What's coming up

Pulaski County Courthouse, quorum court

NOT a rezoning. Pulaski County's quorum court advanced a data-center MORATORIUM only after a stronger version failed -- and the version that moved forward EXEMPTS the $6 billion AVAIO Digital project, which is the project the moratorium was raised to address. Anyone showing up to stop AVAIO should know the pause as drafted does not reach it. Confirm the agenda item and start time with the county clerk before attending.

LAPD headquarters / Police Commission

LAPD's contract with Axon -- which supplies ALPR software in 1,500 patrol cars -- expires at the end of July 2026, weeks after the department let its Flock agreement lapse. The Inspector General has urged suspending ALL new ALPR deployments and contracts pending public input and a vendor-wide reassessment. Whether LA renews Axon, swaps vendors, or pauses plate reading entirely is the live question; the Police Commission takes public comment.

West Hollywood plans to launch a one-year, $750,000 Drone as First Responder pilot -- LA County Sheriff drones flying ahead of deputies to certain calls -- by the end of July 2026.

Massachusetts students are pushing the 'Act Regarding Free Expression' (S.2696), which the state Senate passed in November 2025; its House companion (H.3594) must clear the House before the 2025-2026 formal session ends around July 31, 2026 or it dies. Separately, the House passed a bipartisan library-policy bill on June 10.

Rural Hall Town Hall

Rural Hall's town council takes a FINAL rezoning vote on a proposed 129-acre data center that local leaders have already given initial approval. Residents have packed the last two meetings in opposition and gathered again ahead of this vote. Confirm the agenda item and start time with the town clerk before attending.

The Montgomery County Planning Board is expected to take public testimony on July 30 on Terra Energy's conditional-use application for a data-center complex in Dickerson, as two County Council moratorium bills advance.

City Council Chambers, 409 South Main Street

Harrisonburg council votes Jul 28 on a city-staff-drafted ordinance PROHIBITING automated license plate readers and similar technology city-wide, alongside terminating the 31-camera Flock Safety contract -- a standing ban, not just a cancellation. The exact ordinance wording was still being drafted as of mid-July. The groundwork was laid at the Jul 14 meeting, where the chamber overflowed onto the sidewalk and Fire Chief Matthew Tobia counted roughly 150 more people waiting outside; council member Monica Robinson said she backed removal "because I believe the risk outweighs the benefits," and Mayor Deanna Reed argued that not sharing the data is no protection because "that doesn't mean that somebody can't get a hold of what we have." HPD had been holding camera data 21 days. Passage puts Harrisonburg alongside Staunton and Charlottesville. Council meets at 7pm on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month; a live phone line is open during public comment, and written comment can be filed beforehand at harrisonburgva.gov/agenda-comments.

Piedmont Veterans Event Center, 240 Edmond Rd NW (overflow venue; regular chambers are the George Fina Municipal Building, 314 Edmond Rd NW)

CHECK THE DATE BEFORE YOU GO -- Piedmont's council meets on MONDAYS at 6:30pm, and the end-of-July regular meeting falls on Mon Jul 27, so the Jul 28 date in circulation could not be confirmed against a posted agenda. Agendas go up at piedmont-ok.gov/AgendaCenter and on the door of the George Fina Municipal Building at least 24 hours ahead. The item: Cloverleaf Infrastructure (Houston) wants roughly 630 acres rezoned and annexed for the "Project Open Sky" campus -- six buildings of about 352,800 sq ft each, plus warehouses and a substation, sited for proximity to the Matheson substation. Power draw is reported as 1.5 GW by KOKH and 1.4 GW elsewhere; the discrepancy is unresolved. The Planning Commission recommended DENIAL. Council heard it Jun 22 at the Veterans Event Center -- the city ran out of parking, and Cloverleaf's CEO never got to speak -- then pushed the decision to late July. Chief development officer Aaron Bilyeu says the campus uses closed-loop cooling that consumes no water in normal operation and that Cloverleaf pays for any power or transmission upgrades. Residents dispute the water and grid claims. A SECOND, SEPARATE proposal from Beltline Energy (BLE Holdings) covers 321 more acres and was deferred pending a comprehensive-plan analysis.

With a packed City Hall, the council voted 4-2 against a multiple-use agreement with the Texas Department of Transportation that would have allowed Flock cameras inside TxDOT right-of-way along the state highways running through town. Read the sequence before scoring this as a rejection: on 24 Mar 2026 the same council passed Resolution 2026-11 authorising a grant application to buy six Flock cameras, so the cameras were already funded and the July vote governed only where they may be placed. Police Chief Guy Green told the meeting he can site them within the city with or without the agreement. Resident Bryan Ford, who opposed it, described the outcome as restricting the cameras to the outskirts rather than stopping them. Mayor Gaylynn Burris said she was surprised by the vote and that it leaves the path forward uncertain. Filed as restricted rather than denied for exactly that reason.

City Council voted to terminate its Flock Safety contract seven months into a two-year, $25,000 agreement, after months of residents packing council meetings in opposition. The resolution has the city pay a $12,500 buyout to exit early, remove all cameras as soon as possible, and delete the data already collected. The police chief defended the original decision as a public-safety measure never intended to invade privacy, and said Flock would not permit the city to buy only the first year -- but confirmed the cameras could come down the next day. Residents argued the program conflicted with the town's values and raised the recording of children without consent. This is the seventh entity in Dane County to end or decline to renew with Flock.

The DeFlock Harrisonburg campaign won the contract fight and lost the structural one. After thousands of resident letters and a packed Jul 15, 2026 meeting where the council committed to ending the city's 31-camera Flock program, the council voted 4-0 on Jul 28, 2026 to end the contract -- Mayor Deanna Reed, Vice Mayor Dany Fleming, and council members Laura Dent and Monica Robinson. City Manager Ande Banks said the systems would go dark that Friday and that the city would pull the cameras if removal took too long, without defining too long. READ THE LIMIT: the council did NOT adopt the ordinance barring other mass-surveillance vendors from contracting with the city, which was the third of DeFlock Harrisonburg's three stated goals. It passed a non-binding policy instead, encouraging future councils to weigh ALPR proposals against the concerns raised. Group member Giles Eanes called the result bittersweet and said the campaign continues until an ordinance passes. So the successor door is open: one vendor is gone, no standing bar replaced it. Charlottesville and Staunton had already ended their Flock contracts.

On Jul 27, 2026 the UK Supreme Court ruled 3-2 that Bahrain cannot claim state immunity to block a spyware lawsuit -- holding that remotely infecting a computer physically located in the UK is an act carried out IN the UK. The precedent is the record: a foreign government that hacks a device in Britain from abroad now faces the same civil liability in English courts as one that sends agents in person, which closes the procedural shield transnational spyware campaigns have hidden behind. The claimants are Dr Saeed Shehabi, 71, a journalist and founder of a Bahraini opposition movement, and Moosa Mohammed, a Bahraini refugee, both in London; they allege agents acting for Bahrain infected their computers in Sep 2011 with FinSpy -- the commercial spyware of the now-defunct Munich firm FinFisher, capable of logging keystrokes, tracking location and monitoring communications. Bahrain denied the hacking and argued sovereign immunity; the High Court rejected that in 2023, the Court of Appeal upheld it in 2024, and the Supreme Court has now closed the question. Filed `contesting` because the win is jurisdictional, not final: the case returns to the High Court for full trial. It sits alongside WhatsApp v. NSO in the US as the second front testing whether spyware operations against exiles can be litigated where the victims live.

The Town Council voted 5-0 to terminate its Flock Safety contract and asked staff to take the license plate readers down as soon as possible, after councillors said they had received hundreds of emails from residents raising misuse and privacy concerns. Councillor Michael Marran said that just because the technology exists does not mean the town should use it; Councillor Deborah Bergner said the potential for federal use of the data made the risk too unpredictable to measure. A Flock representative said he respected the decision and maintained the company does not sell data and that the community owns it. The Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association defended the technology as a tool for solving crimes with privacy safeguards in place. IMPORTANT LIMIT ON THIS RESULT: Rhode Island State Police hold their own separate Flock contract, so cameras can still appear inside South Kingstown along state roads. Ending the town contract removes the town's cameras, not all cameras in the town. The town is seeking a partial refund of remaining operational costs.

A local group hosts a public hearing in Marquez so residents can put questions directly to Crusoe Technologies about its proposed $34 billion data-center campus, planned to be operational in 2028. Commissioners Court and Crusoe representatives have been invited; this is not a county meeting and no vote is scheduled. Context: on Jul 13, 2026 more than 200 residents packed the county's Annex 2 building and commissioners REJECTED Crusoe's tax-abatement application as incomplete. Crusoe is expected to file a new application, on no announced date -- that refiling, not this hearing, is the next decision point. Residents objected to the abatement itself, to a reinvestment zone on prime farmland, and to the absence of any bond covering the site if the company folds. The exact Marquez venue and start time have not been published.

