On Monday, the President of the United States told the people of Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, and every other state now fighting hyperscale data centers exactly what he thinks of them. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backward and poor,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.” And then the warning: “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

The context is not subtle. Polling now shows a large majority of Americans oppose new data centers, with complaints centering on rising electricity bills, excessive water usage and industrial noise. Candidates in at least 21 races across 18 states have run television ads on the issue, split almost evenly between the parties. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has warned that data-center opposition in Ohio is, in its own words, the anchor hanging around Senator Jon Husted’s neck in his race against Sherrod Brown.¹

A rational political actor facing that landscape might listen. Trump instead did what Technocrats have always done when the public gets in the way of the engineering plan: he redefined the objection as a moral defect. And to seal it, he tied every county commissioner voting against a 500-megawatt campus to Beijing. “China could not be happier with this anti-data center movement,” he wrote. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”²

If that rhetorical move sounds familiar, it should. It is the secular translation of a sermon Peter Thiel has been preaching for two years.

The Antichrist as Safety Regulator

Beginning in the fall of 2024 and culminating in a four-part lecture series delivered to the ACTS 17 Collective in San Francisco in 2025, Thiel laid out a theological-political thesis that has since become the operating theology of the AI buildout. The Antichrist, Thiel argues, will not arrive as a reckless technologist. He will arrive as a safety-minded administrator, exploiting fears of nuclear war, climate collapse and artificial intelligence to install a one-world governance system. His slogan, drawn from 1 Thessalonians 5:3, is “peace and safety.”³

Thiel named names. In the twenty-first century, he told his audience, the Antichrist is “a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta Thunberg or Eliezer Yudkowsky.” Climate activists and AI safety researchers are, in his phrase, “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” not because they are consciously evil but because they are building the institutional architecture a future world-state would need. And on the technologies themselves, Thiel was candid: “Maybe these things are good or bad. Stopping them seems far, far worse.”⁴

Set that beside the Truth Social post and the structure is identical. In Thiel’s register, the person who wants to slow AI is doing the Antichrist’s work. In Trump’s register, the person who wants to slow the data center is “backwards,” “poor,” and objectively serving China. Neither framing permits the position that most of those Ohio voters actually hold, which is not “stop AI” but “do not make my family pay for your grid load.” Economic objections invite cost-benefit analysis and compromise. Apocalyptic and treasonous framings do not. You cannot negotiate with the Antichrist, and you cannot negotiate with a Chinese asset.

Technocrat-in-Chief

Courtenay Turner and I documented in The Final Betrayal (November 2025) how the second Trump Administration became the vehicle by which a cohort of billionaire arch-Technocrats, Thiel foremost among them, moved from the periphery of American power to its center. Thiel financed J.D. Vance’s political career from the ground up. His Palantir alumni and Founders Fund network populate the national-security and technology apparatus. The Dark Enlightenment’s contempt for democratic consent, which we traced through Thiel’s own writings and those of his intellectual circle, is no longer a fringe philosophy. It is staffing policy.

What we argued then, and what Monday’s outburst confirms, is that Trump has not merely hosted these men. He has become the Technocrat-in-Chief. The populist who promised to return power to forgotten communities is now instructing those same communities that their objection to a hyperscale facility next to their children’s school is evidence of backwardness.

Sorry, that is not populism. That is the voice of Howard Scott and Technocracy, Inc. in 1934, telling Americans that their opinions were irrelevant to the requirements of the energy system and that the Technate would allocate resources according to engineering necessity, not democratic preference.

The MAGA movement was told it was getting America First. What it is getting is a federal executive using the full weight of the presidency to override local self-government on behalf of the single most capital-intensive industry in human history.

Energy Is the Currency

The historical Technocracy movement made one claim that has never been refuted: the fundamental unit of value in an industrial society is the kilowatt-hour and not the dollar. Scott and his engineers proposed replacing money with energy certificates and allocating energy to every man,  woman, and child by expert decree. Thankfully, they failed to seize power in the 1930s. They did not fail to describe the twenty-first century.

