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privacy
Man in Darth Vader Costume Praises Flock Cameras at City Council Meeting: ‘The Emperor Is a Fan’
"We must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium."
Aug 20, 2026
Residents of San Diego are up in arms about Flock cameras. But for those seeking to keep tabs on "rebel scum," the omnipotent surveillance technology has its uses.
That's according to one Darth Vader, who took the podium during the public comment period at a Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee Meeting in the California city on Wednesday night to sing, or more accurately, bellow his praises for the company, whose automatic license-plate reading (ALPR) cameras are fast being installed around the nation.
"The emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium," the person dressed as the infamous Star Wars villain said.
"Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license [plates]; they are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this," the sith lord continued. "I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend."
There are more than 550 Flock cameras installed across the city of San Diego, according to a public database by the activist group DeFlock.
And while the person who embodied the dark lord has not yet been identified, the satirical performance gave voice to some of the well-documented ways that the technology has been used to create a nationwide panopticon that enables widespread warrantless spying.
One database published earlier this month by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian nonprofit law firm, found over 100 documented cases of police using the technology for “romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct.”
Vader was also not exaggerating about the use of Flock cameras to spy on children. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an internet-focused civil liberties group, found, some school districts have enlisted cops to track families in order to root out "residency fraud" and prove that they live in the district.
"A search of ALPR data will show a lot more than whether a family lives within the right zone," wrote Dave Maass, EFF’s director of investigations, and Rindala Alajaji, a legislative activist with the group. "Every time a plate is searched, it can reveal personal information about a family: when they go to the doctor, when they go to worship, when they go out at night, and where they travel on vacation. None of that is the school district's business, and these searches are a huge invasion of privacy."
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ACLU Says New Flock Camera Guardrails Nothing But a 'Thinly Veiled PR Attempt'
“Transforming an exceptionally dangerous mass surveillance system into one that is fully protective of civil rights and civil liberties is a difficult, if not impossible task.”
Aug 13, 2026
The ACLU on Thursday largely dismissed new privacy measures announced by surveillance tech company Flock Safety, arguing the changes do little to address mounting concerns about the company’s sprawling automated license plate reader network and abuses of its technology by law enforcement agencies and other malicious actors.
Flock on Thursday unveiled new guardrails for its law enforcement customers, including a reduction in default license plate data retention from 30 days to seven, mandatory auditing tools designed to flag suspicious searches, and requirements that officers associate searches with case numbers.
The ACLU said the changes "seem to be a thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system with largely hollow security promises, rather than an earnest effort to address them."
ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow asserted that “transforming an exceptionally dangerous mass surveillance system into one that is fully protective of civil rights and civil liberties is a difficult, if not impossible task."
"That is even more the case with a company like Flock, whose nearly $1 billion in venture capitalist funding has locked it into an operational model that seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits," he continued. “Given that Flock’s latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a PR problem than the significant privacy and other harms its products create, we will continue to analyze the company’s proposals fairly and honestly."
Flock Safety's new guardrails come amid growing nationwide backlash against automated license plate readers (ALPRs). As more and more instances of alleged police abuse emerge—including use of Flock cameras to stalk exes, track abortion patients, target undocumented immigrants, and spy on protesters—an increasing number of law enforcement agencies are canceling or not renewing contracts with the company.
"Abuse of Flock technology, at any level, is unacceptable," Flock Safety said in its statement Thursday. "We have strengthened safeguards over the past nine years, from basic audit logs to proactive monitoring. Sixteen weeks ago, we introduced audit assistance, which detects abnormal activity and flags it for administrator review. In recent weeks, those reviews have been associated with arrests of several law enforcement officers who allegedly abused the system."
"We will now require all law enforcement customers to adopt this feature by the end of this year," the company continued. "In addition, we will institute proactive lockout. When a user’s activity meets defined criteria for abnormal behavior, Flock will automatically suspend access pending administrator review. The goal is to intervene before misuse becomes recurring or widespread."
"In July 2025, we introduced an optional case code requirement for searches," Flock noted. "Results from participating agencies have been promising, so we will now require case codes for all law enforcement searches by the end of the year. Agencies may bypass the requirement in emergencies, but every exigent search will be flagged for administrator review."
"We are not perfect," the firm added, "so we will keep listening, improving, and building a better standard for public safety technology together."
However, the ACLU analyzed Flock's announced changes and found that "the devil will be in the details":
For example, an exception to the data retention policy is something called evidence mode, which is “when a search is tied to a case number, that data is preserved instead of aging out after seven days.”... “If ‘evidence mode’ only retains hit result data that police determine may be evidence in an active investigation of a specific case, then the change may be a positive one. But if evidence mode triggers the retention of any ALPR data that is searched, then the new mode could indefinitely retain all the ALPR data Flock collects and shares nationally.”
Another “change” the company is implementing is that local police will be able to decide what types of offenses other Flock customers can search their data for... Flock has attempted this before, and the security measure failed because police were easily able to circumvent the system’s requirement that they input the purpose of their search.
Finally, Flock announced that in response to the reports of police abuse, they will now require reasons for a search, and that they plan to universally roll out its audit assistance tool to detect police misuse. Flock’s announcement fails to note how easily users have circumvented “search reason” security measures in the past or how its new policy improves the quality of the feature.