Common Council voted to revoke the Flock contract and switch to Axon, after police inadvertently opted into national data sharing and Border Patrol ran more than 2,000 immigration-related searches. Update, July 2026: Flock physically removed its 13 license plate readers from city property, finalizing an eight-month breakup that began with the council's revocation. Two caveats keep the win partial: Flock remains in Syracuse through separate contracts with Syracuse University and the Destiny USA mall, and statewide ALPR legislation from Assemblymember Pam Hunter will not be considered until the 2027 session. Completion and aftermath, July 2026: all 131 Flock cameras are down, ending an eight-month breakup -- February's 7-1 council vote for a five-year, $422,636 Axon contract (passed as officers removed protesting activists from the chamber), March's revocation of Flock's street permissions, hardware out by the May 26 deadline. But critics say the switch solved nothing: the NYCLU strategist on the city's own surveillance working group reports being refused both the ALPR policy and the Axon contract for six months, and notes Axon's reach -- body cameras, drones, and its Fusus real-time crime center -- may raise the stakes rather than lower them. Assemblymember Pamela Hunter's Albany bill (retention caps, use limits, warrant requirements for federal or out-of-state sharing) is the proposal privacy advocates now point to as the fix that survives vendor swaps. Axon's plate product is Fleet 3, a dual-view 4K reader that checks scans against hotlists; notably, local demonstrators rallied against Axon too, not only Flock, over its own federal relationships -- underscoring that for Syracuse activists the objection was to the surveillance, not merely the vendor. Then the follow-through stalled. As of July 24, 2026 -- nearly a year after the vote to drop Flock and five months after the Common Council approved the Axon contract 7-1 on February 9 -- the Flock cameras were reportedly still physically standing. Daniel Schwarz, a senior privacy and technology strategist with the New York Civil Liberties Union who sat on the city's own Surveillance Technology Working Group, says he was shut out of the replacement process: he requested the department's ALPR policy and the Axon contract more than six months ago and has received neither, and was never consulted on the contract's terms. He notes this mirrors how the city adopted Flock in 2023, when the group was likewise never shown any specific language. His own conclusion is the one worth recording here, because it cuts against reading a vendor change as a remedy: every one of these vendors presents surveillance risk and opportunity for abuse, all of them function by tracking any driver around the clock, and Axon's reach may raise the stakes rather than lower them because it sells far more than plate readers. Questions also remain unanswered about what data was shared during the Flock period. So Syracuse is a switch on paper whose oversight body cannot see the contract that replaced the system it reviewed.

Sumter County Sheriff Patrick Breeden suspended the office's use of Flock in late July 2026 after an internal audit found a detective had allegedly reached into multiple law-enforcement databases -- Flock, DAVID and court records -- over a personal dispute. An arrest warrant issued July 23 charged her with official misconduct under F.S. 838.022(1)(a) and offences against computer users under F.S. 815.06 for allegedly exceeding authorised access; she was notified of pending termination on arrest. The office ordered a complete internal audit of all database activity and said further charges could follow as results come back, describing the arrest as a step toward accountability and transparency. The sequence is what earns this a place here: the misuse surfaced through the agency's own audit rather than a journalist or a lawsuit, and the response was to switch the system off county-wide over a single detective's conduct -- an implicit concession that one person's access is enough to compromise the whole network. This is a suspension pending the audit, not a cancellation.

Sheriff John Smith gave Flock Safety formal notice on July 23, 2026 that Clearwater County would not renew, terminating for convenience when the agreement lapses on September 22, 2026. The reasoning is the reason to record it. Smith did not cite privacy, the Fourth Amendment, data sharing, or federal access. He said the office had run the system for roughly nine months specifically to find out whether it delivered a meaningful public-safety benefit for a county this size, concluded it did not show enough operational value to justify the cost, and redirected the money to equipment supporting proactive patrol and criminal investigations, which he expects to return more. The press release thanked Flock's staff for their professionalism. Almost every other departure on this map is an argument about rights; this one is a procurement judgement that the product underperformed, reached by the agency that bought it rather than forced on it by a council or a campaign -- and it is harder to answer, because there is no civil-liberties objection to rebut. The office said it would complete the contractual deactivation and removal requirements before the agreement ends. Orofino is the county seat. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor, and this is the rare case where that is a settled question rather than an open one. Sheriff John Smith ran the system about nine months specifically to test whether it earned its cost for a county this size, concluded it did not, and REDIRECTED THE MONEY to equipment supporting proactive patrol and criminal investigations -- so the budget line that would fund a successor has already been spent elsewhere.

Monroe County commissioners voted 2-0 on July 23, 2026 to terminate the county's Flock Safety agreement and have all six automated license plate readers taken down, choosing to eat a $3,000 removal charge -- up to $500 per camera -- rather than let the contract run to its September 2027 expiry. Commissioner Julie Thomas moved to approve the termination letter, Jody Madeira gave what she called an enthusiastic second, and Lee Jones was absent. The original 2021 deal was $16,500 for six cameras at high-traffic locations, with a two-year term that auto-renewed in two-year blocks. What makes this one worth reading closely is that Thomas did not argue the cameras had failed. She said they had helped find missing people and investigate crimes, that the technology has a role, and that giving it up was unfortunate -- and then said the national record of how the data has been abused had changed the balance for her anyway. County attorney Jeff Cockerill said residents had asked the commissioners to review the contract. Sheriff Ruben Marte agreed to the termination, his office confirming it was in keeping with the values of most county residents, which removes the usual sheriff-versus-board dynamic entirely. The 2021 agreement obliges Flock to remove the cameras within a reasonable time but sets no deadline; Madeira asked whether the county could hood them meanwhile and Thomas said no, the county should not alter equipment it does not own. Thomas said she would prefer locally controlled technology that keeps the Amber and Silver Alert benefits without the national network. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor yet, but an explicitly stated appetite for one. Commissioner Julie Thomas did not argue the cameras had failed -- she said they had helped find missing people and investigate crimes and that giving them up was unfortunate -- and said she would PREFER LOCALLY CONTROLLED TECHNOLOGY that keeps the Amber and Silver Alert benefits without the national network. That is a specification for a replacement, not a rejection of plate reading, so treat this record as likely to change.

City Council voted 6-1 in June 2026 to cancel its Flock Safety contract, halt data collection immediately and remove all 15 city-owned cameras, capping sustained resident pushback -- led in part by local privacy organisers -- over mass surveillance and federal data access. Confirmed complete: police services reported on July 23, 2026 that all 15 cameras had been physically taken down. Worth logging the gap, because it is the part that usually goes unverified on this map: roughly six weeks between the vote and the hardware actually leaving the poles. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. Worth keeping the interval, because it is the kind of confirmation most records on this map lack: council voted 6-1 in June 2026, and police services confirmed on Jul 23 that all 15 city-owned cameras were physically down -- about six weeks between the vote and the hardware leaving the poles.

Choctaw City Hall

Choctaw's council votes on keeping or removing the city's four Flock cameras. Mayor Chad Allcox framed it directly: the question is where the community sets the balance between public safety, privacy, transparency, and individual liberty. Public comment is open.

Costa Mesa City Hall, Council Chambers, 77 Fair Drive

Costa Mesa's City Council takes up its Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader contract after months of resident pressure to end it. City staff recommend continuing the program, citing 100 felony arrests, 20 recovered stolen vehicles and three missing-persons cases; residents and immigrant-rights groups (Sunrise OC, Resilience OC) warn about privacy and out-of-state and ICE access to the data, and point to a former Costa Mesa officer who pleaded guilty in April 2026 to using Flock to track his wife, a mistress and romantic rivals. Public comment is open; confirm the agenda item and start time on the city portal before attending.

Latimer County Sheriff Adam Woodruff announced in July 2026 that his office would not use Flock automated license plate readers at all, after reviewing the technology. He acknowledged the cameras have helped other agencies solve crimes, then pointed to the national record on privacy, data sharing, transparency and potential for misuse, and said proactive policing and strong investigative work can protect the county without a system he considers an infringement on privacy. His framing -- that the people of Latimer County deserve both security and freedom, and that the office will not use Flock as long as he holds the job -- makes this a pre-emptive refusal rather than a cancellation, which is the rarer entry on this map: a sheriff declining the technology before adopting it, on his own initiative, with no contract to exit and no council vote behind him.

Costa Mesa's council took up its Flock ALPR contract on July 21, 2026 after months of resident pressure to end it, with immigrant-rights and youth-organizing groups (Resilience OC, Sunrise OC) warning about ICE and third-party access to plate data. City staff recommended continuing, citing 100 felony arrests, 20 recovered stolen vehicles and three missing-persons cases. The fight follows a former Costa Mesa officer's guilty plea over using law-enforcement tools including Flock to track his wife, a mistress and romantic rivals. Outcome, July 21, 2026: council voted 6-1 to KEEP the 46-camera Flock contract through its April 2027 expiration, over an outpouring of residents citing privacy and ICE data-sharing concerns. Councilmember Arlis Reynolds cast the lone no, citing contract vulnerabilities. The consolation: staff were directed to renegotiate the terms, including how Flock may access and use Costa Mesa's data. Police credited the cameras with 20 stolen-vehicle recoveries, 3 located missing persons, and 10 solved sexual-assault cases in the past year -- the argument that carried the room.

The Yankton County Commission holds a public hearing on a data-center moratorium at its July 21 regular meeting, as a resident petition drive to restrict or ban data centers runs in parallel.

THE RENEWAL PASSED. On Jul 20, 2026 the Park Ridge City Council approved a one-year extension of its Flock contract 5-1, and the arithmetic of how is the record: as a sole-source contract it needed a two-thirds supermajority, at least five votes. Two alderpersons were absent, which under the city attorney's reading let Mayor Marty Maloney cast a vote that counted toward the supermajority. The measure had cleared its first reading 6-1 on Jul 6, with Ald. Fred Sanchez opposed both times. Police Chief Bob Kampwirth told the council the cameras were useful and did not invade privacy. Resident Erik Olijnyk urged rejection, arguing nothing prevents officers from sharing data with federal immigration authorities. Filed here because a map that logs only the cancellations is an argument rather than a record -- and because a one-year term means Park Ridge decides again in 2027.

