☕ Daily Brief: Investigating Flock Cameras

WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

📱 Meta settled with 48 states for $17 billion over teen addiction. The deal ends a landmark trial accusing the tech giant of designing features to hook children and hide the damage. Meta agreed to add default time limits and disable features like "like" counts. The kicker: a contingent 30 percent, which would push the total to $18 billion, is released only if TikTok and YouTube adopt the same safeguards and pay an equal share.

⚖️ A federal judge lifted the nationwide block on Trump's mail-in voting rules. The Boston ruling clears the way for the Postal Service to implement new ballot standards ahead of November's midterms. The new rule requires unique logos, ZIP code barcodes, and voter eligibility lists before ballots ship. Democratic states filed a fresh challenge Wednesday, but with mail ballots going out in North Carolina as early as Sept. 4, time is running short.

🚗 Sen. Josh Hawley launched an investigation into Flock Safety's sprawling surveillance network. The company operates 120,000 cameras across 49 states, scanning 20 billion vehicle plates monthly. Hawley cited cases of police officers stalking ex-girlfriends through the system and a 71 percent false-positive rate at one California department. He's demanding answers on who can access Americans' driving data and how the company plans to monetize its $8.3 billion valuation.

🏫 Trump Admin reverses Obama-era school policy. For a decade, schools got in trouble for suspension numbers that looked lopsided by race, so the safe move was to suspend fewer kids and keep the disruption in the classroom. That led to worse-performing school districts. Now, the The Education Department is reversing that, investigating districts in and warning schools that weighing a student's race in discipline decisions is itself a civil rights violation.

WORLD NEWS

Behind the paywall: a terror designation for a foreign protest group, a disrupted state-sponsored hacking plot against federal agencies, and an FBI investigation into a ransomware attack on a US utility supplier.

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INSIDER EXCLUSIVE

10 weeks from today, Americans will decide whether Donald Trump gets to finish his second term as a president who governs, or spends it as a lame duck fighting for his own political survival.

ASK THE EDITORS

Q: Why has Upward News published one-sided coverage of data centers and Flock cameras? Data centers harm the environment. Flock cameras are going to be used to attack our freedom. (Jennifer, MO)

A: Both topics involve technological progress with enormous upside.

Start with data centers. Without them, there’s no artificial intelligence, and AI has the potential to advance humanity at an unprecedented rate. Theoretically, everything could get better; look at the potential in medicine and research alone. On security, AI will transform warfare (cyber, kinetic, weaponry), and it matters a great deal that America beats China there.

That requires building data centers. A lot of them. And of course there are real downsides too.

America is a beautiful country, and dropping massive warehouses into rural areas doesn’t sit well with the people living there. I wouldn’t want one in my backyard either. But as we’ve covered, the claim that data centers consume obscene amounts of water isn’t true (they used about 228 billion gallons in 2023, while growing feed for animals used more than 24 times as much), and the criticism about rising electricity prices is still mostly overblown (the states with the highest data center concentration have the cheapest residential rates).

The backlash has become alarmist in the same way the climate conversation has. I’d pin the blame on Big Tech, which lost our trust a while ago, and on the threat of losing jobs to AI, which is real.

Still, for the aforementioned reasons, data centers need to get built. Politicians should make sure communities aren’t devastated in the process. (In some towns, the promise of tax revenue has actually made residents welcome them. In Quincy, Washington, where data centers cover 57 percent of property taxes, poverty fell from 29.4 percent to 6.2 percent after the facilities arrived.)

On Flock cameras: the number of violent criminals caught because of them is astounding. Flock estimates its cameras were involved in solving roughly 700,000 crimes in a single year, about 10 percent of all reported crime in the country. Counties across the country now have a new tool for weeding out violent offenders, and for the sake of law and order, it would be a crime not to use it. But the system is new, which makes it ripe for privacy abuse. I won’t pretend the dystopian risks aren’t real. A Washington Post investigation found at least 50 cases of officers accused of misusing the cameras, 26 of them involving officers spying on women in their lives, and one Kansas police chief resigned after using Flock to check on an ex-girlfriend’s whereabouts 164 times in three months.

The Trump administration should lead on legislation limiting when and why police can use these systems. (Something like: restrict it to solving violent crimes, with a warrant.) And yes, with Flock, the pandemic lockdowns might have been even more tyrannical. But the government already has access to much of our data, and the technology to track down almost anyone already exists.

Flock—like data centers—have a potential to do good, and that shouldn’t be passed up. Tomorrow, I’ll dive into some more problems with data centers, and some common-sense regulations to curb their worst effects.

Agree? Disagree? Send in a response. Or, send in follow-up questions. There’s much more to say on both of these.

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POP QUIZ

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