"Change may still come as Flock faces this ever-growing threat to its corporate viability," the ACLU said, "but we certainly won’t be holding our breath."
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New Database Documents Over 100 Cases of Cops Abusing Flock Surveillance Cameras
Police have used Flock cameras to stalk their exes, track abortion patients, and spy on protesters—among other abuses.
Aug 12, 2026
A new database launched Wednesday that details more than 100 cases of alleged abuse by law enforcement officers using Flock Safety's nationwide camera network is adding fresh urgency to the growing backlash against automated license plate readers.
The database, published by the Institute for Justice (IJ)—a libertarian nonprofit public interest law firm based in Arlington, Virginia—documents "romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct."
"Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) were sold to American communities as a targeted tool for catching car thieves and finding missing people," IJ said in an introduction to the database. "What they actually purchased has grown into something far broader and more frightening: an AI-powered network of cameras that photograph and log the movement of every driver who passes, whether or not they are suspected of any crime."
"Companies like Flock Safety have now blanketed thousands of communities with ALPRs, quietly assembling powerful mass surveillance systems that can reconstruct where people have been, when, and how often, all without a warrant," the institute continued. "This dragnet surveillance threatens the freedoms the Fourth Amendment was adopted to protect. These concerns aren’t just abstractions: Every day, innocent people are harmed by officials’ abuse and misuse of these ALPRs."
"When the government can track the everyday movements of ordinary people—to their jobs, their churches, their doctors, their protests—it holds a kind of power over private life that the Constitution does not allow," IJ added.
Among the cases highlighted in the database are those of a Florida sheriff's deputy who allegedly used an ALPR to track and pull over a woman after seeing her at a television shoot, a Texas deputy who reportedly searched tens of thousands of Flock cameras while trying to locate a woman who had allegedly obtained a medication abortion, and a Georgia police chief who reportedly tracked his former girlfriend and her teenage daughter hundreds of times.
The database's authors warn that even those 100-plus cases may represent only a fraction of the actual misconduct. Officers often provide vague explanations when searching ALPR databases, making systematic detection of abuse difficult. In one case in Norfolk, Virginia, for example, IJ found that three generic search terms accounted for nearly one-third of roughly 230,000 searches over two years. One officer repeatedly entered “la la la la” as a justification without apparently attracting scrutiny.
Growing public angst over ALPRs is increasingly transcending partisan lines. As Common Dreams reported last month, the backlash has prompted dozens of communities to cancel or reject Flock contracts. According to Ban Flock Cameras, 82 contracts across 28 states had been terminated between August 2021 and May 2026, including 39 cancellations during the first five months of this year alone.
"It's my professional opinion that Flock is a dystopian violation of our rights," Ohio State University professor Viet Trinh said Monday during a public safety audit in Columbus.
"What I mean by that is that it inverts the very nature of how police are supposed to function," he explained. "So in traditional investigations, a crime is supposed to happen first, and then detectives are supposed to identify a list of plausible suspects, and then those suspects are placed under investigation."
"But under Flock, we are all—everybody in this room, every day, every time we get into our cars—we are all under investigation at all times for all crimes," Trinh continued. "Then, when a crime actually does occur, the police have a list of pre-investigated suspects. That's you, that's me, that's everybody in this room who gets in a car, that's everybody in this city."
"So today in Columbus, our constitutional rights—especially our Fourth Amendment rights—are flagrantly violated every single day as a matter of regular government policy," he asserted.
Trinh contended that Flock "is not a tool for investigating crimes, and that misnomer has apparently bamboozled several people in this room."
"Flock is, at its very foundation, a tool for investigating pre-crimes," he stressed. "Not crimes, but pre-crimes."
"So others in this room have implied that we can reform Flock, we can have Flock and preserve our civil liberties, we can make this technology work for us," Trinh noted, adding that "it is not a technology that can be made righteous."
"On this matter, we cannot and we can never have our cake and eat it too," the professor added. "To believe otherwise is hubris."
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Thomson Reuters Slammed for Deal That Gives ICE Access to Private Profiles of Tens of Millions of Americans
"Big Tech and Big Data companies like Thomson Reuters need to decide whether profiting from government surveillance is compatible with the values they claim to hold," said one tech watchdog.
Aug 12, 2026
More than two dozen watchdog organizations are calling on Congress to investigate reports that the data broker Thomson Reuters is making its investigative database available to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which they warn will make Americans vulnerable to Fourth Amendment violations.
Last month, documents unearthed by 404 Media revealed:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data—which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information—to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what it describes as “voters fraud” and immigration fraud.
On Tuesday, a coalition of advocacy groups, including Public Citizen, ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, sent a letter to members of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees warning about the deal.
"The reporting highlights a problem that has continued to grow in recent years: Federal agencies are purchasing access to commercially aggregated personal information that they could not otherwise obtain without judicial oversight," the letter says. "This growing practice threatens to erode the protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment and underscores the urgent need for Congress to close the data broker loophole."
Thomson Reuters is primarily known for its leading international news agency, but it is also a major data broker that sells access to its dozens of databases to businesses and governments.