On Saturday July 18, 2026, opponents of the data-center buildout held 142 protests across 42 states -- the first coordinated national action against AI infrastructure, after a year in which the fight had been almost entirely municipal. The organiser was HumansFirst, co-founded by a former leader of the Tea Party, who compares the movement to the 2009 revolt against taxation and government overreach and frames the buildout as an unaccountable infringement on liberty. The geography is the interesting part: Texas hosted 18 events, more than any other state, Georgia 11, California 8, and Pennsylvania, Florida and Indiana 7 each -- the heaviest turnout in the states doing the most hosting, not the ones with the most environmental politics. A sign in Fredericksburg, Virginia read that we thrive on water not data; in Atlanta, that Georgia never voted for hyperscale. And the coalition is not unified on remedy: organisers pressed for transparency in development, protection of water and environmental health, union jobs, and a way to hold developers to their promises, but several said explicitly that they do not support moratoriums of the kind New York adopted four days earlier. That split matters for reading the rest of this map, where a moratorium is usually the win being counted. For scale: The Information counts more than 300 cities, towns and counties with bans or moratoriums, and 75 major projects worth over $130 billion delayed or cancelled in the first three months of 2026 alone, at least partly through organised local opposition.

HumansFirst coordinated the first nationwide day of action against AI data-center construction: 142 protests across 42 states. Texas led with 18 events, Georgia 11, California 8, and Pennsylvania, Florida and Indiana 7 each. Organiser demands centred on development transparency, water and environmental protection, union jobs and developer accountability -- though several organisers said they oppose blanket moratoriums like New York's, signed four days earlier.

Junction City is considering a 90-day free trial of eight Flock cameras, drawing civil-liberties objections at a mid-July 2026 council meeting where residents warned the system would build a searchable record of ordinary people's movements. It follows Eugene, Springfield and Lane County cutting ties with Flock and a 2026 Oregon law adding data-retention limits, encryption and sanctuary-law compliance for plate readers. No decision was made; the council set further discussion for August 11.

Documents obtained by ABC13 show a Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office lieutenant used Flock cameras to look up one license plate 41 times and another 148 times between January 2022 and December 2025, admitting the searches were not tied to official work. A resident had complained the lieutenant was stalking them; internal affairs found a violation of general orders tied to a contentious family relationship and suspended the lieutenant for two days. No criminal charges were filed and the lieutenant was not named.

DeKalb County sheriff's Sgt. Kabiru Salawu, employed since 2009, was fired and jailed without bond on July 17, 2026 after an internal investigation found he used Flock license-plate technology for unauthorized purposes. He faces charges of violation of oath of office and misuse of license-plate data. Sheriff Melody Maddox said misusing law-enforcement technology for any unauthorized purpose is a serious breach of public trust. THE CONTRACT BEHIND THE CASE: DeKalb County commissioners approved a ten-year, sole-source Flock agreement worth close to $19 million in a single sitting, branded Digital Shield, spanning license plate readers, AI-enabled drones and surveillance cameras -- the largest single Flock commitment recorded in this dataset, adopted with promises of transparency and ethical data use. This felony case is that rollout's first. How it surfaced matters for every misuse count on this map: Flock has deployed an AI audit-assistance feature that flags queries falling outside a department's stated policy and routes them to supervisors instead of leaving misuse to manual log review, and company spokesperson Paris Lewbel has pointed to the resulting wave of firings as the system working as intended. If detection improved, some share of the 2026 misuse surge is better auditing rather than more abuse -- and departments without the tooling are not cleaner, only blinder.

The Fayetteville Police Department fired three officers on July 17, 2026 after a new auditing feature for its Flock cameras flagged searches outside the scope of their work, including officers running their own plates or those of friends and family with no legitimate law-enforcement purpose. The three were placed on administrative leave before being terminated, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation opened a criminal inquiry. The department said it would not speculate about the officers' intent.

Governor Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to require data centers to fully fund the grid infrastructure serving them, keeping those costs off residential bills; the agencies' joint memo is due July 17.

Moody Police Chief Reece Smith confirmed that an officer was terminated on Jul 16, 2026 after an internal investigation opened Jul 10 found a violation of the department's license plate reader policy. The officer was placed on leave immediately and fired three days later; the findings went to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, which decides whether criminal charges follow. The department declined to name the officer or describe the violation, citing personnel policy, so what the search was FOR is not on the public record. Smith said Moody has run the cameras since 2019 and called this the city's first breach, while defending the system as a valuable investigative tool. Mayor Nick Rutledge issued a statement backing the chief and the department. Recorded as an outcome, not an allegation: the discipline is confirmed, the underlying conduct is not disclosed, and the ALEA review was still open when this was written.

One day after the Huntington City Council approved a $2.1 million Flock Technologies surveillance contract on a 6-4 vote -- following a meeting that ran past 4 a.m. and more than 50 public comments against it -- the ACLU of West Virginia, the Haslam Law Firm and Glazer, Saad and Anderson sued the city in Cabell County Circuit Court on behalf of resident Greg Jimison. The suit seeks to void the deal, arguing the city ignored its own procurement rules and that city code bars letting a private company use city property for commercial purposes without public notice and a hearing. The contract covers plate-recognition cameras, vehicle-fingerprint technology, live video, gunshot detection and automatically dispatched drones.

Minneapolis police asked the City Council for a 75-day, no-cost trial of Skydio 'Drone as First Responder' aircraft: two marked drones based at Fire Station 14, launched on 911 calls in the Fourth Precinct -- which covers much of North Minneapolis and is majority Black -- to reach scenes before officers and stream live video to dispatch. The department put the case on response time, a median of seven minutes and 48 seconds on the northside against a projected two, and Mayor Jacob Frey supported it. On July 16, 2026 the council deadlocked 6-6 and the contract failed. The mechanics matter: the deciding vote was cast by Council Vice President Jamal Osman, a co-sponsor, who switched sides over Skydio's drone sales to the Israeli military and its Department of Homeland Security immigration work -- a concern with local weight, since ICE had run Operation Metro Surge in the city roughly six months before. Forty residents testified against the pilot at the July 8 committee hearing and none in favour; more than a hundred filled the chambers and overflow room on the day. Police released thermal footage four days earlier showing a drone locating a missing 82-year-old veteran in nine minutes after a three-and-a-half-hour ground search failed, and it changed nothing. Two caveats against filing this as settled: a motion to keep the proposal off future agendas failed on the same 6-6 count, so it can come back, and the vote does not end other police drone use here. St. Paul, Minnetonka, Rochester, Brooklyn Park and Duluth all run or are building the same programme on the same vendor's hardware, which leaves Minneapolis the exception in its own metro rather than the start of a trend.

Resolved, and narrowly. On Thursday July 16, 2026 the Minneapolis City Council deadlocked 6-6 on the 75-day, no-cost Skydio 'Drone as First Responder' pilot, and a tie fails -- so the contract was rejected. Two marked drones would have flown from Fire Station 14 in the Fourth Precinct, which covers much of North Minneapolis, dispatched on 911 calls ahead of officers; the sponsor argued a median response time of seven minutes and 48 seconds could fall to roughly two, and Mayor Jacob Frey backed it. The deciding vote came from Council Vice President Jamal Osman, a co-sponsor of the measure, who switched sides citing Skydio's equipment sales to the Israeli military and its work with the Department of Homeland Security on immigration enforcement -- the latter landing hard in a city where ICE had run Operation Metro Surge roughly six months earlier. Around 40 residents had testified against it at the July 8 committee stage with nobody speaking in favour, and more than 100 packed the chambers and overflow room for the vote after weeks of organising. Four days before the vote the police department released thermal footage of a drone finding a missing 82-year-old veteran in nine minutes after a three-and-a-half-hour ground search had failed. It moved no votes. Two things keep this from being a clean ending: a motion to bar the proposal from future agendas failed on the same 6-6 split, so it can return, and the rejection does not end other police drone use in the city. Minneapolis is now the metro holdout -- St. Paul, Minnetonka, Rochester, Brooklyn Park and Duluth all run or are building the same programme, every one of them on Skydio hardware.

New Albany's City Council advanced a one-year moratorium blocking new data centers or multi-building campuses larger than 100,000 square feet and set a final vote for July 16, citing resident demand for clearer zoning rules.

On July 15, 2026 the San Francisco Police Commission approved a $3 million gift from billionaire Chris Larsen's San Francisco Police Community Foundation to expand SFPD's Real Time Investigation Center, which tracks plates via hundreds of street cameras and dozens of drones and runs the city's 400 Flock cameras. The money funds drone docking stations, counter-drone technology and center infrastructure. The approval came days after WIRED reported that feeds from five SFPD surveillance drones had been left accessible on the open internet for more than seven months through a mishandled Skydio sharing link.

Cleveland kept its cameras -- for now. The Safety Committee first voted 3-1 against renewing the roughly $250,000 Flock contract on June 17, 2026, and the deal expired June 29 though the cameras stayed on; the committee then reversed course on July 8, and on July 15 the full City Council approved a six-month, $125,000 extension by 9-6 after a heated debate. Council deliberately halved the term to press Mayor Justin Bibb to find a new vendor faster, and added contract fines. Guardrails now bar immigration-related and vague 'other' searches, and only Cleveland officers can search the data -- outside departments must sign individual agreements. That leaves City Hall until late December to either switch vendors or stay with Flock. Update, July 2026: after the safety committee voted 3-1 against renewing the $250,000 contract and it expired June 29, the roughly 100 cameras did not go dark -- they remained on, with police still using them days past expiry. Cleveland joined Cambridge and Eugene on the list of cities where terminating a Flock contract and actually ending the surveillance turned out to be two different things; the vote only counts if the cameras obey it. Update, July 15, 2026: after the safety committee's June vote to end the $250,000 contract, full council reversed and renewed Flock through December 29 -- but only six months, and with an amendment barring the DHS-managed Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center from the city's camera data. Police said Flock helped find suspects in 25 of Cleveland's 53 homicides this year and that ICE database access was disabled in fall 2025. The wrinkle that made national news: after the earlier committee vote to shut the cameras down, the 100+ cameras stayed on and police kept using them -- the same cameras-don't-die pattern seen in Cambridge and Eugene.

