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surveillance
Union Report Warns Electronic Shelf Labels Could Kill Jobs and Crush Wages
Some states are cracking down on "surveillance pricing." But a report out from the AFL-CIO suggests that the risk of electronic shelf labels are much broader than just price gouging.
Sep 09, 2026
Lawmakers are already raising concerns that electronic shelf labels could be used by grocery chains to jack up prices on shoppers. But the technology could also be used to shrink paychecks and kill jobs, according to a report out Wednesday from the research arm of the AFL-CIO.
The new report examines marketing materials used by electronic shelf label (ESL) companies to sell their products to grocery chains. It finds that they are often billed as a tool allowing retailers to save on labor costs, automate work, and reduce hours for real employees.
"Grocery giants like to claim that electronic shelf labels will free up workers to serve customers directly, but this report shows this is not the case," said Ademola Oyefeso, the international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents over 800,000 grocery industry employees. "Using studies and marketing material from the manufacturers pushing the technology, we know ESLs could actually cost workers and their families billions of dollars in lost income."
The AFL-CIO Tech Institute, which conducted the report, examined studies from two ESL manufacturers, Pricer and Vusion Group, that examined how their systems were used at specific stores.
The 2022 study by Pricer found that by automating price changes, its system saved one store about 5,200 worker hours annually. Vusion, meanwhile, found in 2024 that its technology saved about 600 hours of work over about six months, or 1,200 annually.
Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the AFL-CIO projected that at these rates, were the technology to be adopted at all of the nearly 60,000 grocery stores in the US, it would reduce the number of worker hours annually by anywhere from 71 million to 308 million.
Using hourly wage data, they found that this translated to the loss of between $1.61 billion-$6.97 billion in annual wages and between 44,000-192,000 full-time jobs. That's anywhere from $608 to $2,633 per employee.
The issue of using ESLs to gouge customers has already become an area of focus for lawmakers in Congress. Earlier this year, Democrats in the US House and Senate introduced legislation to prohibit "surveillance pricing," which involves targeting individual shoppers with increased prices by analyzing their personal data.
Surveillance pricing has been used in e-commerce to fluctuate prices for individual consumers of everything from grocery delivery to airline tickets. But as facial recognition and other surveillance technologies grow more powerful, fears have grown that ESLs could be used to bring surveillance practices into the physical realm.
“Through our analysis, we found that the implementation of electronic shelf labels are likely going to drive prices even higher. The reason being that these labels are connected to the same algorithmic pricing software that online retailers are already using,” said Sunny Glottmann, the policy and programs manager at the AFL-CIO Tech Institute and co-author of the report.
"Electronic shelf labels create the infrastructure that would make rapid algorithmic price changes easier to implement at scale, and this raises concerns for consumers that are already struggling with grocery costs," Glottmann said.
At least three states—Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey—have banned some forms of surveillance pricing, and other states are also considering a ban.
Unions like the AFL-CIO and UFCW say that legislating only against surveillance pricing is much too narrow, encompassing only a small segment of the dangers posed by ESLs.
"Policymakers should ban ESLs outright, rather than rely on narrower disclosure or dynamic-pricing laws that leave the underlying technology in place," the AFL-CIO report says, noting New Jersey's one-year moratorium on the technology as a good starting place.
"When grocery store workers lose income, that means less money to spend at other stores and businesses in the community," Oyefeso said. "Banning this technology should be a top priority for lawmakers at every level, like New Jersey has done with a moratorium on ESLs and a ban on predatory pricing practices outright. More states should follow suit to protect both shoppers and workers.”
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Anthropic Building a 'Pre-Crime' System to Surveil Anti-AI Dissenters, Investigation Shows
One legal expert said that as AI companies “become more hated, there’s more pressure on them to over-disclose knowing that some of the people they identify for law enforcement shouldn’t be targeted.”
Sep 09, 2026
The American Prospect on Wednesday published an investigation revealing that top artificial intelligence firm Anthropic is building a predictive surveillance system aimed at tracking activists who are opposed to advanced AI development.
The Prospect found that Anthropic last month issued a job posting seeking an intelligence specialist to "identify, assess, track, and investigate global threats including geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector."
This job will also employ a "pre-crime" approach that will involve "attempting to predict incidents before a crime occurs," according to the Prospect. The concept of "pre-crime" was explored in Minority Report, a dystopian science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick.
