Cities Cancel Flock Camera Agreements After Brazen Privacy Breaches

In 2025, something shifted in the long, largely one-sided battle over surveillance technology in American cities. The Atlanta-based company Flock Safety sells AI-powered license plate readers, or ALPRs, to thousands of police departments. Last year, they started losing. At least two dozen cities and counties cancelled, rejected, or terminated Flock contracts after local communities organized and said no.

In Austin, more than 30 community groups formed a coalition that forced the city to cancel its contract. The city government of Cambridge, Massachusetts, terminated its agreement after catching Flock installing cameras without permission. In Evanston, Illinois, an audit revealed that cameras were quietly feeding data to federal immigration enforcement. The pattern is the same: surveillance sold as a public safety tool is covertly repurposed in ways communities never approved. At the center of this movement is Fight for the Future—the primary digital rights nonprofit running the Flock Out campaign opposing Flock’s80,000+ AI-powered ALPRs.

Guest – Reem Suleiman, Senior Campaign Director at Fight for the Future. She previously served as the U.S. advocacy lead for the Mozilla Foundation, and was an original member of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, working to safeguard civil liberties against surveillance technology. FlockOut.org

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Prairieland Texas Case Update

The Prairieland cases have been grinding through both state and federal courts since a noise demonstration nearly one year ago. The demo was in solidarity with detainees at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, in early July 2025. It ended when an Alvarado Police Department officer arrived on the scene and became involved in a gunfire exchange. He allegedly sustained minor injuries—though the prosecution has withheld his medical records. What followed has become the nation’s first federal “Antifa” trial, with 22 defendants now facing a combination of state and federal charges, most of them held on bonds as high as $15 million.

In recent weeks, there have been new developments on multiple fronts: a third indictment of defendant Dario Sanchez over allegations that he removed people from group text chats, the quiet indictment of three additional defendants that defense teams say went unannounced, and an approaching trial date that has already been delayed twice. Today we’ll get an update on the cases and what the road ahead looks like for the Prairieland defendants.

Guest – Xavier de Janon is a criminal defense attorney and the Mass Defense Director at the National Lawyers Guild, where he provides protest defense and support for the right to dissent. Based in North Carolina, Xavier also represents individuals in politically motivated cases across the South.

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The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

For more than two years, the world has witnessed not only a devastating war in Gaza, but also a fierce battle over how that war has been covered in the media. We’ve seen headlines repeated before facts were verified. We’ve seen civilian deaths described in passive language that obscures responsibility. We’ve watched journalists, students, doctors, and even U.N. officials dismissed or marginalized when their accounts challenged official narratives – sometimes costing their lives.

All the while, independent reporting and social media footage taken by individuals on the ground show a different reality than the Israeli and US government narratives that dominate corporate media coverage. So what happens when the press stops acting as a watchdog and instead becomes an amplifier for state power? How can the public make informed moral decisions when reporting is shaped by concentrated political and corporate interests? And what obligations do journalists have when governments are pushing narratives in times of war?

Guest – Robin Andersen is a professor, media critic, and longtime scholar of war propaganda and political communication. Her new book, The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, examines how major U.S. media institutions covered the war after October 7th, 2023 and how corporate journalism helped manufacture public consent for catastrophic violence while, at the same time, narrowing the scope of speech and debate.

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The Future Of Cash Bail Reform

The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” has stood at the center of the criminal legal system in the United States for centuries. But in the real world, enjoying freedom before a trial has often depended less on guilt or innocence — and more on money. According to the Prison Policy Initiatives, among other sources, at least 400,000 people are in jail awaiting trial. In other words, they are legally innocent and have not been convicted of a crime, but remain behind bars. Many are there because they cannot afford to pay bail.

Supporters of the cash bail system claim it ensures people return to court for their trial, and therefore protects public safety. Critics, including our next guest, point to the unfairness of cash bail: it punishes poverty, pressures people into guilty pleas, tears apart families, and deepens racial and economic inequality. Out of this evolving debate, the bail reform movement was born. And on April 30, 2026, the California Supreme Court gave the bail reform movement the fortification it needed.

In the closely watched case In re Kowalczyk, the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed constitutional limits on pretrial detention and expanded on earlier rulings that challenged wealth-based incarceration. The decision is already being viewed as one of the most significant state court rulings on bail and pretrial liberty in recent years — with possible implications far beyond California.

Guest – Carson White, arson is a supervising attorney at Civil Rights Corps where she raises systemic challenges to the criminalization of poverty. She currently leads CRC’s California Writ Project, which trains public defenders statewide and has litigated hundreds of pretrial habeas petitions raising the issues ultimately decided by In re Kowalczyk. Carson is a graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of Texas at Austin.

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Guilty of Genocide

For decades, activists in the United States have argued that racial violence, political repression, and systemic inequality are not simply domestic issues. They’re also violations of international human rights law. A new collection, Guilty of Genocide, revisits that argument through the lens of the 2021 International Tribunal on U.S. Human Rights Abuses Against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples. The book gathers testimony, legal analysis, poetry, artwork, and organizing documents from a landmark people’s tribunal convened by the Spirit of Mandela Coalition.

After hearing testimony on policing, incarceration, political prisoners, environmental racism, and colonialism, an international panel of jurists delivered a sweeping verdict finding the United States guilty of multiple human rights abuses.