Ofcom

Published July 15, ahead of the late-July expectation. Findings: highly effective age checks reached 43 percent of children (from 25), 83 adult sites under investigation, AVS fined 1 million pounds, a TikTok probe opened, and 'serious doubts' recorded about age-inference systems. Next milestone: the over-16 rapid assessment to Parliament by end of October.

Resolved. At its Wednesday July 15, 2026 meeting the Appleton Common Council approved the resolution terminating the city's Flock Safety contract and stopping payments to the company -- confirming a decision Mayor Jake Woodford had announced in May, citing concerns about the integrity of Flock's underlying system that had eroded the city's trust. The city had already ended use of the cameras on June 30, bagging some and having Flock remove others, with a July 31 deadline for full removal. But the second half of the agenda did not pass: Resolution 9-R-26, which would have established public oversight and accountability standards for automated license-plate readers and mass-surveillance technology generally, was referred back to the Safety and Licensing Committee after residents urged the council to slow down and several asked for an outright moratorium on any future ALPR use. The committee took it up again July 22. So the vendor is gone and the framework is not written -- worth separating when reading this as a win. The city says it is not pursuing a replacement ALPR vendor and will run no trials or demonstrations while the legislative process continues.

Putnam County Government Complex, 2509 Crill Ave, Suite 100, Palatka

Putnam County commissioners voted unanimously to require county staff to report every inquiry or conversation about potential data-center development to County Administrator Terry Suggs, who must then share it with all five commissioners and post it publicly within 72 hours. Commissioners stopped short of a moratorium, which several residents had asked for. It is a disclosure rule rather than a pause: it does not stop a project, it removes the ability to negotiate one quietly, which is the failure mode that produced the backlash in Valparaiso and Leon County. Correction: this record previously carried a Jul 28 vote date taken from an aggregator daily note. No data-center item is scheduled for Jul 28. The board sits on the fourth Tuesday of the month at 9:00 a.m. at the address above, next on Aug 25 -- watch that agenda if the question returns.

On July 14, 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul issued an executive order making New York the first US state to impose a data-center moratorium -- a one-year pause barring the Department of Environmental Conservation from issuing permits or licenses for new large (hyperscale) data centers while regulators develop standards for their energy, water and environmental impacts. Hochul opted for the executive order rather than signing the Legislature's separate one-year moratorium bill (AB 10141 / SB 9144, passed June 4, 2026), which her office called complex and in need of further work. More than 30 hyperscale projects drawing an estimated 10,000 MW had been proposed across the state. Update, July 14, 2026: Hochul signed Executive Order 62 -- the nation's first statewide data-center moratorium -- pausing state environmental approvals for new data centers over 50 MW for up to a year while the Department of Public Service produces a generic environmental impact statement with public hearings. She acted by executive order rather than signing the legislature's broader bill, which she is expected to veto by year-end; the EO lets her own the issue on her own terms in an election year. Moratorium bills are now alive in Georgia, Maryland, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Virginia.

On July 14, 2026 the Macon County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously, in two motions initiated by commissioner John Shearl, to bar the Sheriff's Office from spending county funds on Flock and to terminate the existing contract as fast as possible. The politics are the story: the organised opposition came from the Macon County Republican Party. County GOP chair Patty Trick argued Flock sells the ability to build military-style intelligence for use against civilians, describing a vehicle fingerprint logging make, colour and bumper stickers to track movement over days without a warrant, and cited the Supreme Court's Chatrie decision from two weeks earlier as establishing that government tracking of location history is a Fourth Amendment search. The party treasurer said it sounded like China; the vice-chair asked commissioners whether they were prepared to apologise to residents if the courts later found the cameras unconstitutional. More than a hundred people filled the fourth-floor courtroom and every one of the dozen-plus speakers on Flock opposed it. Sheriff Brent Holbrooks fought to keep the system, which his office had used since spring 2024 under a $31,950 contract signed in 2023, rising to an expected $47,000 in the 2026-27 budget: daily use on breaking and entering, larceny, abductions and narcotics, plus dementia patients and Silver and Amber alerts, and a recent role in recovering a kidnapped child in Jackson County. Lt. Lee Tritt, a retired State Bureau of Investigation agent, said meth seizures went from 1,241 grams in 2023 to 5,803 in 2024 after the cameras went up in March. Holbrooks also argued the vote unfairly singled out law enforcement when retailers run comparable technology freely. Flock's regional sales director Alex Gruth attended to argue that 40 court cases have upheld ALPRs, that Chatrie does not map onto snapshot-based cameras, and that fewer than 2 percent of Flock customers have exited contracts. He lost the room. One exchange is worth keeping: Shearl drove past a camera, got out of his car, and asked to see what the system had captured of him. Chief Deputy Derek Jones said he had been asked to break the law, because G.S. 20-183.33 bars the office from disclosing plate data -- a sitting commissioner could not see his own record. Gruth said exit requires three days' notice and no fee. Afterwards Jones said the office had lost access to all 16 cameras, the 12 it controlled and four placed at schools with grant money, and that nobody now has access to any of them; Flock must remove them and they were still standing on July 21. The school district said no one from either the Sheriff's Office or Flock had contacted it about the four on its property. One resident told commissioners he had counted 22 cameras in the county. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. The board barred the Sheriff's Office from spending county funds on Flock at all, which blocks a quiet renewal, and Flock's own regional sales director said exit requires three days' notice and no fee. Removal lagged as usual -- access to all 16 cameras was gone on Jul 14 but they were still standing on Jul 21, and the school district hosting four of them said nobody from the Sheriff's Office or Flock had contacted it. One resident counted 22 cameras in the county against the 16 the office controlled, so the difference is presumably private or grant-placed and unaffected.

THE RENEWAL SURVIVED A RECONSIDERATION. Warren has run Flock ALPR since 2021, and on Jul 14, 2026 the City Council voted 4-3 to extend the contract for a second two-year term at $132,000. The sequence is the record: Councilwoman Melody Magee had been part of a 4-2 majority approving the extension in June, then asked to reconsider her own vote, and voted against it on the retake along with Angela Rogensues and Henry Newnan. Mindy Moore, Gary Boike, Dave Dwyer and Jonathan Lafferty carried it. Magee said she accepted the cameras can aid public safety and reduce pursuits but concluded the agreement lacked sufficient privacy safeguards for residents. Ferndale Councilwoman Laura Mikulski travelled to speak against it, telling Warren that her own city cancelled after outside agencies searched its network giving vague reasons. Police Commissioner Eric Hawkins said he respected the opposition arguments but maintained the technology has great value. Lafferty framed his yes vote as buying the council an audit opportunity and said they would watch the access logs. A council member publicly reversing herself on ALPR and still losing the vote is why this is recorded as an outcome rather than left as an open campaign.

Warren City Hall, One City Square

Warren City Council voted 4-3 to extend its Flock Safety license-plate-reader contract for a second two-year term ($132,000), after a councilwoman asked to reconsider her earlier vote. It came as Westland, Milford, Ferndale and Clawson declined to renew their Flock contracts.

Jackson's City Council introduced a six-month moratorium as the Planning Commission weighs a rezoning for a data center in northwest Jackson; residents raised water-system and health concerns. The council takes it up July 14.

Oshkosh's Common Council takes up a data-center resolution on July 14.

The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality holds a public hearing tied to a proposed data center on July 14.

More than 200 residents packed Leon County's Annex 2 building on Jul 13, 2026 as commissioners took up a tax-abatement agreement with Crusoe Technologies for a $34 billion data center targeted to be operational in 2028. Commissioners REJECTED THE APPLICATION AS INCOMPLETE -- a procedural bounce, not a decision on the merits, and Crusoe is expected to file a new one. Treat this as live, not won. Residents objected on three distinct grounds worth keeping separate: Kat Wall on fairness, that a company "95% funded" was seeking a special deal no ordinary citizen could get, and separately that a large facility should have to post a bond in case it goes out of business; Donna Hull that the consensus opposed the data center, the reinvestment zone on prime farmland, and any abatement at all, and that commissioners should press on how much more land a future expansion would take; Rachel Streater on the property-rights line -- no objection to what they do on their own land, but "when it crosses that fence line... that's when it becomes an infringement on our rights as citizens." A local group scheduled a separate public hearing in Marquez for Jul 27 and invited Commissioners Court and Crusoe representatives.

York County Council advanced a nine-month moratorium pausing data-center approvals in unincorporated areas while it studies impacts; a public hearing is set for July 13.

Mankato's council set a July 13 public hearing on an interim one-year moratorium on data centers and other resource-heavy industrial users, rushed after an outside party asked about the city's code. No application is on file yet.

On July 11, 2026 the Los Angeles Police Department -- the nation's third-largest police force and once one of Flock's largest government customers -- let its Flock Safety contract expire. Chief information officer Dean Gialamas said the decision was not about cost but about serious civil-liberties and civil-rights concerns over the privacy of the data the cameras collect. Thirty-nine Flock contracts were reported terminated nationwide in the first five months of 2026.