A report last week in The San Francisco Standard revealed there is already at least one example of Anthropic taking this kind of predictive approach to policing.
Specifically, Anthropic called police last year and informed them that one of its users told the company's Claude AI chatbot that he had purchased a rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei "in his sights."
The AI lab told police that this person "was going to kill everyone at Anthropic," but it didn't provide law enforcement officials with transcripts of the chats, which would have let them make their own determination about the seriousness of the threat.
The person in question was not arrested or charged with a crime, and they told the Standard that they were "just fucking around" when they talked about buying a gun.
Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, told the Standard that he had some sympathy for Anthropic because if they don't report potential crimes to police then "they face significant liability if, in fact, a crime does occur."
"As they become more hated," Goldman said of the AI companies, "there’s more pressure on them to over-disclose knowing that some of the people they identify for law enforcement shouldn’t be targeted at all."
Anthropic isn't merely using technology to monitor potential crimes, but also to keep tabs on US citizens lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.
The Prospect tracked down a podcast interview with Keon Ellison, global security operations center manager at Anthropic, where he revealed how employees at the company use technology provided by risk detection firm Samdesk to monitor activists.
"Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. "Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline... That extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption."
This story about taking great lengths to evade protesters drew a sarcastic reaction from tech journalist and author Brian Merchant.
"You know what you're doing is good," Merchant wrote in a social media post, "when you have to develop an in-house, real-time surveillance system to help your executives locate the ideal service exit to avoid contact with the public."
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The New Red Scare Is a Dangerous Distraction From the GOP's Failures
The attempt to revive the McCarthyist witch hunts of yesteryear is, at its core, a reaction to the working-class rightfully demanding its fair share of the economic pie.
Sep 07, 2026
A familiar spectre is haunting the nation—that of communism. Or so one might conclude from the Republican Party’s increasingly frantic rhetoric.
Following a string of wins by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in congressional primaries from New York to Colorado to Michigan, even reaching as far as Florida, the GOP is dusting off an old refrain.
“Communism is on the ballot this November,” warned House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) at a press conference. President Donald Trump has gone further still, calling communism “the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding.”
At first glance, this reads like little more than election-year theatrics. The candidates provoking such alarm are, on the whole, hardly the revolutionaries their critics imagine.
But, try as they might, no amount of fearmongering, surveillance, or censorship will dampen the working person’s dream for a more dignified life, one where their labor is compensated fairly, their dollar stretches further, and their children inherit a secure future.
Many of the policies promoted by today’s democratic socialists fall comfortably within the lineage of the New Deal: strengthening labor protections, expanding access to healthcare, greater investment in public infrastructure, and so on.
That House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would liken their ascendance to “a nightmare… a trail to certain death,” ought to strike any person of sound mind as patently absurd.
Yet dismissing such a frenzied reaction as mere campaign-season hyperbole risks overlooking what it actually reveals: staggering insecurity.
If the political establishment had any real confidence in their track record, they wouldn’t need to manufacture so much anxiety around their opposition.
It is precisely because they can feel their grip on the public’s trust slipping that they have resorted to reviving the McCarthyist witch hunts of yesteryear—an effort that extends well beyond incendiary speeches.
Last year, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), directing federal agencies to expand policing of social movements linked to “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” among other ideological strains, ostensibly to “identify and prevent potential violent activity.”
NSPM-7 has, in turn, become the legal backbone for an aggressive crackdown on dissent, seen in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issuing “warning notices” to those who have criticized the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whether that be through social media posts or email correspondence.
Recent reporting even uncovered a sweeping probe, dubbed “Operation Puppet Master” by DHS, into a number of left-wing groups in Minnesota after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and Border Patrol agents, respectively, earlier this year.
The probe included, among other things, the subpoenaing of financial records from various labor unions and nonprofits, as well as “spying operations conducted by undercover agents who posed as activists and surveilled community activities.”
It is little wonder that such egregious actions have since been compared to COINTELPRO, J Edgar Hoover’s illegal pet project designed to infiltrate, surveil, and discredit civil rights and anti-war activists who caught the ire of the federal government.