Hyperscale data centers are the first industrial class whose product is literally computation purchased with electricity. When a facility draws hundreds of megawatts, the question is not abstract. It is whether the household or the hyperscaler has priority claim on the grid, and who pays for the transmission and generation built to serve the newcomer. Every rate case now pending before a state utility commission is a contest over exactly that. Trump’s post resolves the contest by fiat: the data center wins, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor to prosperity.

This is resource control transferring from individuals to consolidated institutional actors, which is the definition of Technocracy I have used for two decades. It does not require a world government. It requires only that the people who own the compute also control the political apparatus that decides who gets the power.

The Inversion

Here is the irony Thiel’s disciples never confront. His stated nightmare is a distant regulator overriding local self-government in the name of safety. Yet the actual mechanism now in use is a national executive overriding local self-government in the name of the AI buildout. The tool he warns against is the tool being wielded, pointed the other way. The county that votes no is not the world-state. It is the last unwatched place in the system, and it is being told to shut up and sit down.

And the China card is doing double duty. Trump invokes Beijing as the beneficiary of American resistance in the very month he prepares to host Xi Jinping, the Technocrat-in-Chief of China, at the White House. A congressional committee has demanded an investigation into whether China is stoking the anti-data-center movement; Trump declined to repeat that charge, but said the Chinese “can’t believe it is happening.”⁵

China is the rhetorical enemy for domestic consumption and the strategic partner in the architecture. Readers who followed my analysis of the Beijing summit in May will recognize the pattern. American and Chinese Technocracy are not at war with each other. They are converging, and the American public is being disciplined to accept the merger.

Speak Up While You Can

I have repeated that Free Speech and the First Amendment are on the guillotine in 2026. This may be the last battle that decides our fate.

Certainly, the people of Ohio did not ask for this. They were not consulted. They are being told that their electric bills, their water tables, and their quiet nights are the acceptable price of a race with China whose terms they were never shown. And when they object, the most powerful man in the world calls them backward, foolish, and prone to self-harm.

They should say no anyway. Not because AI is evil, and not because the Antichrist is coming, but because the right of a community to decide what gets built inside its borders is the last practical check on Technocracy that ordinary Americans still hold.

Every local vote against a data center is a vote for the proposition that the people, not the engineers, decide. Thiel calls that heresy. Trump calls it treason. I call it self-government, and it is worth defending precisely because they want it gone.

References

1. Kevin Breuninger, “Trump says U.S. communities opposing AI data centers could end up ‘backwards and poor’,” CNBC, August 31, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/31/trump-data-centers-backlash-elections-congress.html. The NRSC memo language and the 21-races-in-18-states figure are reported there and in AFP coverage of the same day.
2. Agence France-Presse, “Trump blasts US backlash against data centers,” August 31, 2026, syndicated at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-blasts-us-backlash-against-161603675.html. All Trump quotations are from his Truth Social post as reproduced by AFP.
3. “Thiel’s Framing of Proponents of an AI Treaty as ‘Antichrist’ Collides with 60 Years of Catholic Doctrine,” Center for Bioethics and Public Affairs in AI (CBPAI), April 8, 2026, https://www.cbpai.org/blog-1/thiels-framing-of-proponents-of-an-ai-treaty-as-antichrist-collides-with-60-years-of-catholic-doctrine; and Fortune, “Peter Thiel just gave the public its closest look yet at his ‘Antichrist’ theory,” July 18, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/07/18/what-is-antichrist-peter-thiel-pope-leo-ai-regulation/.
4. Leaked recordings of the ACTS 17 Collective lectures, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (September–October 2025) and analyzed in “The Eschatology of Deregulation: On Peter Thiel’s Antichrist,” OILab, https://oilab.eu/the-eschatology-of-deregulation-on-peter-thiels-antichrist/. The Thunberg/Yudkowsky remark is quoted in multiple contemporaneous accounts of the lectures.
5. AFP, op. cit.; CNBC, op. cit. Trump’s upcoming White House meeting with Xi Jinping is noted in the AFP report.

Over the past few years, the rapid advancement of AI technology has changed the world in a lot of ways. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks some more drastic changes are coming within the next six months, but the media community is not necessarily happy about it.

During a recent interview, Altman said that a “descendant of ChatGPT” will be able to essentially watch your computer and phone screen constantly, learn your behavior, and make suggestions, which sparked widespread concerns from the sports media community.