ICE has been buying data from Thomson Reuters since 2008. But the Trump administration hopes to dramatically expand its access through a package of Thomson Reuters Special Services investigative products that includes CLEAR, which aggregates public and proprietary records such as addresses, phone and subscriber data, vehicle records, and publicly available web and social media information.
The package also includes license-plate and alerting tools capable of providing nationwide vehicle location information and real-time alerts based on last-known-location data.
While much of this data could be acquired through other means, the watchdog groups explained that "aggregating them into searchable investigative dossiers dramatically expands government surveillance capabilities, which further run the risk of being supercharged by the rapid growth and use of artificial intelligence by the federal government."
A DHS procurement document reviewed by 404 stated that Thomson Reuters "is the only contractor able to provide ICE with a continuous monitoring and alert service for millions of individuals and entities of interest; this is essential for national security purposes.”
Thomson Reuters has denied that selling CLEAR access presents a constitutional risk, stating earlier this year that "CLEAR does not contain the types of information that law enforcement traditionally need a warrant to obtain, and CLEAR does not include information about an individual’s citizenship or immigration status."
The letter from advocacy groups also notes that the use of this technology in voter fraud investigations, in addition to immigration and national security, "demonstrates the broad range of government functions now supported by commercially acquired surveillance tools."
The documents do not make clear how ICE plans to use the data from Thomson Reuters in a voter fraud investigation.
Trump has directed the federal government to use DHS citizenship and immigration records to identify suspected noncitizen voters and commanded states—in an order that has been blocked by a federal judge—to turn over information about their voters.
While the administration says the goal is to root out noncitizen voters, voting rights advocates have warned that many eligible voters are also at risk of being wrongly purged.
As 404 pointed out, news of the agreement with Thomson Reuters came "after President [Donald] Trump held a conspiracy-laden and unhinged press conference about election security" in July, "setting the stage for potentially undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections."
The letter urges Congress to hold oversight hearings examining federal agencies' acquisition and use of commercially available information from data brokers, require transparency about what data agencies are purchasing and how it's being used, and examine whether existing law surrounding data purchasing adequately protects constitutional rights.
It also calls on the government to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that would close the data broker loophole by preventing the government from buying data from private companies that it would ordinarily need a judicial warrant to obtain directly from an individual or company.
"Americans should not lose their Fourth Amendment rights simply because the government is willing to purchase its way around our rights," said JB Branch, the director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen. "Big Tech and Big Data companies like Thomson Reuters need to decide whether profiting from government surveillance is compatible with the values they claim to hold.”
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DuckDuckGo Releases 'Normal Sunglasses' to Troll Meta's AI-Powered 'Pervert Glasses'
"These are the first smart glasses guaranteed to never record nude videos of you and send them to random people. I never thought I’d have to guarantee that, but here we are.”
Aug 07, 2026
As Meta faces heat for selling artificial intelligence-powered sunglasses that record people without their knowledge, the web browser DuckDuckGo responded with what it called "the world's most innovative anti-surveillance sunglasses"... otherwise known as normal sunglasses.
Meta, the Big Tech behemoth that owns Facebook and Instagram, likely did not expect to become the subject of relentless scorn and mockery over its new line of "Meta Glasses," which retail for upwards of $299 and have been plugged by the likes of Kylie Jenner.
But internet users have saddled the shades with the nickname "pervert glasses." For good reason: among other high-tech bells and whistles, the latest version is equipped with photo and video technology that some of the clientele have used to discreetly film strangers.
As the Los Angeles Times chronicles, some women have been approached by bespectacled creeps only to later find a recording of the encounter posted online, entirely without their consent. Although the glasses have a white light to indicate that recording is in progress, some elite-tier perverts have found ways to disable it.
DuckDuckGo, a company that has billed itself as an alternative to its data-mining, privacy-violating competitors, responded to the backlash against Meta by partnering with the eyewear company Knockaround and selling its own pair of glasses whose primary gimmick is that they do absolutely nothing but sit on your face.
"No camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery, no electronics of any kind," reads the website, "Just a beautifully crafted pair of matte black sunglasses with a glossy DuckDuckGo logo, designed to block the sun and never send data to the cloud."
“We’re obsessed with innovation. So when Big Tech started putting cameras in smart glasses, we asked ourselves a radical question: What if we just didn’t do that?” a July 30 social media post from DuckDuckGo said. “These are the first smart glasses guaranteed to never record nude videos of you and send them to random people. I never thought I’d have to guarantee that, but here we are.”
This was not merely a hyperbolic what-if. It's been reported that Meta's AI glasses have recorded videos of users having sex and using the bathroom that were then viewed by Kenyan subcontractors involved in manually training Meta's AI systems.
Internal documents have also revealed plans by Meta to embed facial recognition technology into the glasses, which dozens of rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, warned "would allow anyone wearing them to identify by name any strangers in their vicinity—including at protests, medical clinics, and businesses."
After being secretly implemented for a brief period without being accessible to consumers, the technology was rolled back. But concerns remain that it could be added again, and there have been growing calls from lawmakers and privacy groups in the US and Europe to ban the glasses.
One British activist group called Everyone Hates Elon has begun a viral guerrilla marketing campaign against the Meta glasses.