This, paired with the White House creating its own blacklist of journalists and influencers on its official “Media Offenders” page, many of whom are cited for such severe transgressions as “Left-Wing Lunacy,” suggests that the hysterical talking points GOP leadership have taken to heart are the vehicle for a broader crusade of political repression.
Such heavy-handed surveillance is undoubtedly born out of a deep-seated panic among those in power. This latest Red Scare is, at its core, a reaction to the working-class rightfully demanding its fair share of the economic pie.
The rise of the DSA, and of the left-wing ideas it propagates, owes much to the fact that its members speak plainly about the financial woes of the everyday person.
Take, for instance, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has striven to take an honest accounting of the financial hardship faced by New Yorkers, and in turn offer tangible remedies like free childcare and a rent freeze.
In contrast, Trump administration officials are desperate to pull the wool over the eyes of the people, with Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, recently claiming that the economy “looks amazing,” despite nearly 80% of voters feeling otherwise.
In fact, public confidence in capitalism broadly has fallen to 54%, according to Gallup polling released last year, the lowest level since the organization began tracking the question. At the same time, socialism commands comparatively steady support, especially among Democratic voters, roughly two-thirds of whom view it favorably.
The generational divide is even more striking. A survey conducted by YouGov and the Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans under 30 hold a favorable view of socialism, while 34% say the same of communism. Of course, each of these labels mean different things to different respondents, but the overarching trend is difficult to ignore.
For many Americans, especially those on the younger side, capitalism is synonymous with constraint, and it’s not hard to see why.
While billionaires’ assets have surged to preposterous heights, the cascading inflationary shocks of war have steadily eroded workers’ purchasing power.
Cornerstones of the American Dream have been priced out of reach for working families, with 62% of Americans now viewing homeownership as unrealistic.
Meanwhile, more than 40% of American households have persistently struggled to cover the cost of basic necessities on their current income.
Yet, rather than confronting the economic frustrations driving millions of Americans to question the status quo, the Trump administration has chosen to paint a target on the backs of those who offer the public a meaningful alternative.
But, try as they might, no amount of fearmongering, surveillance, or censorship will dampen the working person’s dream for a more dignified life, one where their labor is compensated fairly, their dollar stretches further, and their children inherit a secure future.
And it is for this reason that yet another Red Scare is an altogether futile, albeit dangerous, distraction meant to blind us to the real struggle of our time: the fight against a rigged economy.
If those in power must conjure ghosts to terrify the people, it is surely because their earthly defenses are failing.
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Jayapal and Wyden Demand Probe of 'Unlimited Surveillance' and Subpoena Abuses by Trump Agencies
Agencies have used their subpoena power "to surveil, intimidate, and suppress the free speech of ordinary citizens and even the free press," said the Democrats.
Sep 02, 2026
Under the Trump administration, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Sen. Ron Wyden this week, federal agencies' use of subpoena power to surveil Americans has become "institutionalized" in what the two Democrats called "brazen abuses of authority."
Jayapal (Wash.) and Wyden (Ore.) wrote to US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and the acting comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Orice Brown, regarding what they called federal agencies’ decades-long practice of attempting "to coerce indefinite silence from private companies that receive subpoenas for customer information."
While federal agencies have the congressionally vested authority to serve companies and service providers with administrative subpoeanas when they are seeking information about the provider's customer or client, the recipient generally maintains the "First Amendment right to notify their customers of the demand, allowing the actual targets of the subpoenas the opportunity to assert their own legal rights or challenge the demand in court," wrote Jayapal and Wyden.
If secrecy is required in a specific case, the agency can apply to a court for a time-limited nondisclosure order, but in the vast majority of cases, the lawmakers said in a statement, "the agencies may not gag recipients of subpoenas."
That appears to have changed under the Trump administration.
Wyden and Jayapal pointed to one incident from July 8, 2025, when Harvard University received three immigration subpoeanas from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regarding international students, which contained "boilerplate requests for silence."'
"The absurdity of this secrecy demand was demonstrated the very next day, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a press release celebrating the very enforcement action it had just directed Harvard to keep secret," wrote the lawmakers.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which operates under ICE, has summons authority only for records relating to customs issues such as illegal imports or unpaid customs dues.
However, HSI has used its subpoena power "to surveil, intimidate, and suppress the free speech of ordinary citizens and even the free press"—in one case trying to reveal the identity of an anonymous Instagram user who had criticized and publicized ICE operations, according to the lawmakers.