‘Have perfect context of your whole life’

During a recent interview with Cory Levy, founder of Z Fellows, Altman outlined what he sees as the incoming developments in AI technology.

“I think we are close to a world where you have, like, a descendant of ChatGPT watch your computer screen all of the time. Watch every meeting you’re in – record every call, everything like that – have perfect context of your whole life, everything you see. You choose what information you want it to have, but you can connect it to your texts or email or docs or Slack,” Altman said during the interview.

“Then you have this thing that is not making decisions for you, but if you’re like the CEO of a startup, there is always more stuff to do than you can do,” Altman continued. “You can have this thing that’s working alongside you.”

“I think that we’re only like, one model generation away from this actually being incredibly useful,” Altman said. “And I think, hopefully, for me, it will change the way I work.”

Altman was asked his best guess on the timing for something like this.

“Sometime in the next six months,” he speculated.

‘This sounds alarming’

While Altman undoubtedly made these comments to drum up excitement, the sports media community had the opposite reaction, as they expressed outrage at the world that Altman described.

“There are only two AI update announcements at this point. It’s either: 1. We created a powerful new tool with obvious and immediate capacity to be abused by tyrannical authorities. or 2. We found a new way to separate you from any aspect of your own lived experience,” wrote Ben Fowlkes of Yahoo Sports.

“Counterpoint: s**k my d**k,” wrote prominent Barstool Sports personality PFT Commenter.

“Only the biggest losers alive actually want this,” wrote B.W. Carlin, founder of Bad Brain Digital Consulting, who previously worked for Barstool and Sports Illustrated.

“nah homie you can keep that [expletive],” prominent sports journalist Bomani Jones wrote in a post.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to comprehend how anyone can hear this and think ‘oh hell yeah,’” wrote prominent San Antonio Spurs writer Matthew Tynan in a post.

“And what good comes from this exactly?” wrote prominent NBA podcaster Chris of Hoop Spaces in a post on X.

“Has he ever listened to anything he says? Cause this sounds alarming. Not helpful,” wrote longtime NFL and NBA writer Scott Kacsmar in a post.

Altman may be excited for these changes, but it’s clear that not everyone is happy to step into the world that he described.

Read full story here…

The Elites are Claiming the World’s Water Supply and Plan to Trade It on the Stock Market.

Yep, you heard me right. This is not a joke or exaggeration. The facts are out there for all to see. I wrote about the tokenization of nature in my article “From Blockchain to Ball and Chain: Are We Being Borged?” [1] This article will deal primarily with the tokenization of the world’s water supply.

Tokenization: Turning Life Itself into a Tradeable Chip

For those who do not understand tokenization, here is a short and simple explanation: Tokenization means turning something real, like a share of water rights, a measured volume of water from a river or aquifer, or even credits for water that was “saved” or recycled, into a digital token (a unique digital certificate) that lives on a blockchain.

A blockchain is simply a shared digital notebook that many computers keep identical copies of at the same time, so the records of who owns what cannot be secretly changed by any one person or company.

That token can then be bought, sold, or traded on markets the same way people trade stocks or other assets. Instead of water simply belonging to the land, the local community, or the people who rely on it, it becomes a financial product that large investors, corporations, and institutions can own fractions of and exchange for profit. The right to use, claim, offset, or trade that water becomes the commodity.

Offset means making up for the water you use by helping save or restore the same amount somewhere else. A farmer switches to drip irrigation, a project restores a wetland, or a company reuses treated wastewater. That saved or restored water is measured and turned into credit. You buy or claim the credit. On paper your water use is balanced.

How Dare They Profit from Stealing Our Water

How dare they make money off this corrupt plan to steal, control, measure and meter the world’s water supply. Yes, I sound like Greta. The irony is thick: the same girl who made “How dare you” famous has been thoroughly programmed to cheer for Agenda 2030 and the very control grid she should be screaming against. Since she refuses to use her catchphrase where it actually belongs, then I will.

Water is the foundation of life itself. Every human, every animal, every plant depends on it. Yet the same elites who lecture the public about scarcity and climate are building the machinery to turn every last drop into a tradable asset they can profit from while ordinary people face rationing and surveillance.