One satirical ad, placed at a bus stop in London, shows the infamous sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein wearing the frames, with the tagline "glasses for people who don't do consent" next to the Meta logo.
"These glasses feel like they’re making perverts’ and abusers’ lives easier when we should actually be making women’s lives easier. They are pervert glasses," a spokesperson for the group told The Times of London. "We wanted to use Jeffrey Epstein to highlight who these glasses will be used by, and it’s powerful men and abusers.”
In this environment, it's perhaps not a surprise that DuckDuckGo's tech-free alternative has been a hit. The company said that within a week, the shades, which cost $35 a pair, had sold out.
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Senate Panel Advances Kids Online Safety Package Despite Civil Liberties Concerns
Critics like Fight for the Future fear that "these bills would allow Trump's FTC to wipe abortion, sex ed, and LGBTQ resources off the internet while instating nationwide age verification requirements."
Aug 05, 2026
The US Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday advanced a package of bills intended to protect children online, despite free speech and privacy concerns long raised by civil liberties groups about such proposals, particularly those that require or urge websites to implement age verification systems.
The panel moved forward the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)—versions of which have been considered in Congress for years—as well as the Children's Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act; the Children's Health, Advancement, Trust, Boundaries, and Oversight in Technology (CHATBOT) Act; and the Youth AI Privacy Act
Some advocacy groups welcomed the development, with Fairplay executive director Josh Golin saying that "the Senate version of KOSA is the most protective, popular, and bipartisan of all children's online safety legislation under consideration. It would be the most important new law to protect kids online in nearly 30 years."
"We are also pleased to see the committee advance both the Youth AI Privacy Act and the CHATBOT Act," Golin continued. "The danger AI chatbots pose to children and teens is a growing crisis. These bills would add deeply needed protections to help mitigate chatbot harms, including strong default settings for long-term memory use, a ban on advertising to minors through a chatbot, a ban on using the data of minors to train AI models, and prohibitions on features that cause compulsive use."
The committee did not advance the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act, which would require pornography websites to verify users' ages so they can block minors, because low attendance led to a failure to meet quorum.
Ahead of the bill markup, the Center for Democracy & Technology wrote to committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to raise alarm about KOSA, the CHATBOT Act, and the SCREEN Act, while acknowledging that the Youth AI Privacy Act "would create important safeguards for the use of minors' data by generative AI services."
The group also stressed that "enacting comprehensive consumer privacy legislation that meaningfully realigns consumer expectations and incentives for online business models is the best path forward to protecting children and everyone online and to addressing root causes of harms related to minors’ activities on social media, generative AI models, and other internet-enabled services."
CDT supports tackling the data practices that put young people at risk. But proposals that encourage age verification or restrict access to lawful content risk undermining privacy and constitutional rights. Read our letter:
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— Center for Democracy & Technology (@cdt.org) August 5, 2026 at 12:09 PM
The Senate action came after a bipartisan vote by the House of Representatives in June to pass the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, which "took portions from 14 digital safety bills—including the SCREEN Act," as The Hill reported Wednesday. "The House's version of KOSA eliminated a 'duty of care' provision that is a redline for the Senate's co-authors, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who called the package 'dead on arrival' in the Senate last month."
"The provision would have legally required platforms to 'exercise reasonable care' to prevent harms to minors. Harms include eating disorders, suicide, substance use disorders, and sexual exploitation," the outlet detailed. "The KIDS Act faces long odds in the Senate as a result, making Cruz's decision to take up some of the bills individually instead not surprising."
Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that "the Senate should reject KOSA's privacy risks," emphasizing that the duty of care obligations included in the upper chamber's version "only work if online services know which users are minors. That means more platforms will be pressured to implement age verification or age estimation systems."
Ahead of the House vote earlier this year, the ACLU's Jenna Leventoff and Christopher Anders similarly noted that "KOSA, although purporting not to require age verification, would nevertheless strongly incentivize it."
The ACLU experts warned that age verification will "severely jeopardize user privacy by turning droves of information over to platforms" and "threatens the First Amendment rights of adults," who may not be able "to verify their ages (because they lack valid identification, face technological difficulties, or lack digital skills), or can but "might still be reluctant to access information online over a fear that a data breach could lead to the disclosure of sensitive information contained within their browsing history."
After the Senate votes on Wednesday, Leventoff reiterated: "Bills that incentivize or require age verification promise safety, but all they deliver is a future where everyone has to undergo invasive identity verification measures that will almost certainly put their sensitive data at risk. We shouldn't need to fork over our IDs, biometrics, or personal information to access the internet, but that's exactly what will happen if these bills become law."
"When the data used to verify a users' age is combined with other commercially available data," she warned, "it can enable adversarial nations to track and attack troops, allow stalkers to locate their victims, and allow scammers to target those who will be most susceptible to their schemes."
Together, these bills would allow Trump’s FTC to wipe abortion, sex ed, & LGBTQ resources off the Internet while instating nationwide age verification requirements. This could mean scanning your face or sending in your government ID just to post on Bluesky! ❌Take action: fftf.link/bib
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— Fight for the Future (@fightforthefuture.org) August 4, 2026 at 12:09 PM
Fight for the Future also called out the Senate panel on Wednesday, with campaign director Sarah Philips saying that "Congress is once again doing political theater instead of actually meaningfully regulating the business model of Big Tech companies."