Earlier this week, The Guardian reported that HSI had used the subpoenas to secretly obtain six months' worth of phone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis-based journalist who, along with former CNN anchor Don Lemon, was arrested in January for covering an anti-ICE protest at a church.
While the secrecy demands that come with subpoenas "carry no force of law," said the lawmakers, "their coercive effect is extremely successful. This leaves customers entirely in the dark about government incursions into their personal data."
Jayapal and Wyden noted that federal agencies were demanding secrecy from subpoenaed companies and third parties for decades before President Donald Trump took office.
For over four decades, they said, the Department of Justice (DOJ) "has treated extra-legal gag requests as standard operating procedure,
regularly instructing the recipients of grand jury subpoenas not to disclose the government's demands."
"Given the severe, asymmetric power dynamics between federal law enforcement and civilian businesses—particularly when the subpoena recipient is a business operating within a highly regulated industry—many corporate legal departments will naturally read an official prosecutorial 'request' for silence as an implied command, choosing compliance over risking scrutiny from federal regulators," wrote Wyden and Jayapal. "This coercive silence is particularly insidious because it targets corporate policies intended to protect consumers. For nearly every American industry, including telecommunications, technology, and healthcare, Congress has neither required nor prohibited notice of subpoenas. Absent a court order or statute saying otherwise, notice to customers is a protected exercise of free speech that furthers government transparency and customer privacy."
The lawmakers called on the GAO to conduct a comprehensive audit of the DOJ and DHS as well as the agencies they oversee regarding their use of gag requests in subpoenas.
Such an audit would "help ensure that agencies do not abuse their subpoena authorities at the expense of privacy and free speech rights," said Jayapal and Wyden.
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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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Amnesty Warns of Right-Wing Argentinian Government's AI-Driven Surveillance State
"When powerful people don’t want accountability, they attack those who ask questions and use whatever is at their disposal to monitor, control, and repress."
Aug 19, 2026
Amnesty International on Wednesday released a report detailing how the Argentine government under the leadership of right-wing President Javier Milei has created a massive artificial intelligence surveillance state that the human rights group described as "a techno-authoritarian infrastructure of social control."
According to Amnesty, Argentina's Military of National Security invested in several pieces of surveillance technology between 2024 and 2025, including licenses for Maltego, an open-source investigator platform that collects and organizes data from "social media, websites, the dark web, personal data, technical infrastructure, and other open sources"; and Clearview AI, a facial recognition platform with "a widely known track record of mass exploitation of biometric data without sufficient legal grounds."
The government also procured drones equipped with automated tracking capabilities and thermal cameras capable of providing real-time image transmission, Amnesty found.
This surveillance state, Amnesty said, has created a "chilling effect" across the country that has reduced participation in protests and forced activists to reduce their public exposure and take further precautions when planning demonstrations.
Ana Tapia, an activist who has been protesting against pension cuts made by Milei's government, described the government's aggressive surveillance tactics against herself and her fellow demonstrators.
"We’ve all been fully identified for a long time now," Tapia explained. "Sometimes as you’re walking... and suddenly you see the drone hovering just above your head. Sometimes within six feet. Why so close? Why is it so invasive?”
Matías Darabós, an activist who documents police abuses, similarly described the omnipresence of the surveillance state.
"There is a very strong feeling that you are being controlled and watched," said Darabós. "In fact, when we go to marches to record what goes on, they are constantly pointing at us or filming us."
Journalists described being subjected to what they believe are coordinated harassment campaigns in which they are swarmed with violent rhetoric and threats which they believe are related to increased state surveillance.
Paula Cejas, director of the Latin America Office of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), told Amnesty that "social media and the streets are no longer a safe space for journalists."
"Even I myself think about what I’m going to post to the IFJ account," Cejas explained, "what language to use so that I’m not put on a list and get us all harassed."
Another journalist who spoke anonymously with Amnesty similarly said she had grown incredibly careful of what she posts on social media compared to the past.
"Before, I used to comment and give my opinion on everything, now I just use it recreationally," the journalist said. "I think a lot about the words I use, I moderated my rhetoric and reduced my interaction 100%, especially on Twitter," the platform Elon Musk renamed X.