This is exactly the process already described and promoted in official reports. Goldman Sachs itself published “Securing and Financing the Future of Water” in 2026, openly stating that tokenization can turn water rights into traceable tokens that track use across markets and deliver credits for companies that conserve or recycle water through connections to flow meters. Read it yourself: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/securing-and-financing-the-future-of-water

The United Nations has declared the world has entered an era of “Global Water Bankruptcy.” Their report argues that the old system of local rights is finished and that new enforceable limits, transparent accounting, and centralized management are required. See the official collection: https://unu.edu/inweh/collection/global-water-bankruptcy

The Mapping Machines Are Already Flying Over Your Head

Look at how they are already doing it. Across the United States, helicopters now fly low over farms and aquifers towing giant electromagnetic loops that map the groundwater beneath our feet like an MRI of the earth. California’s Department of Water Resources runs statewide Airborne Electromagnetic Surveys for exactly this purpose. Click here to read how the water mapping technology works: https://water.ca.gov/programs/sgma/aem

hese surveys create detailed maps of every major water source so that usage can later be tracked and limited.

The All-Seeing Eye of Oracle Returns: Now It Watches Every Drop You Use

Oracle Utilities already processes data from more than 100 million meters worldwide with AI systems that detect irrigation, leaks, and individual household use in real time. Their customer platform is designed for exactly this level of precise control: https://www.oracle.com/utilities/customer-platform/

Larry Ellison didn’t just dream of a panopticon. He said the quiet part out loud: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” That wasn’t a warning. That was a sales pitch from the man who still owns roughly 40% of Oracle, the company now quietly embedding itself into the pipes that deliver the most basic resource on Earth: water.

Once you own the real-time ledger of every drop that enters every home, every farm, every factory, you don’t need jackboots. You just need a dashboard. Throttle the water, and compliance follows. The same technocratic elite that spent decades consolidating data, finance, and surveillance is now moving on the last ungoverned commons, water itself, under the soothing branding of “customer platforms” and “smart utilities.”

And Ellison isn’t some lone eccentric billionaire operating in a vacuum. He’s a Trump donor who poured roughly $45 million into supporting the 2024 campaign and has since enjoyed the kind of access that turns political proximity into regulatory profit. The same circle that lectures about freedom while building the tools to score, monitor, and ration everyday life now has one of its most unapologetic surveillance advocates sitting in their inner circle.

The water meters are just the latest sensor in a system that already knows when you open the fridge, when and where you drive, when you yawn, drink, text or speak and soon, how long you shower and how many times you flush your toilet.

This is not innovation. This is the elite’s operating system for managed scarcity and behavioral compliance, dressed up as progress and sold by a man who openly celebrated the idea that constant recording would keep the public “on their best behavior.” Oracle isn’t managing utilities. It’s helping construct the choke points. What’s next Larry? Are you going to regulate and tokenize oxygen?

The infrastructure for control is already being paired with the financial machinery. Chainlink, a decentralized oracle network that feeds real-world data such as meter readings and conservation verification into blockchain systems, has published detailed guides on digitizing water rights and conservation credits into tokens so companies can buy offsets just like carbon credits: https://chain.link/article/tokenized-water-rights-credits

In Dubai, the DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre), a government-backed free zone and major international trading hub, has signed agreements to launch the world’s first digital token backed by verified freshwater reserves, positioning water itself as a tradable commodity on global markets: https://mediaoffice.ae/en/news/2025/june/17-06/dmcc-signs-strategic-mou

They Already Seized the Food and Are Playing God with the Weather

The elites have been systematically taking control of the world’s food supply for years. Bill Gates, through Cascade Investment, has become the largest private owner of U.S. farmland, holding hundreds of thousands of acres across nearly twenty states. At the same time, major asset managers like BlackRock hold massive stakes in the dominant agribusiness corporations that control seeds, fertilizers, processing, and distribution.

Simultaneously, cloud seeding programs and solar geoengineering research, backed by Silicon Valley money and governments, are rapidly expanding. These efforts claim to manage rainfall and cool the planet, yet they place the power to influence weather patterns in the hands of the very institutions already pushing centralized control over water and food.

In other words, they are running the classic Hegelian dialectic to consolidate power:

1. Create the droughts through weather geoengineering/modification
2. Declare an emergency and frighten the public.
3. Arrive with the “solution,” water tokenization that will supposedly save the planet but in reality just make them richer.