LAPD let its three-year agreement with Flock Safety expire on July 11, 2026, discontinuing use of the cameras over what its chief information officer called serious civil-liberties and privacy concerns. But Flock was only one of THREE ALPR vendors supplying the department -- its 138 pole cameras were funded by private associations and council discretionary money, not bought by LAPD -- and Axon still provides ALPR software in 1,500 patrol cars under a contract expiring at the end of July 2026. The Inspector General has urged the department to suspend new ALPR deployments and contracts entirely, pending public input and a broader reassessment of vendors and data practices across the board -- the vendor-neutral review privacy advocates say is the real decision point. LAPD shares ALPR data with 15 other Southern California agencies. A number that framed the decision: LAPD officers performed 161 traffic stops on vehicles Flock's systems had errantly flagged as stolen -- drivers pulled over, some at gunpoint under felony-stop protocols, over cars connected to no crime. The error count turned an abstract privacy debate into a concrete due-process record. Confirmed by the record: Flock Safety, Axon Enterprise, AND Motorola Solutions all provide ALPR technology to LAPD, and Councilwoman Ysabel Jurado -- who moved for the review in May -- put it plainly: 'This was never just about one vendor or one contract.' The IG also recommended requiring annual audits and stating explicitly that misuse of ALPR data may bring discipline. The lesson the whole map has been circling: the fight is about the surveillance, not the logo on the camera. RECLASSIFIED from removed to switched: Flock was one of THREE ALPR vendors at LAPD, and Axon still supplies plate-reader software in 1,500 patrol cars under a separate contract. Los Angeles did not stop reading plates in July 2026; it stopped using one brand. Filing this as a removal made the largest agency on this map look like it had exited ALPR entirely. The department named its reason through Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas, who said the contract was not renewed because of serious civil-liberties and civil-rights concerns, particularly privacy and the data being collected, and that LAPD would stay out until questions about data, privacy, security and sharing could be settled contractually. Cost was explicitly not the reason, which matters because it removes the argument that pushback is only ever budgetary.

A Jefferson County judge ruled July 10, 2026 that Oxmoor Valley residents' consolidated lawsuit against the Nebius data center rising off Lakeshore Parkway in Birmingham can proceed -- rejecting the city's and builders' argument that neighbors had to go through the zoning board first, and holding that how the city approved the project is a question for a court. The timeline residents are litigating: Nebius bought the land in September 2025, permits issued and construction began by February, and in March the city passed a data-center moratorium that exempted Nebius itself. The Humane Society filed its own suit the same week.

The Dutch ANPR Act -- Article 126jj of the Code of Criminal Procedure, in force since 2019 -- has police log the plate and location of every passing vehicle and hold it for four weeks in a central database, whether or not anyone is suspected of anything. Privacy First has been litigating to have it declared unlawful since 2021, arguing the bulk retention of millions of motorists' movements is disproportionate under European privacy law, unsupervised, easy to abuse, and by several studies ineffective at what it claims to do. After summary proceedings, the District Court of The Hague cleared the case to proceed on the merits in early 2024. The appeal was heard at the Court of Appeal in The Hague on July 9, 2026 (Privacy First Foundation v. the State, case 200.347.782/01), in a hearing the foundation opened to the public, and it says it will carry the case to the highest European courts if it has to, citing recent European case law and the Dutch data protection authority's own positions. Judgment pending. Read this against Norfolk, Virginia, where a US federal judge held a 21-day ALPR retention window too short to amount to Carpenter-style surveillance: the Dutch window is twice that, nationwide, and statutory rather than contractual. Same technology, same question about how long is too long, two legal systems arriving from opposite directions.

The Court of Appeal in The Hague heard Privacy First Foundation v. the State (case 200.347.782/01), the challenge to Article 126jj of the Dutch Code of Criminal Procedure, which since 2019 has held every passing vehicle's plate and location for four weeks regardless of suspicion. Judgment pending; Privacy First has said it will pursue the case to the highest European courts if necessary.

The European Parliament fell 47 votes short of the absolute majority needed to reject the Council's revived 'Chat Control 1.0' voluntary-scanning regime (314 of the 361 required), letting suspicionless scanning of unencrypted messages continue in the EU until 2028.

Missoula County commissioners hold a July 9 public hearing on interim zoning that would temporarily pause new data-center development; it would affect Krambu's proposed center at the former Stimson Mill site in Bonner, after hundreds of residents petitioned over power and water demands.

Springville Police Chief Jason Mize said an audit opened Jun 23, 2026 showed one of his officers had run multiple plate-reader searches on a family member in a single day. The relative was notified, and when the investigation closed the officer was called in and resigned on Jul 8, 2026. The findings were referred to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency for a charging decision; the officer has not been publicly named. This is the cleanest form of the misuse pattern on this map -- not a wrong plate or a bad hit, but an officer using a city surveillance network to look at someone he knew. It surfaced through a routine audit rather than a complaint, which is the argument for mandatory audit trails and also the reason the true rate is unknowable in departments that do not run them. Springville is the second St. Clair County department in the same month to lose an officer this way.

Weeks after approving a contested 31-acre data center near I-75, the Marietta City Council took up a citywide moratorium on new data-center development after residents said the original hearings were under-advertised.

Oklahoma City Hall, 200 N Walker Ave

Oklahoma City's council took up the third renewal of its Flock Safety contract at the July 7, 2026 meeting amid sustained pressure from DeFlock OKC, Oklahomans for Privacy and the ACLU of Oklahoma. No final decision followed: the vote was expected on July 21 and then pushed to August after the police department asked for more time on the contract.

Broomfield City Council voted 9-0 on July 7, 2026 to pass Ordinance 2313, an 18-month moratorium halting land-use applications, site plans and building permits for data centers with a projected load of 10 MW or more. It takes effect immediately and runs through December 2, 2027 or until permanent rules are adopted; residents cited drought-state water use and rising electricity demand.

The Broomfield City Council voted 9-0 to pass Ordinance 2313, an 18-month moratorium on data centers of 10 MW or more, effective immediately through December 2, 2027 or until permanent regulations are adopted.

The Prince George's County Council voted on July 7, 2026 to approve a two-year moratorium on new data-center development, after a contentious packed hearing; it can be lifted sooner if the county adopts a zoning framework.

Windsor Town Hall, 275 Broad St

The Windsor Town Council voted 5-4 to permanently turn off its 16 Flock Safety license-plate-reader cameras and end the town's contract, after a months-long fight; the mayor said Flock could not guarantee residents' privacy. Several Connecticut towns have moved to switch off ALPR cameras over data-access concerns.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to block Texas's App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), denying an industry and student request to lift a lower-court order that let the law take effect while First Amendment litigation continues. The law requires app stores to verify users' ages and link minors' accounts to a parent for downloads and purchases.

The fight over who pays for data centers has produced a fight over WHO IS ALLOWED TO ARGUE. The Louisiana Public Service Commission is considering a "transparency" rule, framed as identifying potential foreign interference and advancing the state's energy dominance, that advocacy groups and at least one sitting commissioner warn would chill participation and limit which organisations can intervene in utility dockets -- the proceedings that decide how much ratepayers are charged and whether a utility may build a new power plant. The context is not abstract: the Sierra Club and the Alliance for Affordable Energy, two of the groups named in a Pelican Institute report, had both intervened in the commission's docket on Meta's Richland Parish data center. Commissioner Davante Lewis, who had earlier proposed opening a public stakeholder proceeding on data-center grid additions instead of fast-tracking them, called the rule "a solution in search of a problem." Worth tracking as its own record because standing to intervene is upstream of every ratepayer argument: an intervenor rule decides the outcome of dockets it never mentions.

Between 2016 and early 2018, Chile's then-director of Army intelligence, Schafik Nazal Lazaro, asked for the phone communications of journalist Mauricio Weibel Barahona, of Army whistleblowers who had talked to him, and of their contacts. A former appellate judge, Juan Antonio Poblete Mendez, signed the orders that made it legal on paper, describing the targets as Bolivian agents. They were not. Weibel had been reporting on corruption inside the Army. On July 2, 2026 the Seventh Court of Guarantee of Santiago convicted both men of unlawful interception of communications and falsifying official records, sentencing each to five years; because both admitted the facts and accepted the evidence, the case was resolved without a full oral trial. Columbia's Global Freedom of Expression project records it as the first time any court has convicted both a judge and a military officer for spying on a journalist. Almost every record on these maps is surveillance or censorship arriving without consequence. This is the rarer thing: the paperwork that authorised the spying became the evidence that convicted the people who signed it.

The Seventh Court of Guarantee of Santiago convicted former Army intelligence director Schafik Nazal Lazaro and former appellate judge Juan Antonio Poblete Mendez of unlawfully intercepting the communications of journalist Mauricio Weibel Barahona and falsifying the records used to authorise it, sentencing each to five years. Reported as the first conviction anywhere of both a judge and a military officer for surveilling a journalist.