"The Senate Commerce Committee is rushing out bad internet bills so they can go out and campaign on them even knowing they are doomed to failure, either because they will be rejected by the House or overturned by the courts for being unconstitutional," Philips said. "Young people have been calling and emailing Congress on this issue for years, and have been rallying around the world against proposals to fence them off from the internet for a reason. They can see through these efforts. They know more censorship and surveillance, more data collection for companies, and all of us having to turn over ID in order to interact online is not safety."
"We've had hearing after hearing on this issue for the last few years instead of actually moving against the tide of tech corporate power that is making our future unlivable and exploiting our data for profit," Philips added. "We want to protect kids, but we want those proposals to actually do the work, instead of just making an easy headline for congressional leadership. Anyone in Congress still pushing censorship and surveillance bills under the facade of kids safety has failed us, especially members that claim to support trans kids and every community currently being attacked by the Trump administration."
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Lawsuit Challenges Trump's Illegal Spying and Retaliation Targeting ICE Monitors
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions," said the head of Democracy Forward.
Jul 24, 2026
A coalition of privacy and civil liberties advocates filed a federal lawsuit Friday accusing the Trump administration of secretly collecting and keeping personal information about people who monitor US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, arguing that the practice violates federal privacy law and threatens constitutionally protected speech and association.
The lawsuit—filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia—was brought by individuals and advocacy groups represented by Democracy Forward.
The plaintiffs—the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and legal observers Nicole Cleland, Jacquelyn Ivey, and Anna Walker—argued that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agencies created and maintained databases of people who observed, documented, or protested immigration enforcement activities without providing notification or safeguards, as required under the Privacy Act of 1974.
That law was passed after the exposure of illegal government surveillance, including longtime former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover's infamous COINTELPRO program, under which the FBI, in addition to conducting unlawful spying, funded and armed murderous far-right militants to terrorize anti-Vietnam War protesters, anti-nuclear weapons activists, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leftists.
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions," Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. "That is exactly the kind of government surveillance Congress sought to prevent when it enacted the Privacy Act after some of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history."
The lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of collecting the names, photographs, vehicle information and license plate numbers, social media accounts, and other identifying information about legal observers, volunteers, journalists, clergy, and community members engaged in First Amendment-protected activities during the government's deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.
"When the Department of Homeland Security dramatically ratcheted up its immigration enforcement, people across the country—of all ages and backgrounds—did what anyone is supposed to do when they disagree with government action: They exercised their First Amendment rights," the suit states. "They peacefully protested. And, as matters here, they observed and recorded how law enforcement agents acted in public."
DHS is using facial recognition technology, body cameras, license plates, mobile devices, and other surveillance tools to identify, track, and punish people who legally observe immigration enforcement in public. This is a clear violation of the Privacy Act. We’ll see them in court.
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— Democracy Forward (@democracyforward.org) July 24, 2026 at 10:36 AM
"In response, DHS decided to record the Americans who were peacefully observing its agents, adopting a secret Protester Surveillance Policy enabling its agents to first collect records on Americans engaging in First Amendment exercise and then maintain them in DHS systems, where they can be used to retaliate against those Americans," the complaint continues.
"Beginning sometime in 2025, DHS deployed a dragnet of drones, bodycams, face-scanning apps, license plate scanners, and camera phones to, as one memo instructed, 'capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form,'" the document notes.
"DHS agents have not been shy about gathering this information or its purpose," the plaintiffs contended. "In Maine, DHS agents told multiple observers that they were being added to a database of 'domestic terrorists.' In Chicago, agents routinely used facial irecognition scans on members of the public."
"In Minneapolis, observers simply watching agents on public streets have been led by those agents to their own houses, despite never having interacted with an agent—a practice so common that it has been named 'being driven home by ICE,'" the suit says. "And across the country, DHS agents have approached observers and addressed them by their full names, even though those observers never identified themselves to the agents or showed them any form of identification."
"As a result of its Protester Surveillance Policy, DHS has recorded and retaliated against each individual plaintiff," the filing alleges. "It’s bad enough that DHS publicly collected information on Americans engaged in lawful First Amendment exercise. But worse, DHS also decided to maintain the information in one or more of its systems, enabling it to later retaliate against observers and protestors—including by canceling Trusted Traveler status," which includes Transportation Security Administration Pre-Check and Global Entry.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the DHS surveillance policy unlawful, end it, and ban the agency from continuing to collect and keep records of individuals’ protected First Amendment activities.
“Now more than ever, those of us who have the privilege to speak out have a responsibility to defend the rights of everyone in our communities,” Walker said in a statement. “When people are punished for exercising their First Amendment rights, we begin losing the democratic principles that protect all of us. Every American should be alarmed by retaliatory action against one’s free speech."
Cleland said: “I believe government accountability starts with transparency. People should be free to peacefully observe and document what their government does in public without worrying they’ll be tracked or retaliated against. This case is about protecting that right for everyone.”
EPIC deputy director John Davisson warned, “When our government compiles secret dossiers on everyday people for exercising their constitutional rights, it sends a chilling message: If you speak up, watch your back."