The pattern is unmistakable. Connect the dots. First, they buy the land that grows the food. Then they experiment with altering the weather that waters the crops. Now they are mapping, metering, and tokenizing the water itself so that every drop can be tracked, rationed, and sold.

This Is Not Theory. This Is the Takeover in Progress. Technocracy 101

They tell us water is too important to leave in local hands. They declare bankruptcy on systems that have sustained communities for generations. Then they create the digital and physical infrastructure to measure every use, enforce every limit, and profit from every token. The shared nature of water is being rewritten into a system of permission slips owned by the elite few who say that they, the experts, the financiers, the scientists, know best how to manage nature and humanity. It is all part and parcel of the plan of Technocracy Inc.

And make no mistake, this entire scheme sits squarely inside the United Nations Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 6 pretends to be about “clean water and sanitation for all,” yet the real machinery being built is the global accounting, metering, and financialization of every drop. The same institutions that wrote the goals now promote water “bankruptcy,” enforceable limits, transparent tracking, and market-based solutions that turn a basic necessity of life into a tradable asset class. What is sold to the public as sustainability and equity is in practice the transfer of control from communities and nations to the very financial and bureaucratic elites who drafted the blueprint. Agenda 2030 is the framework being used to justify seizing, measuring, and selling the world’s water under the banner of saving it.

This is the plan. It is already in motion. And the people pushing it expect the public to accept it as inevitable.

It is NOT inevitable.

Resistance is NOT futile.

Expose the plan. Shout if from the rooftops, news sites, podcasts and council meetings.

Don’t let the elites complete their takeover plan. They have the money but we have the numbers.

Read full story here…

For four hours in July, some of the biggest players in finance put Wall Street’s long-running blockchain experiment to work across an ordinary trading day.

After years of tests with digital versions of securities, cash and trading networks, the focus has shifted to whether these technologies could work together. This time, nearly 40 firms were testing how tokenized assets could move through the institutions that keep modern markets moving.

Over blockchain networks, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Invesco Ltd. and Citadel Securities LLC traded stocks and Treasuries, posted collateral, met margin calls and transferred assets. Overseeing it all was the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., which monitored the exercise from “war rooms” in New York and New Jersey as the firms completed dozens of transactions across various use cases.

The broader aim was to test whether tokenized versions of familiar assets can move through new blockchain systems without sacrificing the settlement, custody and risk controls of traditional markets.

“We tried to replicate the activities that occur in the market on a day to day,” said Nadine Chakar, DTCC’s global head of digital assets. “You don’t want tokenization to be done in isolation. You want it to be part of the daily workflow.”

That is the bet behind much of Wall Street’s tokenization push: not just longer operating hours as markets move toward 24/7 trading, but whether assets can move more freely across institutions, reducing trapped liquidity and some of the handoffs involved in moving collateral.

The July pilot was an attempt to test that proposition under something closer to real market conditions, bringing together exchanges, clearinghouses, banks and asset managers rather than limiting transactions to bilateral trades. Transactions included collateral pledges, margin calls, repo trades, delivery-versus-payment and transfers between blockchains using digital versions of stocks, exchange-traded funds and Treasuries on DTCC’s private network built using Besu and the Canton Network.

DTCC said it plans to move the service from limited tests toward ongoing use in October, adding another blockchain network, expanding support for Treasury corporate actions — coupon payment and Treasury maturity dates — and opening it to eligible participants beyond the July group.

DTCC’s role in the test was key because it maintains the official record for trillions of dollars of securities. If tokenized trades still have to be reconciled back to that traditional record at the DTCC, some of the promised efficiency disappears.

DTCC declined to provide transaction values or client-specific details. Chakar said “the purpose of the day was to simulate a representative snapshot of the market by including exchanges, clearing houses, buy-side and sell-side participants.”

Major hurdles remain, Chakar said, including adoption, regulatory alignment and integration with existing systems.

DTCC says Wall Street’s current tokenization push is different from previous attempts to deploy blockchain to financial markets because institutional demand has grown. The agency pointed to an industry working group that has nearly doubled in a few months to more than 100 members. Whether that matters commercially is a different question, said Vivian Fang, a finance professor at Indiana University.