Paola Garcia Ray, deputy director of Amnesty International Argentina, summed up the report by arguing that "pervasive surveillance is being used against Argentinians in both physical and digital spaces, to devastating effect" on civil society.
"These technologies have become an integral part of the infrastructure of state control, targeting dissent, deterring protest movements, and harassing marginalized groups, among other authoritarian practices,” Garcia Ray emphasized. "When powerful people don’t want accountability, they attack those who ask questions and use whatever is at their disposal to monitor, control, and repress."
Milei is a political ally of US tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of AI surveillance company Palantir whose presence in Argentina has resulted in protests demanding his ouster from the country.
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800+ USA Today Journalists Demand Paper End Deal With Palantir to Collect Reader Data
Not only does the partnership "create an inherent conflict of interest," it "fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests."
Aug 14, 2026
More than 800 unionized journalists and other media workers at USA Today Co. demanded this week that the nation’s largest newspaper chain abandon a newly announced partnership with surveillance tech giant Palantir to collect and analyze reader data, warning that the deal threatens privacy, public trust, and newsroom independence.
USA Today Co. chair Mike Reed told investors during an August 6 meeting that the company, formerly known as Gannett, is working with Palantir to “drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform" by using its software to collect and analyze reader data. Reed did not say how long USA Today had been using the software.
In a statement released earlier this week, workers represented by The NewsGuild-CWA said they were “shocked” by the company’s decision to partner with the controversial data analytics firm. Thirty-one unions representing employees across USA Today Co. publications have called on management to immediately terminate the agreement.
"We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence (AI) software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns," the union said. "Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests."
Journalists are committed to upholding First Amendment principles to serve the democratic process. That’s in direct contrast with a company like Palantir, whose cofounder, Peter Thiel, once said freedom and democracy were not compatible. newsguild.org/usa-today-jo...
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— The NewsGuild-CWA (@newsguild.org) August 10, 2026 at 9:02 AM
"USA Today Co. has provided minimal details about this partnership and the parameters of its agreement with Palantir," the statement continues. "We have serious concerns and questions about how readers’ personal information and data will be used under this partnership and how their data would be protected. Without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?"
The journalists noted that billionaire Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—who "once said freedom and democracy were not compatible"—is responsible for products tied to human rights abuses and privacy violations.
"Technologists and even former employees have warned that it’s not far-fetched to imagine a future where Palantir’s AI technology is used to surveil American citizens and target dissidents," their statement notes. "And throughout history, journalists are often the first to be targeted."
"These concerns should be reason enough for USA Today Co. to steer clear," the journalists asserted. "This partnership with Palantir arrives as USA Today Co. executives dive headfirst into AI without sufficient regard for workers or the public after decimating newsrooms across the country."
"We will continue pushing back on ill-planned attempts to force AI into our newsrooms and onto our readers, who deserve quality, human-led journalism," they added. "We will advocate for the responsible use of new technologies when it emboldens our journalists and their work instead of shamelessly promoting AI to support profit-driven corporate edicts."
News organizations increasingly operate not just as publishers, but as data collection businesses. The USA Today journalists' concerns come against a backdrop of increasingly sophisticated tracking across digital news. USA Today Co.'s own public Data Collection Explorer shows that the company already operates an extensive system for collecting, routing, and analyzing user data across its publications and platforms, including through third-party analytics vendors.
Mike Davis, a reporter for the Asbury Park Press—a USA Today Co. newspaper in southern New Jersey—told NiemanLab that “part of the problem" with the Palantir partnership "is that we know very, very little" about how the company's software is being used.
“It’s pretty surprising that our company would unilaterally decide to bring in such a controversial partner like Palantir without providing a complete explanation to its employees, most of whom are naturally skeptical journalists," Davis said.
“An investigative reporter who keeps a ton of sensitive notes, source information, and confidential documents on their devices is going to be naturally concerned about protecting that information, and who could blame them?” he added. “It’s pretty hard to trust management’s intentions when the goalposts shift so often that there’s always a fear that what’s true today won’t be true in six months. We’ve all seen the years of disinvestment in local news, especially in the name of going all-in on AI.”
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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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'Fighting for the Peeping Tom Vote': El-Sayed Calls Out PATRIOT Act Champion Rogers Over Privacy
"You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated," Rogers said in an infamous clip from 2013 as he defended the NSA's mass spying programs.