The single most useful figure for anyone arguing this locally: 71% OF AMERICANS OPPOSE A DATA CENTER BEING BUILT NEAR THEM, 48% strongly (Gallup, polled March 2026, released May 13, 2026). This is not a fringe position and the polling says so. On outcomes: Data Center Watch counts more than 140 local groups that have blocked or delayed over $60 BILLION in US data center investment in little over a year. Good Jobs First counts at least 63 local moratorium actions introduced, considered or adopted, of which 54 have already passed -- usually short freezes while zoning and utility rules get rewritten. On legislation, more than 300 state data center bills were filed across 30-plus states in the first six weeks of 2026, a shift from incentives toward oversight; at least 18 states have introduced special rate classes for large energy users, and roughly 11 to 12 states have introduced moratorium bills. Maine came closest to a first statewide moratorium and was VETOED by outgoing Governor Janet Mills. New York's legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act (S10642/A11560) on Jun 4 -- a one-year pause on new permits for 20MW-plus facilities plus rate classes and impact studies -- and Governor Hochul had still not signed or vetoed it as of Jul 10, saying she was undecided; she issued her own executive-order moratorium on Jul 14 instead. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a federal moratorium bill (S.4214 / H.R.9442) in March 2026 with 230-plus groups behind it. On the money: states are discovering what the exemptions cost them -- Georgia about $2.5 billion in a single year, Virginia roughly $1.6 billion, Texas about $1 billion. And in the PJM region, UCS found ratepayers across seven states were on the hook for $4.3 billion in infrastructure approved in 2024 SOLELY to connect data centers.

The clearest measurement yet of who pays for the AI build-out: PJM, the 13-state grid serving 65 million people, saw capacity prices rocket from $28.92 per megawatt-day in 2024-25 to $329.17 for 2026-27 -- the second straight year at the price cap, and only a cap demanded by the governors of Pennsylvania and Maryland kept it from $388. PJM's own independent market monitor attributed 63 percent of the increase to data-center load: $9.3 billion in one year recovered from customers, with wholesale power up 76 percent in the first quarter of 2026. Pepco customers in DC saw bills jump $21 a month, roughly half of it capacity costs; NRDC and the Citizens Utility Board project $163 billion in added capacity costs through 2033 -- about $70 a month per household -- if demand keeps outrunning supply, alongside warnings of forced blackouts. The July 2026 auction again failed to procure enough power to meet reliability targets, sending PJM to federal regulators for an emergency backstop. Oregon's POWER Act, the first dedicated data-center rate class, is the template states are reaching for; everywhere else, the subsidy flows silently through everyone's bill.

Faribault is preparing performance standards for future data centers, including a proposed Archer Datacenters facility -- the quieter regulatory response that is spreading alongside the outright moratoriums: not a ban, but a rulebook written before the buildout arrives.

Haring Township unanimously approved a six-month data-center moratorium in July 2026, with officials noting Michigan law bars an outright ban but permits stringent construction standards -- the same legal reading driving the wave of Michigan township pauses.

Wixom's city council unanimously voted down a developer's request to lift the Detroit suburb's six-month data-center moratorium early, keeping the pause (March through August 2026) in force while officials study the effects. A rare procedural moment on this map: not a fight to impose a moratorium, but a developer trying to end one -- and losing 7-0.

When an 822-acre data-center campus surfaced in Augusta Charter Township -- a farming community of 8,000 southeast of Ann Arbor -- with full township-board support, residents formed Protect Augusta Charter Township and collected more than 950 ballot-petition signatures, enough to force the rezoning onto the 2026 ballot. The fight has consumed local politics, with accusations of harassment on both sides, and follows neighboring Saline Township's rejection of a similar campus: southeast Michigan's townships are deciding these projects at the ballot box now, not the board table.

El Dorado's commission invalidated a citizen-led petition against data centers and asked a court to weigh in -- the second Kansas town in a month where the fight moved from the hearing room to petition law. Paired with Emporia's certified petition ninety minutes up the turnpike, Kansas is becoming the test of whether direct democracy can reach data-center decisions at all.

The Flint Hills Digital Campus -- 1,000 acres on the west edge of Emporia -- was announced June 2, 2026; the city commission annexed the land the next day, and all hell broke loose in a town of 25,000 that lost 1,200 manufacturing jobs in recent years. Civic leaders admitted they had worked with the developer for eight months but said NDAs barred naming it; a Kansas Reflector columnist reported the purported developer swore under oath he was not involved. More than 400 people packed a six-hour planning hearing where speakers turned their chairs when the project's representative approached the microphone. Emporia Neighbors United ran a boycott of pro-project businesses, then a petition drive: the first 1,400-signature petition was bounced on a filing technicality, the second was certified July 21 -- forcing the city to either enact a data-center prohibition ordinance or put it to voters. The commission took up rezoning July 22 at a meeting where one attendee was arrested. An unlikely coalition -- young and old, tree huggers and Bible thumpers, as the local columnist put it -- against a chamber of commerce promising jobs: the whole national fight, compressed into one Kansas town.

Boulder City is appealing the Bureau of Land Management's approval of a data-center project on federal land outside its borders -- a rare case of a city fighting a campus it cannot zone against, on the ground that the federal review shortchanged water and viewshed impacts in the driest state in the country.

After Inver Grove Heights imposed a moratorium reaching a project already in its pipeline, the developer threatened a $150 million lawsuit, arguing the pause is retroactive as applied. Alongside Monroe Township's $300 million suit in New Jersey, the litigation playbook against towns that say no is now its own pattern on this map.

Tyler's council denied a special-use permit for a combined bitcoin-mining and AI data center 5-2 in July 2026 after neighbors organized over noise -- the constant fan roar documented at existing crypto sites across Texas made the case for them.

Santa Fe County commissioners adopted an 18-month data-center moratorium in July 2026 with no project even proposed -- pausing the industry preemptively while the county writes water, energy, and zoning rules. The purely precautionary moratorium is a new genre on this map: regulate before the application arrives, not after.

St. Joseph County's council voted down a $13 billion data-center campus near New Carlisle on July 21, 2026, ending a ten-hour meeting where residents lined up past midnight. The county already hosts an Amazon build; speakers argued the second campus's water and power demands were being priced onto them. One of the largest dollar-figure rejections recorded here.

After a hearing that ran twelve hours, Palm Beach County commissioners voted 5-1 on July 22, 2026 to deny Project Tango, a proposed 600-acre AI data-center campus west of Boca Raton -- one of the largest single-project denials on this map. Commissioners cited water demand, grid load, and the county's own pending rules for the industry; residents packed overflow rooms for the third consecutive meeting.

Sunbury will put a proposed 25-megawatt cap on data centers before voters this November -- a measure that could block a planned $2 billion Amazon campus and hand residents direct ballot-box control over hyperscale development, over concerns spanning energy, water, noise, and land. One of the first times the question goes straight to the voters rather than a council.

New Mexico regulators rejected the proposed 17-mile natural gas pipeline meant to supply Oracle's 2.5-gigawatt Project Jupiter campus in Dona Ana County -- a major setback for one of the largest AI data-center developments in the country, delivered not through zoning but through energy regulation. The pattern is spreading: when the campus itself is hard to stop, the fuel line, the substation, or the water right becomes the vote that matters.

New Jersey enacted the Data Center Fair Share Act (S731/A796) on July 7, 2026, following the four-part statewide framework Governor Mikie Sherrill unveiled in May. The law creates a separate ratepayer class so large data centers pay for the grid upgrades and energy their operations require, rather than shifting those costs onto residential and small-business customers, and pairs with energy and water reporting and community-benefit standards. Environmental groups had pressed for a stronger three-year moratorium on facilities over 20 megawatts.

The Fort Wayne Common Council unanimously delayed a vote on creating an advisory task force for Google's proposed southeast-side data center, pushing the decision to September to allow time to develop broader data-center legislation alongside the advisory group.

The Grand Traverse County Planning Commission recommended a zoning change that would let the township board impose a data-center moratorium, after hundreds of residents packed a meeting in support. No project has been formally proposed; residents cited the region's Great Lakes freshwater and limited job benefits, and some urged an outright ban.

The Joplin City Council voted 9-0 to table a proposed data-center ordinance and send it back to the Planning and Zoning Commission for revisions, after staff said new research and public feedback could strengthen it. The draft would require a special-use permit rather than by-right approval in heavy-industrial zones and set standards for setbacks, noise, lighting, and air pollution.

Massillon delayed action on its data-center zoning ordinance after adding amendments that would restrict the facilities to heavy-industrial zoning and expand required setbacks from homes to 400 feet.

The North Mankato City Council discussed a proposed one-year moratorium on new or expanded data centers, but did not take a formal vote at the meeting.

Crossville officials were weighing a two-year moratorium on new data centers as residents raised concerns about the industry's electricity and water demands.

Lakeland is weighing a one-year moratorium on data centers drawing 50 megawatts or more, driven by opposition to the proposed Project Swan facility; officials were still studying its power and water implications. Note the venue: Lakeland is where DeSantis signed SB 484 on May 7, 2026, and the city's 50MW threshold matches the large-scale definition in circulation around that law. A final vote was set for Aug 3, 2026.

The Council Bluffs City Council voted unanimously against a proposed one-year moratorium on new data centers. Mayor Jill Shudak had requested the pause so staff could rewrite the city's data-center zoning and weigh strain on water and sewer capacity, which officials said is already running high. Several council members worried a moratorium would signal the city was closed to business and preferred to keep handling projects case by case.

Fort Worth's zoning commission voted 7-4 on July 8, 2026 to deny the city's first-of-its-kind data-center zoning ordinance, siding with residents who argued its setbacks and noise limits were too weak, and returning it toward the City Council with a recommendation to tighten. Residents packed the meeting demanding a moratorium over noise, water and power. Note what this fight is: not one campus, but the rulebook every future campus in the city would be judged by -- which is why a commission rejecting rules as too WEAK counts as pushback rather than approval.

Albany's Common Council voted 12-0 on July 6, 2026 to back a proposed statewide one-year data-center moratorium, adding municipal pressure on Governor Hochul to sign the pending state bill. Demonstrators rallied outside city hall beforehand.

The New Albany City Council advanced a proposed one-year moratorium that would block new data centers or multi-building campuses larger than 100,000 square feet, setting up a final vote for July 16, 2026.