“Many enterprise blockchain pilots over the past decade failed not because the technology didn’t work, but because they lacked the conditions needed for commercial adoption,” she said. “The ultimate test will be whether market participants meaningfully adopt tokenized securities and whether the platform delivers measurable economic value.”

Collateral Movement

Collateral offered one of the clearest tests of whether tokenization has economic value. In one transaction, DTCC tokenized an equity it held and deployed it as margin at CME Group Inc. within minutes. Tokenized collateral can settle almost instantly, potentially reducing trapped liquidity and allowing firms to put assets to work more efficiently, Chakar said.

JPMorgan, participating as a DTCC clearing member, separately converted securities collateral into digital tokens and used them to fund a margin call. The bank also tested tokenized equity collateral, including Invesco’s Nasdaq 100 ETF, ticker QQQ.

“Tokenization could reduce friction, improve collateral mobility and enable assets to be deployed more efficiently in support of margin requirements,” said Danny Hand, digital assets lead for prime financial services at JPMorgan.

There is a catch. JPMorgan can create tokenized collateral, but clearinghouses still have to accept it, custodians have to handle it and risk systems have to account for it. Broader adoption will depend in part on central counterparties recognizing tokenized collateral after DTCC expands the service.

That helps explain why early adoption may cluster around a handful of uses. Citigroup Inc. has projected tokenized assets could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, rising to $8.2 trillion in a bullish scenario. Bank of America Corp. Global Research analysts expect early adoption to focus on collateral mobility, on-chain cash management and settlement of standardized financial instruments, with stocks and credit developing more gradually.

Legal clarity remains another obstacle, according to Noelle Acheson, author of the “Crypto Is Macro Now” newsletter. But DTCC is “in the relatively unique position of being able to move the industry forward by setting standards and working with global partners,” she noted. “That said, the transformation is likely to take about a decade.”

Even if those uses take hold, another problem remains: firms are building on blockchain networks that do not automatically communicate. Moving an asset between them still requires both systems to agree on what moved and who owns it.

The July transactions also tested whether separately built systems could work together. Digital Asset Holdings LLC’s Canton Network underpinned several of those trades.

“It was a real functioning secondary market set of activities that was enabled by market participants,” said Kelly Mathieson, the company’s chief business development officer.

For all the activity in July, the exercise was carefully choreographed. Participants spent months testing together in an intentionally narrow window and a relatively small amount of assets were converted into an onchain form. October begins the harder phase: whether the system gets used by a larger group during the course of everyday business.

“It was a massive step for the market and for the overall state of readiness for all participants come October,” Chakar said. “There’s nobody questioning anymore whether the technology works.”

Read full story here…

“Flock on the Pole” song

Mass surveillance technology might be popular with police departments, but for the US public, it’s becoming an increasingly difficult sell.

At least 54 cities across the US have voted to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPRs) since the start of the year, according to data collected by the Washington Examiner. That comes after reporting in February that some 30 cities had done the same since 2025, indicative of the rising backlash against the tech.

In all, the Examiner reports cities in 23 states have shredded their Flock contracts so far this year, led by California and Wisconsin, which each have seven rejections, cancellations, or deactivations. Other heavy hitters include New York, Washington, and Massachusetts with four each, and Virginia with three.

Though Flock has its cameras in over 5,000 US cities as of July 2026, the rise in rejections at the municipal level comes amidst a tidal wave of outrage around issues of privacy and civil rights.

In cities where civic leaders have been slow to respond to these anxieties, citizens have moved quickly to take matters into their own hands by damaging, obscuring, or stealing the surveillance cameras in order to stop them from recording footage. A rise in official cancelations or rejections shows municipal leaders are catching on to the reality that the American populace broadly disproves of the technology, and they aren’t afraid to show it.

Arguably the highest-profile contract cancellation for Flock came when the Los Angeles Police Department decided to non-renew its years-long contract with the company, a decision motivated by a searing internal audit of the company’s technology. The internal report found that, in just two months, Flock’s ALPRs contributed to 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts, resulting in a false-positive rate of 32.3 percent.

With no sign of the outrage settling anytime soon, it’s likely these 54 cities could just be the start.

Read full story here…