Aug 11, 2026
Amid an expanding assault on privacy by the federal government, Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has brought the issue of mass surveillance to the forefront of Michigan's Senate race, attacking his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, for his longtime defense of the PATRIOT Act.
"Mike Rogers out here fighting for the Peeping Tom vote," wrote El-Sayed, a former public health official, in a social media post on Monday. "Creepy stuff, Mike."
El-Sayed was responding to an unearthed comment from Rogers, then the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, made during a 2013 committee hearing in Congress just months after whistleblower Edward Snowden's explosive revelations about the extent of the National Security Agency's (NSA) warrantless surveillance of Americans.
At the time, Congress was debating whether to enact legislation reining in a provision in the PATRIOT Act, Section 215, which the government had used to secretly collect phone records and other information in bulk from Americans not accused of wrongdoing.
Rogers was pushing American University law professor Stephen Vladeck to agree that the government should be allowed to examine Americans' business records to determine if they were connected to a foreign terrorist organization. Vladeck said he believed it should, but that protecting Americans' privacy needed to be taken into account. "The way we do it matters," he said.
The chair responded that in the decade since the policy had been enacted, nobody had ever complained about it. Vladeck, noting that the program was a secret, responded: "But who would be complaining?”
"Somebody whose privacy was violated," Rogers retorted. "You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated."
The quote is highly representative of Rogers' record of support for extensive government surveillance over his decade-and-a-half in Congress. He was one of the PATRIOT Act's leading champions since its introduction in 2001 and led the charge to stop mass collection powers from being curtailed after the Snowden revelations.
“The charge that the program tramples on the privacy of citizens is simply wrong,” he said in a statement with Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), then the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee.
Rogers and Ruppersberger also coauthored the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) in 2012, which would have allowed companies to share cybersecurity-related information with the government, including the NSA, with protections from existing privacy restrictions. The American Civil Liberties Union argued that the bill, which failed in the Senate, would have allowed the government to obtain large amounts of sensitive personal data with few restrictions.
"You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated."
In 2026, as artificial intelligence becomes a new tool for even more powerful and pervasive spying, El-Sayed has said the government must be banned from using it to "conduct warrantless surveillance."
As part of an AI policy platform rolled out in June, he said rules should be put in place to prevent its use for "domestic authoritarianism," including "mass political surveillance, protected-characteristic predictive policing, or AI targeting of dissent."
During President Donald Trump's second term, as he's used anti-"terrorism" rhetoric to justify a legal crackdown on domestic opposition, the government's expanding spy powers have become an increasing concern.
With the aid of private surveillance companies like Palantir, the administration has created an unprecedented surveillance dragnet that connects AI-powered facial recognition technology, license plate readers, and phone location tools to piles of data on Americans that have been used to supercharge its mass deportation campaign and aggressively monitor protesters and dissenters.
It has been met with some pushback in the Senate, where Republicans earlier this year narrowly failed to extend Trump's powers to surveil noncitizens under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without warrants. Though US citizens are not supposed to be targeted, civil liberties advocates argue that their information is often collected easily and the government has used it to prosecute them.
Rogers has attempted to back off some of his earlier defense of mass surveillance, though he has not meaningfully pushed to reduce the government's spying powers. During a losing Senate bid against Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in 2024, he said that it's "wrong" for the FBI to conduct warrantless searches against US citizens, but did not call for actually repealing or blocking Section 702.
Since serving in Congress, Rogers parlayed his time overseeing the intelligence community into a lucrative career advising and governing cybersecurity, intelligence, and government-contracting firms.
He served as a senior security adviser to AT&T while the company operated a little-known program that gave law enforcement access to searches of trillions of domestic phone records, though there is no record that he personally worked on the program.
Michigan Advance reported earlier this year that he also made almost $100,000 advising a company that helped the government of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro spy on dissidents.
Noting the Republican nominee's recent pivot to Trumpian election denialism, journalist Spencer Ackerman—who has extensively covered the expansion of government surveillance during the War on Terror—suggested in a post on social media that there is little reason to believe Rogers has changed much after over a decade out of Congress.
"I saw up close his efforts, post-Snowden, to protect the NSA and ensure it continues to nullify your constitutionally-protected privacy," Ackerman said. "He was for impunity then and wants the same thing for himself."
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