Santa Fe County commissioners advanced a one-year data-center moratorium ordinance in early July 2026, citing water and energy concerns as demand for large facilities grows in New Mexico.

The Hamblen County Planning Commission voted on July 6, 2026 to enact a one-year moratorium on new data-center construction in the county while it develops permanent rules.

Nelson County and Bardstown officials said hyperscale data centers are not welcome and are preparing a countywide moratorium as residents press for regulations, saying the facilities do not fit the county's rural character. The debate intensified after the city and county bought 527 acres for a future industrial park.

The Jackson City Council introduced a six-month data-center moratorium on July 6, 2026 amid swift community pushback against a proposed rezoning in northwest Jackson, with residents citing strain on the city's water system. Some called for a permanent ban. The measure is set for a vote July 14, 2026.

The Prince George's County Council passed a two-year moratorium on hyperscale data-center development, extending earlier pauses to give members time to write permanent rules. The chair said passing comprehensive legislation would lift the moratorium; the county is separately trying to stop a project proposed for the old Landover Mall site.

The Paris City Commission voted on second and final reading to place a temporary moratorium on data-processing centers within city limits.

The Linn County Board of Supervisors voted 2-1 for an 18-month moratorium on new applications to rezone land into the county's large-scale data-center district, running through Jan. 1, 2028 -- months after adopting one of Iowa's most restrictive data-center ordinances. About 3,500 acres are already tied to data-center development.

After an emergency Quorum Court meeting that officials called the largest crowd the court has ever hosted, Union County unanimously approved a one-year pause on new data-center development running July 10, 2026 through July 9, 2027, with an emergency clause skipping the usual waiting period.

The Somerville Town Council approved an 18-month moratorium on data centers following pushback over a proposed bitcoin-mining facility near Union Road.

The Clay Town Board adopted a one-year moratorium pausing zone changes and special permits for large-scale data centers, AI computing, and crypto mining, paired with a new battery-storage law. No data centers have been proposed yet; the town is preparing for growth tied to Micron's planned semiconductor campus.

Palm Beach County commissioners approved a zoning moratorium on new AI data-center applications to rewrite the rules governing the facilities. The county's most controversial proposal, the 3.6M-square-foot Project Tango near Wellington and Saddle View Elementary, is exempt because it was already in review; the binding commission vote on it is set for July 15, 2026.

San Marcos became the first Texas city to ban data centers outright, a move that tests municipal home-rule authority against state law as Texas pushes to court data-center investment.

Marietta residents turned out in force against a data center the City Council had already approved, arguing the hearings had been under-advertised, and the council responded by postponing a further rezoning decision and ADOPTING a temporary moratorium on new data-center projects through December 31, 2026 -- buying time to write rules before the next application arrives. SITE NAMES DISAGREE ACROSS SOURCES and are both recorded rather than reconciled: one describes a 31-acre project on Bells Ferry Road near I-75, the other a proposal at Powers Ferry Place. These may be two separate projects in the same city or one misreported; no primary document was found to settle it.

The Coachella City Council voted unanimously on July 8, 2026 to extend its 45-day data-center moratorium by another 10 months and 15 days while it drafts a permanent ban. A draft ban goes to the planning commission July 15, with council adoption votes set for August 12 and 26.

Ahead of and during the NATO summit held in Ankara on July 7 and 8, 2026, Turkish authorities detained more than 200 people, journalists among them, and extended bans on demonstrations. Human Rights Watch and press-freedom organisations described it as a crackdown that further narrowed independent reporting and public scrutiny at precisely the moment international attention was on the country. The pattern is familiar from the Imamoglu arrest already on this map: the restriction is timed to an event, framed as security, and lifted late enough that the coverage never happens.

Since late June 2026 Hanoi police have arrested five people -- writers, editors, and promoters -- over a controversial book about Ho Chi Minh, charging all five with anti-state propaganda under penal code article 117, the national-security statute that anchors most speech prosecutions in Vietnam. Among them is Tran Viet Anh, founder of Spiderum, an online discussion platform popular with young Vietnamese whose YouTube channel counts 1.19 million subscribers; the platform has been suspended. A history book, a publisher, and a discussion forum: the arrest list is a tidy inventory of what article 117 reaches.

On July 9, 2026 the European Parliament fell short of the 361-vote absolute majority needed to block the Council's fast-tracked revival of the expired 'Chat Control 1.0' derogation -- only 314 MEPs voted to reject. The move reinstates a legal basis for platforms to voluntarily scan private messages for CSAM until 2028, drawing accusations that the Council forced through a measure Parliament had already rejected.

The EU Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR), nicknamed Chat Control by critics, would oblige messaging and hosting platforms to detect and report child sexual abuse material -- reaching end-to-end encrypted services in practice through client-side scanning. A fifth trilogue on June 29, 2026 collapsed over suspicionless scanning, with a sixth expected under the Irish presidency. Separately, the expired 'Chat Control 1.0' voluntary-scanning regime was revived on July 9, 2026 when Parliament fell short of the 361 votes needed to block it, letting suspicionless scanning of unencrypted services continue to 2028. Within the Council, a qualified majority of 23 member states backs the detection framework, while the Czech Republic, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland formally oppose suspicionless scanning.

Reporting in Jul 2026 documented anti-Flock social media influencers manufacturing fake cease-and-desist letters and going viral with them -- in one case a former American Idol contestant and country musician who narrated an aggregated news report as though it were his own discovery, and circulated a fabricated legal threat. This record exists to keep the other four in this batch honest. Flock did send a real cease-and-desist to DeFlock, did press a hosting provider to drop HaveIBeenFlocked, and does block the Internet Archive; those are documented, with the letter itself published and EFF's response on the record. Invented threats damage exactly that documentation, because they give any company a free rebuttal to a genuine complaint and they train readers to discount the category. The reporting that surfaced the fabrications is the same outlet that obtained and published the authentic letter, which is the correct way round: whoever documents the real suppression should also be the one calling out the fake. Anyone using this map to argue a case should be able to cite the primary document, and for the four preceding records they can. National in effect; pinned at Washington and marked approximate.

Sebastian Rucci -- developer, engineer and attorney for a proposed Imperial County data center that would be the largest in California -- sued four separate sets of critics for defamation through his company Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing. The targets: KPBS and reporter Kori Suzuki, plus San Diego State University, which owns the station, sued in Feb 2026 over articles published in Dec 2025 and Jan 2026, alleging defamation, false light and intentional interference with prospective economic advantage; Comite Civico del Valle and its executive director Luis Olmedo; and local activist Tison, who was additionally accused of harassment and of being paid to oppose the project, which he denies. The reporting that triggered it was not exotic: in Dec 2025 KPBS covered State Sen. Steve Padilla calling for public review of the project. Every case was struck under California's anti-SLAPP statute. Judge Cynthia Freeland, who granted the KPBS motion, had been sceptical from the start, telling Rucci none of the information in the articles was incorrect; on the Comite Civico motion the court found no admissible evidence connecting the organisation or Olmedo to any defamatory campaign. Rucci says he intends to keep pursuing legal action against KPBS, and separately has suits pending in Imperial County Superior Court seeking additional water sources for the facility. The detail worth carrying forward is Tison's: being sued made him speak more, not less -- more posts, more appearances at the Board of Supervisors, and a shift to talking about the money and the county rather than just the project.

On Jul 30, 2025 the Los Angeles City Council adopted Council Rule 7, barring members of the public from saying either of two specific words -- a racial slur and an obscene term for a woman -- or any variation of them during public comment, regardless of context and regardless of whether the speaker disrupts anything. One warning, then removal. Months later the council amended a second rule so that anyone removed is automatically barred from attending further council and committee meetings for up to six business days depending on their removal history. Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger, a resident who regularly speaks at public comment, criticized the rule itself on Oct 31, 2025, saying the council was afraid of the word and adding that it was insane they were more offended by bad words than by police brutalising citizens and journalists. She stayed within her time, addressed a matter squarely within the council's jurisdiction and disrupted nothing; the presiding officer warned her anyway. On Dec 3, 2025 the rule was enforced against her a second time and she was removed and barred from attending other meetings that day. In Jul 2026 the First Amendment Coalition and FIRE sent the council a demand letter threatening suit unless it repealed the word ban and the exclusion provisions, arguing the rule discriminates by viewpoint, is unreasonable in a public-comment period, and unlawfully authorises removal without any actual disruption. The motion was introduced by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson; the council has defended the rule as a response to persistent abusive speakers.