"If every protest, every recording, every act of dissent opens us up to surveillance and retribution, privacy and free speech are at risk of collapse," he added. "But the laws of this nation don’t permit that, and we won’t either.”
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'The Creepiest Possible Path': Meta Letting Facebook, Instagram Use Your Personal Posts for AI Image Generation
"People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy."
Jul 08, 2026
Tech giant Meta on Tuesday introduced an artificial intelligence image generation model that critics say is a major potential risk to users' personal privacy.
Meta, the parent company of social networks including Facebook and Instagram, described its new Muse Image model as a "creative partner that knows your world, making it easy to turn your ideas into high-quality visuals that you can download and share anywhere, including directly to your feed, story, or chat."
In its announcement, Meta explained how users can either alter existing images or create new ones from scratch using AI prompts.
"You can describe what you want in simple, conversational language, and Meta AI handles the rest thanks to Muse Image," the company said. "Ask it to mock up an image of you in front of a historical landmark, cleanly erase a photobomber from the background of a shot, or write a custom prompt to build a functional QR code."
However, tech publication The Verge on Tuesday flagged a potentially troublesome feature that could compromise user privacy, noting that "users can... mention other Instagram accounts in Muse Image prompts," which will let the AI model "incorporate their likeness into its output."
According to a Tuesday report from Wired, the feature will let users snatch photos from any public Instagram and Facebook accounts unless those accounts' owners specifically choose to opt out of the system.
What's more, opting out of the system is not a simple one-click operation.
"If you want to avoid these AI generations of your Instagram posts without switching your account to private, you’ll have to dig into the app’s settings," reported Wired. "Open the Instagram app, tap your profile, and then tap the three lines in the top-right corner of the screen. Then, scroll down to the Sharing and reuse tab. Here is where you should see a section labeled 'Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta,' with a toggle for Posts and one for Reels."
JB Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, blasted Meta for being careless with its users' privacy by making them jump through hoops to stop others from swiping their photos.
"Meta has once again chosen the creepiest possible path," said Branch. "People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy. Instead of asking for meaningful consent, Meta quietly defaults users into the system and buries the opt-out in account settings."
Branch added that while Meta had a long history of violating user privacy, forcing them to opt out of its new AI image generation model "crosses what should be a bright line."
"If our faces can be repurposed for AI simply because we posted a public photo, then very little remains off limits," Branch emphasized. "Congress should establish clear privacy protections that require affirmative consent before companies can use a person’s image or likeness for AI products."
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Privacy Advocates Raise Alarm Over Online Age Verification Provisions as House Passes KIDS Act
"Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources," warned two press freedom advocates.
Jun 30, 2026
Opponents of a bill that is purported to protect children online said Monday night, after the legislation passed in the US House, that laws are "urgently" needed to stop Big Tech companies from preying on kids' vulnerabilities.
"The KIDS Act is not that piece of legislation," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who was one of 117 lawmakers who voted against the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, which passed with 267 votes, while 47 members of Congress did not vote.
The bipartisan bill requires online platforms to use new safety features and parental controls, restricts the use of minors' personal data to target ads, and establishes new restrictions for AI chatbots and online games.
But ahead of the bill's passage, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was among the opponents raising alarm about other provisions "buried inside the KIDS Act" that would "push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications."
The legislation, drawing from portions of 14 different online safety bills, "is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards," wrote EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin. "It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms."
As Mullin explained:
Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as anyone between 13 and 16 years old).
The problem is a website operator doesn’t need actual knowledge that a user is a minor to get in legal trouble. It applies when a platform “knows or should have known” a user’s age—a low, negligence-style standard of knowledge. If an online service gets it wrong, it’s going to be up to courts and regulators to decide, after the fact, if an online service “should” have known a user was 16.
To try to avoid liability, services will have to determine which users are teenagers and which are not. Most won’t be able to simply trust their users. They’ll have to collect more information about age, before any lawsuit or government action arises. Some companies may respond by requesting driver's licenses or passports. Others will rely on age-estimation systems that attempt to guess users' ages by looking at existing activity or doing facial scans.
At The Intercept, Caitlin Vogus of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Aliya Bhatia of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project warned ahead of the bill's passage that while the legislation is ostensibly meant to protect children, the age verification requirement could impact all users' ability to access social media platforms without revealing their identities—chilling anonymous speech and threatening would-be whistleblowers.
"Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them," wrote Vogus and Bhatia. "Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources."
While the KIDS Act says it won't require online platforms to collect government IDs for age verification, they said, "at least some platforms will likely choose this route to comply with the law or offer it as a fallback approach when other methods inevitably fail."
Former Republican congressman Justin Amash, a libertarian, accused the lawmakers who voted "yes" on the legislation of betraying "the Constitution and the American people."
Other opponents of the legislation, including Jayapal, argued that the bill would allow tech companies to continue targeting children with algorithms that send harmful content to the youngest users.
The legislation omits a "duty of care" provision that was included in the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which was passed by the US Senate in 2024—a requirement that tech firms "exercise reasonable care” to prevent harms to children.
Jayapal noted that the bill, which faces an uphill battle in the Senate, leaves "suicide, depression, addiction, substance use disorders, and eating disorders from the list of harms" that tech companies like Meta must address in their algorithms.