Guest – Matt Meyer an internationally recognized peace educator, author, and activist. He was nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize alongside the International Peace Research Association in recognition of his lifelong commitment to nonviolence and global peace education. Author of more than a dozen books, including Guns and Gandhi in Africa, Matt has played a major role in building international peace studies and justice networks across Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America.

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A Look Back At The Inception Of New York City’s Panopticon

When Law and Disorder first interviewed privacy activist Bill Brown in 2005, the landscape of surveillance in New York City — and across the United States — was already alarming. Bill was warning us about hundreds of NYPD cameras going up in Brooklyn, federal Homeland Security dollars flooding into local surveillance infrastructure, and the proposed “ring of steel” around lower Manhattan modeled on London’s vast camera network. What seemed like a dire warning then looks almost quaint today.

In the years since, mass surveillance has expanded in ways that would have been difficult to imagine. Amazon’s RING doorbell cameras, now installed on tens of millions of private homes, have become a vast, crowd-sourced surveillance network — with police departments across the country routinely requesting footage from residents, sometimes without a warrant. Meanwhile, a newer and perhaps even more insidious technology has taken hold: FLOCK Safety cameras, license plate readers now deployed in thousands of communities, logging the movements of ordinary Americans going about their daily lives and making that data available to law enforcement across jurisdictions. Add to this the explosion of facial recognition technology, social media monitoring, and AI-driven predictive policing tools, and the surveillance state Bill Brown cautioned us about has arrived in full force.

But Americans are pushing back. Civil liberties organizations including the ACLU have won outright bans on government use of facial recognition in cities including San Francisco, Boston, and Portland. Community organizers have successfully blocked FLOCK camera contracts in several cities after exposing how the data is shared and retained. And a growing movement of digital rights advocates, tenant organizations, and privacy activists continues to fight surveillance expansion at the local, state, and federal level — carrying on exactly the kind of work Bill Brown was urging listeners to take up all those years ago.

Since 2006, New York City’s surveillance infrastructure has evolved from a fragmented network of video cameras. It’s now an integrated, intelligence-driven system powered by the Domain Awareness System (DAS) and advanced biometric tools. The NYPD’s intelligence and counterterrorism budget quadrupled from $83 million in 2006 to $349 million in 2021, enabling the deployment of technologies originally designed for counterterrorism to monitor routine street crime and protests. These include facial recognition software, license plate readers, and mobile X-ray vans.

The scale of physical surveillance has expanded dramatically. By 2021, Amnesty International estimated more than 15,000 police cameras in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn alone, up from roughly 2,400 visible cameras in Manhattan in 1998. This network is further augmented by cellphone surveillance tools like Stingray trackers and cell tower dumps. Those allow police to identify individuals at protests or public gatherings without warrants.

This evolution has created a surveillance state that disproportionately impacts communities of color. There’s a well-documented correlation between surveillance density and higher rates of stop-and-frisk incidents in minority neighborhoods. Police maintain that these tools are essential for solving crimes and preventing attacks — but the lack of public oversight and the use of data scraped from social media have intensified debates over privacy rights and racial bias in policing.

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War And Debt Economy

We are experiencing a great transformation in who holds economic, and therefore political power in America. This transformation is going on for the last 50 some years. There are now approximately 1000 billionaires in America. Our constitutional form of government, the government of checks and balances has been transformed. The three branches of government, the legislative, the judicial, and the executive were designed to hold each other in check and that is no longer the case. Executive power reigns supreme.

Trump is not the disease, he’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is capitalism, production for profit, and not for human needs. This is manifested in autocracy, the rule of the rich, and those with whom they are connected. They have popularly become known as the Epstein class. In tandem with the billionaire class in power in the United States, is this country’s decline in power as compared to China. China is soon to become the leading economic force in the world.

It is about to overcome the United States in this regard, while American governmental debt approaches $40 trillion, an amount worth more than the annual production of goods and services in the United States, this country has now turned to borrowing money from China to aid its economy.

Guest – Richard Wolff  is Professor Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts, and the author of Understanding Capitalism. According to New York Times, Richard Wolff is, probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist.  He is the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their national syndicated show Economic Update. Professor Wolff has authorized numerous books on capitalism and socialism, including most recently “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself“, “Understanding Socialism“; and “Understanding Marxism”, which can be found at democracyatwork.info.

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Israel’s Practice of Assassination

World War II ended in 1945. Sixty million people had died. To prevent a recurrence the foundations of international law were laid. The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals concluded in 1947. The guilty verdicts against the Nazi leaders were not seen as “victors’ justice“ but instead as a way forward based on three principles. The first was the illegality of aggressive war, the worst crime of all because it included within it all other crimes. The second principal consisted of violations of the laws of war, such as bombing civilians. The third was crimes against humanity.

Pete Hegseth, the American Secretary of Defense, who has changed the name of the department and styles himself as Secretary of War, has denounced the very laws of war set up after Nuremberg. The third principal, crimes against humanity, includes assassinations which are political murders. The Israeli assassination program has become elaborate and ambitious. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, the ethno- state has been an extremely aggressive violator of these three principles.

In developing political assassination as “an art form” in the words of an Israel leader, Israel has taken the lead along with its partner the United States in the dismantling of the international rules of law.

Guest –  Washington DC journalist Andrew Cockburn  is the author of many books and articles. His most recent book is titled Washington is Burning: Lies and Corruption in the Age of Trump. His Substack is titled Spoils of War. Mr. Cockburn’s latest article appeared on April 17, 2026 in the London Review of Books.

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