other speakers. By the end of the conversation, I realized that despite being upset about the decision, the experience left me with hope and faith in the goodness of humanity.
As America continues to throw billions into war, cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid funding, pull out of climate commitments, and move toward projects and systems that further harm people, we can begin to believe that Americans are not concerned with their neighbors’ well-being. What the hearing taught me, however, is that decisions—like whether to move forward with data center projects—and the current state of our county do not reflect our communities’ desires.
It is critical that decisions like the Colorado Springs Planning Commission’s don’t lead us to lose hope in one another and our collective power.
The committee’s decision is a reflection of money in politics. It is a reflection of desperately needing to change who our elected officials are. Of needing to address corporate consolidation that holds this power in opposition to people’s needs and not accountable to communities. Of needing to distribute power so that real people are better represented, and of needing to better support communities so that they have the time, resources, and energy to ensure their voices are taken into account in issues that affect them and their neighbors.
We are up against a political and economic system with such strong inertia that even if communities understand it isn’t working for them, only strategic coordinated action will bring about change. The more people are overworked, underfed, and under-resourced, the harder it is for them to advocate. They have less time to attend community meetings; to speak out about the meetings themselves being scheduled during the workday; to look into local candidates' positions; to turn out to vote. And they have less money to contribute to grassroots campaigns that refuse money from Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Big Tech.
Though Raeden claims to have people’s best interests in mind, it is structured to secure a profit, not to adhere to communities’ needs. A majority of Americans oppose local data center construction, and only 14% of Americans feel comfortable with a data center built nearby. This aligns with the 85% of public comments that were in opposition to Project Taurus.
Community members spoke about the project's impact on neighborhood health, the environment, wildlife, water, and energy. They explained that the center’s infrasound can’t be blocked by Raeden’s proposed 30-foot sound wall; diesel backup generators pose severe health risks by emitting high levels of toxic particles that cause respiratory issues, worsen asthma, and increase long-term cancer risks; and although Raeden emphasizes its closed-loop cooling system to save water in an environment that is already in a major drought, the treatment chemicals used pose risks to the local environment and health of our water supply while the system as a whole significantly increases energy usage, which the company itself admits will likely be powered by fossil fuels and nuclear plants.
Furthermore, community members emphasized that data centers are not built for community needs. The energy itself powers mass surveillance and military AI programs for companies like Palantir and the world’s largest prisoner tracking company, BI, both of which are headquartered in Colorado.
Raeden tells the community that it will bring jobs and money to the Springs. However, while Raeden will immediately profit from the development, the long-term economic benefits for the community are much more dubious. Experts have increasingly been raising concerns about the longevity of AI investments, or what they refer to as the “AI bubble.” A recent MIT study found that 95% of AI companies have achieved zero return on investment, despite investments of $30 to $40 billion in the technology. The end of the AI bubble is predicted to be akin to the 2008 financial crisis but with more devastating effects. Similar to 2008, when banks got a $500 billion bailout while 6 million Americans lost their homes, tech companies will likely be protected while communities will suffer the costs. Raeden, for instance, will be protected because it is a real estate company and does not have roots in the community, unlike Colorado Springs residents.
As one community member emphasized, Raeden came into Colorado Springs not for the water or natural resources the city can provide, but to take advantage of the city's human desperation. Northwest Colorado Springs is in need of jobs and local investment.
Raeden came to the Springs expecting to be welcomed by a community too tired and worn out to push back, but the company has been met with a very different reality. Despite the minimal transparency from the city and Raeden, not only are a large majority of community members against data centers, but the community has also been able to spread awareness about the project and mobilize over 100 people to show up to speak out for nature, their neighbors’ health, and the fate of future generations.
I have built my worldview around a belief that if we all come together as regular people with human values, we will have the power to stand up against even the millions of dollars corporations throw at candidates, policy, or, in this case, data centers. The hearing was a realization of this working-class movement of the people that I spend much of my time striving for.
The hard part was supposed to be getting people to come together and to show up. We did that. People spoke eloquently, with knowledge, and heartfelt appeals. And still, they were denied.
Nevertheless, this past week has shown me that people are truly good. Despite billions of dollars put into trying to change individuals' opinions to fit the needs of corporations, people continue to hold onto values of health, well-being, community, mutual aid, and democracy. This is true power that can be harnessed.
It is critical that decisions like the Colorado Springs Planning Commission’s don’t lead us to lose hope in one another and our collective power. Corporations like Raeden would love nothing more than for us to be apathetic and divided. Instead, we must stay true to our demands for humanity. Stay true to these demands as we vote for candidates who prioritize human needs over corporate interests. As we increase our trust in one another, the conversations we have with our neighbors, and our faith in our power. We will continue to show up and prove that people have not given consent for our current systems.
There are now over 300 local bans and moratoriums on data centers across the US, including Denver, Jefferson County, Boulder, Longmont, and Monument, and a majority of Americans support pausing the construction of AI data centers for at least one year.
Colorado Springs proved that communities have not and will not accept a rise in corporate trickle-down projects as a replacement for government programs. We proved that communities will continue to show up for one another and stay grounded in human values. We proved that this fight is far from easy and anything but fair, but we will persist.
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