The "duty of care" provision has been criticized as too vague by several digital rights groups, while some child safety groups said its omission in the KIDS Act would "let Big Tech off the hook."
"We have seen time and again that these corporations cannot be trusted to put children's safety over their own profit margins," said Jayapal. "We cannot keep exposing our kids to platforms that are either completely indifferent to their safety or a direct threat to it."
The KIDS Act, Jayapal said, also includes provisions "that do not do enough to actually address the harms of" artificial intelligence.
"I voted no," said Jayapal, "because we have a real opportunity to pass bipartisan legislation that holds these companies to not just be transparent about the harms and mitigate them, but to actually prevent them."
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'We're Not a Company Town': Tech Hub Seattle Passes Data Center Moratorium
To celebrate, the network of local activists who fought for the moratorium launched a People’s AI Bill of Rights to advocate for fairness, privacy, transparency, and accountability in technological development.
Jun 08, 2026
Seattle—a city whose image and economy has been linked to Big Tech since Microsoft set up shop in nearby Redmond, Washington 40 years ago—is now making a name for itself as part of the anti-tech resistance as its City Council voted 9-0 on Tuesday to make it the biggest US city so far to pass a moratorium on new large-scale AI data centers.
The council unanimously approved two measures—a resolution to study the impacts of data centers and an ordinance passing the moratorium itself—to rousing applause. The votes followed approximately 50 comments from members of the public in support of the measure, as union members, tech workers, and community members voiced concerns ranging from the climate crisis and water use to affordability, AI-driven job loss, surveillance under an increasingly authoritarian federal government, and a general mistrust of Big Tech and its motives.
"We're not a company town. We don't owe our soul to the company store," one member of the public said.
Ahead of the vote, Council Member Alexis Mercedes Rinck noted that she had heard impassioned opposition to data centers at every committee meeting in which the moratorium was discussed.
"We have a moral imperative... to put the health of our people and our planet above the profit margins of tech companies."
"If we do not legislate or regulate this right, the people will bear the brunt. And I believe we have a moral imperative... to put the health of our people and our planet above the profit margins of tech companies," Rinck said.
To celebrate the win, the network of local activists who pushed for the moratorium launched a People’s AI Bill of Rights on the steps of City Hall after the vote. The campaigners, who organize under the umbrella of Washington AI Resistance (WA-AIR), hope to use the yearlong permitting pause to advocate for a meaningful regulatory framework that would ensure any rollout of artificial intelligence benefits human and ecological well-being rather than the profits of tech billionaires.
“Washington is home to some of the biggest tech companies in the world, and we've been at the forefront of the digital revolution in many ways,” Evan Sutton, an activist with WA-AIR who helped develop the bill of rights, told Common Dreams. “This time, we need to be at the forefront of a human revolution and have leaders rise to the moment to protect us in a meaningful way.”
Saying ‘No’ to This Stuff
The passage of the Seattle moratorium itself is both a reflection of and a booster for the growing national movement against data centers and AI.
Since news first broke April 10 that four companies had approached Seattle City Light with proposals to build five large data centers, which would have consumed one-third of the city’s current electricity demand, over 98,000 concerned residents sent letters to the City Council and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson calling for a pause. (In the midst of the letter-writing campaign, two companies dropped their plans.) An organizational endorsement letter garnered over 50 signatures from a broad swath of interests such as influential unions like the Seattle Education Association and UNITE HERE Local 8, environmental organizations like Food & Water Watch and Third Act Washington, and large advocacy groups like Seattle Indivisible and the Washington Working Families Party.
Ben Jones, the digital and communications director at local climate group and WA-AIR founding member 350 Seattle, said he had been informed by the City Council that it had received more comments about data centers than all other issues for this council put together. The outpouring of anti-data center and AI sentiment reminded him of the climate strike movement of 2017-2018, in which "you've had a lot of people that have been hearing about an issue for a long time that are now realizing the existential stakes of it."
“People are concerned about the role of billionaires, they're concerned about their jobs, they're concerned about being, you know, automated without a safety net, they're concerned about the climate impacts,” Jones told Common Dreams. “There's just really nothing that ordinary people like about this stuff. And that the fact that this is like such an outcry, I think, is in part because people have had very few other ways to actually say, ‘No’ to this stuff.”
"People see data centers as the bridge to AI, and people are not happy with AI."
At the same time, local activists were able to effectively channel and direct that outcry because they had been keeping tabs on national and statewide fights, as Lauren Redfield of Seattle Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) explained.
During the fall and winter, Seattle DSA; 350; and Troublemakers, another Seattle-based activist group organized a series of People’s Forums on AI. The WA-AIR network grew out of those forums, and mobilized to support statewide legislation regulating AI and data centers during the 2026 session. While most of the bills they supported were first watered down by tech lobbyists and ultimately defeated, the network remained in place.
“That system, those partnerships, those listservs existed before we needed them to,” Redfield said. “It was really helpful for us to be prepared to act quickly once the rumor broke.”
It also gave organizers another chance to counteract the power of Big Tech.
“Because our legislators weren't able to protect us, now we have to fight community by community,” Redfield said.
Redfield hoped the Seattle moratorium would give the city a chance to enact regulations that would be a “leading example for the rest of the state.” Activists also hope that moratoria will spread across the state—nearby cities Burien and Renton are currently considering them—and be passed for all of King County (where Seattle is located and its utility serves other customers) as well.
And they haven’t given up on statewide legislation.
“We want to have such a strong pushback against these at the local level, that we're sending a very clear signal to our representatives for the next time that they're in session,” Redfield said.
Jones agreed. He told Common Dreams that a "reason why we're so excited to see the Seattle City Council so strongly embrace this is that we need these City Council members in Seattle to be a strong voice when it comes to the legislative session."
Jones and Redfield hope that legislation will set guidelines for both data centers and what they enable.
"I want to see our legislators also think about not just how to protect communities from the infrastructure of AI, but also how to protect communities from AI itself," Redfield said.
Jones added, "People see data centers as the bridge to AI, and people are not happy with AI."
The City Council meeting suggested the activists will have allies in the statewide fight. Council Member Debora Juarez noted that of 9 state bills her office had tracked in the last legislative session relating to AI and data centers, only 1 had passed.
"I'm hoping that this crowd understands, and I know you do, that when this next legislative session comes around, we need to take the bull by the horns and send and talk to your elected representatives," Juarez said.
A People’s AI Bill of Rights
Part of mobilizing for statewide legislation and beyond is the launch of the People’s AI Bill of Rights.
The framework—which was developed over months of research and discussion among members of WA-AIR—is being released both to take advantage of the excitement surrounding the moratorium and to inject new ideas into the space provided by the yearlong pause.
“The bill of rights has to capitalize on that momentum and tell voters and regular people, ‘You don't have to take it, the future that is expressed that you did not have input in,’” Suraj Mirpuri, a member of WA-AIR and Seattle DSA who helped write the document, told Common Dreams. “This is the time for that.”
Becca Deutsch, co-founder of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, said during the press conference launching the bill of rights: "We need to make sure we don't allow our power to evaporate in the heat of this moment. We need to design policies right now that make sure workers and the public come out on the other side of any AI buildout with more power, not less."
Sutton told Common Dreams that the launch was "an important moment to say: 'This is a great start. Seattle is not enough, and data centers are not enough, and let's take this momentum and demand more.'”
“We can really guarantee a better future for ourselves and actually the whole nation.”
The bill of rights consists of two documents—a brief and a longer policy framework. It is built around four core values—fairness, privacy, transparency, and accountability—that each correspond to different potential policy recommendations.
"The Washington People's AI Bill of Rights is built on 4 simple ideas," Sutton explained during the launch. "No. 1, fairness: AI must benefit everyone, not just ultra billionaires. No. 2, transparency: We must know when and how AI is being used and have ways to say, 'No fucking thank you.' No. 3, privacy: We will not live in a panopticon where every movement we make is tracked, surveiled, and used to exploit us. And No. 4, accountability: There must be real consequences for tech billionaires who unleash dangerous products on the world."
Proposed regulations include a fee to offset automation impacts on taxation, a ban on facial recognition technology in consumer goods, a ban on nondisclosure agreements between data center developers and governments, and criminal and civil liability for CEOs whose products harm Washingtonians.
The framework also proposes a statewide moratorium on data centers until laws are passed that ensure they are powered by renewable energy, do not strain water resources or harm river ecosystems, and can produce accurate yearly sustainability reports.
“We have an opportunity in Washington to be the leaders in this space and really address a lot of things that have been unaddressed, using this to heal the wrongs,” Mirpuri said.
After Tuesday’s launch, organizers plan to hold a series of listening sessions in communities across the state to solicit feedback and incorporate it into the document. The goal is to end the summer with proposals that can be transformed into bills to be introduced into the state legislature.
“We'll work with legislators and candidates to get people committed to carrying and introducing those bills and hopefully, hopefully be able to go into the 2027 legislative session with some really bold proposals and a statewide constituency ready to mobilize behind it,” Sutton said.
However, the authors of the bill of rights are also thinking beyond Washington state, hoping to promote a “package of bills” that can be introduced in statehouses across the country and ultimately transform the industry.
Mirpuri offered the example of California’s air quality regulations, which have set the standard for vehicles across the country.
“We can really guarantee a better future for ourselves and actually the whole nation,” he said.
At the same time, the experience of the 2026 legislative session taught activists that they will have a fight on their hands.
“Washington state being a tech leader, we think it will be really powerful if we're able to, you know, overcome what we expect to be an absolute flood of lobbying from some of the biggest tech firms in the world that are based here,” Sutton said.
He emphasized that opposition to AI and data centers are bipartisan issues—even a recent Fox News poll found that 8 in 10 voters believe it is “urgent” that the government enact regulations—and that urban and rural Washingtonians from across the political spectrum would need to unite to impose meaningful guardrails on tech oligarchs.
“Every corner of the state is going to be needed to fight these guys, and we can either link arms together as Americans and take a stand against these extractive billionaires, or we can fight with each other and let them steamroll all of us,” he said. “I certainly hope folks will come together and find a common cause for our shared future.”
Editor's note: Olivia Rosane is a member of WA-AIR, Seattle DSA, and 350 Seattle.
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