On April 28, 2025, Shiloh Hendrix was filmed at a Rochester playground repeatedly calling an 8-year-old Black autistic boy a racial slur after he took an applesauce pouch from her bag, telling the man who confronted her she did not care. The video drew millions of views and set off every collision this map exists to chart. She was doxxed and, she said, driven from her home; her GiveSendGo fundraiser drew more than $800,000 -- some donations carrying openly racist messages -- while the platform disabled comments over hate speech but kept the campaign, and the NAACP's fund for the boy's family raised $340,000 before the family closed it, saying they did not want the case politicized. The NAACP listed seven statutes she could be charged under; Attorney General Ellison called her conduct morally repugnant and welcomed accountability. In August the city charged her with three misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct -- 'offensive, obscene, or abusive language ... that would reasonably tend to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others' -- a category of statute the courts have repeatedly narrowed on First Amendment grounds, because it criminalizes words by their offensiveness. One count was dropped in March 2026; trial on the remaining two began July 20, 2026, with prosecutors resting on the 22nd. Ninety days in jail is the maximum, but the stakes are doctrinal: whether a slur, aimed at a child, spoken in a park, is unprotected fighting words or protected ugly speech -- and everything around the trial, from the doxxing to the $800,000, shows how little of the punishment now waits on the verdict. Trial updates: in a pretrial ruling the judge denied dismissal and held the recorded language 'may fit the definition of fighting words' -- putting the unprotected-speech question squarely to the jury. The state rested July 22 after two days; the defense presents July 23. The trial itself became a speech story: the prosecution withheld its witness list as long as possible citing safety, mostly masked supporters unfurled 'Shiloh did nothing wrong' and 'White Unity' banners outside the government center, and the court asked police to investigate a Facebook post claiming a juror had predetermined the verdict. The case went to the six-person jury at 1:04 p.m. on July 23. Late testimony sharpened both threads: the boy's father took the stand, the NAACP fund for the family was disclosed at trial to exceed $300,000, and Judge Christa Daily warned defense counsel about contempt over an attempt to introduce unverifiable fundraising evidence -- while outside, signs reading 'Defend white families' faced the courthouse. The jury came back late that same night, after about nine hours, and split it: not guilty on the count involving the child, guilty on the count involving the man who filmed her. That split is the doctrinal answer this record was waiting for. The pretrial ruling had sent the fighting-words question to the jury, and the factfinder declined to strip protection from the slur aimed at the 8-year-old while convicting on the adult-directed exchange that followed -- an outcome that tracks the actual shape of the fighting-words doctrine, which turns on a face-to-face provocation likely to draw immediate retaliation from the person addressed, not on how vile the word is or how sympathetic the target. Judge Christa Daily imposed a $1,000 fine, one year of supervised probation, 200 hours of community work service, and a 90-day jail term stayed on compliance. Rochester NAACP president Wale Elegbede called it a mixed result and said he wished the outcome had been different, while noting it was the first time in recent years that anyone in the area faced consequences for a racist incident. The city attorney's office issued a written statement acknowledging the conviction, said Hendrix had admitted the conduct and profited from it without remorse, and said it did not anticipate further comment. Defense counsel Brian Karalus said he would appeal, which keeps the fighting-words question alive on review; Daily had twice threatened him with sanctions during the trial. The arithmetic the record opened with still holds: a $1,000 fine and 200 hours of service against a fundraiser north of $800,000, with the doxxing, the move, and the banners outside the courthouse all delivered long before any jury spoke.

In May 2025 Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a policy denying visas to foreign nationals the department judged responsible for censoring Americans. It grew into a broader campaign reaching noncitizens who work on misinformation research, fact-checking, content moderation, platform compliance, and trust and safety, and by the department's own account five people were sanctioned under it, among them former European commissioner Thierry Breton and Imran Ahmed, the lawful US resident who runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Several leaders of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research were deported before the case was heard. On 14 July 2026 Chief Judge James Boasberg of the federal district court in Washington granted a preliminary injunction in Coalition for Independent Technology Research v. Rubio, No. 1:26-cv-00815, staying the policy for the duration of the litigation. He held that the government was likely violating the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act by discriminating on viewpoint: the label of foreign censorship had been stretched to cover ordinary research, reporting, and advocacy, and the government could not tie the private researchers and nonprofit staff it targeted to the exercise of any foreign government's power. The ruling does not bar action against genuine foreign state actors; it bars treating content-moderation work as grounds for removal.

Keir Starmer announced a free national digital ID on 25 September 2025 -- branded BritCard, held in a GOV.UK wallet, mandatory for right-to-work checks and targeted for full rollout in 2029. The backlash was the largest of any recent UK digital policy: a parliamentary petition against it drew close to three million signatures, one of the biggest in British history, and thousands marched from Marble Arch to Whitehall on 18 October 2025 behind placards calling it a digital prison. Security specialists warned about concentrating that much identity data in a single store. In January 2026 the government dropped the mandatory element and made the scheme voluntary; that concession did not save it. Andy Burnham, sworn in as prime minister on 20 July 2026, confirmed on taking office that the roughly 1.8 billion pound programme is cancelled outright and the money redirected to cost-of-living measures. Separate digital public services and the wider government digital programme continue -- what died is the universal state identity credential. Unlike most wins on this map, this one came from sustained public opposition rather than a courtroom.

The aggregate the town-by-town pins add up to, recorded with each tally's method because the counts differ by what is being counted. By CONTRACTS: 82 Flock contracts terminated across 28 states between Aug 2021 and May 2026, 39 of them in the first five months of 2026 alone -- an Institute for Justice tally. By GOVERNMENTS: the ACLU of Georgia put it at nearly 60 local governments cancelling or declining to renew in the year to Jun 2026, and counts more than 26 US cities with CCOPS ordinances requiring public process before surveillance tech is adopted. By TRACKER: whoapprovedthis.org documents 168 Flock contracts across 46 states, 55 ended, $50.8M in contract value, with typical terms of two to five years at roughly $2,500 to $3,000 per camera per year -- which is why renewal dates recur: most communities get another vote inside two years. By CAMERAS: the DeFlock project maps more than 122,000 ALPR cameras nationally and counts 95 cities that have rejected them. Treat any single figure as one method, not a settled total. TWO CAVEATS BELONG ON EVERY NUMBER HERE. First, the counts move weekly -- in one mid-July fortnight Cleveland extended 9-6, Warren renewed 4-3, Huntington approved 6-4 and four Michigan cities left, so the wave runs in both directions at once. Second, the parallel surge in officer-misuse firings partly reflects new detection rather than new behaviour: Flock's AI audit-assistance feature now flags queries outside a department's stated policy and routes them to supervisors, and the company itself points to the firing wave as proof the auditing works. A department with no such tooling shows a clean record and proves nothing. This record is pinned at Washington, DC as a national aggregate; the coordinate is a convention, not a location.

This map is organised around public decisions, which quietly assumes there was one. Often there is not. After Denver's council rejected a $666,000 Flock renewal, the city signed a $498,500 extension instead -- $1,500 below the threshold that would have required a council vote. In Westland, Michigan the police chief declined to bring an expiring contract to the council at all, so no vote was held and no roll call exists. In Dane County, Wisconsin the sheriff had signed with Flock without board approval in the first place, which is why the board could only reach the money and not the capability. The Who Approved This tracker, which records how each contract was authorised, finds 168 contracts across 46 states, 55 of them ended, $50.8M documented -- and that only 14 of 164 records state a funding source at all (6 grants, 4 general fund, 3 asset forfeiture, 1 ARPA). The other 150 show an approval but not the money, which matters because grant-funded programs die when the grant does rather than when the politics change: Guthrie, Oklahoma's Flock system was bought with a federal DOJ grant and ended when the grant ran out. Contracts are subscriptions, typically 2 to 5 years at $2,500-$3,000 per camera per year. For scale, an Institute for Justice tally counts communities in 28 states terminating Flock contracts between August 2021 and May 2026, 39 of those in the first five months of 2026 alone. The practical lesson for reading this map: absence of a cancellation vote is not evidence a program is uncontested, and the spending threshold, the renewal date and the funding source are often more decisive than any council debate.

Every `removed` entry on this map records a decision. It does not establish that the hardware left, and across 2025-26 the two came apart often enough to be a pattern rather than a series of delays. DeFlock Dane puts it flatly: physical removal is a separate question from the vote. Verona's contract lapsed in December and the cameras were still standing in January, until the mayor covered them with black plastic bags and Flock began removal in February. Dane County's subscription ended May 31, Flock did not remove the cameras, and on June 6 deputies bagged all 26 themselves. Oshkosh's police chief bagged his too. UW-Madison's contract ended June 26 and removal was announced July 3, yet the solar-powered cameras were still in place and uncovered afterward, with police able to say only that they assumed the cameras were no longer collecting. Guthrie OK cancelled effective February 18, 2025 and Flock did not schedule the uninstall until July 21, five months of cameras running free of charge. Macon County NC lost access to all 16 cameras on July 14 and they were still standing on July 21, with the school district hosting four of them saying nobody had contacted it. Fort Collins voted in June and the last of 15 cameras came down July 23, about six weeks later. Cleveland, Cambridge and Eugene all kept cameras live past termination. Syracuse took eight months. TWO SEPARATE FAILURES ARE BUNDLED HERE, and they need different fixes: the vendor controls the removal schedule and has no deadline in most contracts, and a covered or unpowered camera is not a verified-offline camera. For anyone reading this map to judge whether surveillance actually stopped somewhere, the vote is the beginning of the answer and not the end of it. Practical test for any new entry: is there a dated confirmation that the hardware is down, and who confirmed it -- the agency, the vendor, or a reporter who went and looked. TWO CHEAP VERIFICATION TOOLS, both vendor-published: Flock's own transparency portal lists departed agencies as "[Inactive]" -- Natick MA PD reads Inactive today -- so a departure can be confirmed, or a stale `removed` record caught, without hunting local coverage. And the same portal publishes each agency's sharing counts, which is how UW-Madison's 168 outbound and 467 inbound agency relationships were established. SEPARATELY, AND LARGER: a municipal cancellation never reaches private cameras. Framingham City Council Chair George King, on his own city's exit -- the cameras are everywhere, Home Depot and Lowe's have them in their parking lots, so they come off city streets without leaving the city. Denver's privately owned Flock cameras kept operating after the city removed all 110 of its own. Every `removed` pin on this map means police-operated cameras, and nothing more.

An Institute for Justice review of media reports and court records, published in July 2026, counted at least 27 cases since 2018 in which an ALPR error led to an innocent motorist being pulled over, detained or jailed -- the majority of them since 2023. The number that matters more than the count: in nearly two thirds of those cases officers did not realise the error until after they had drawn and pointed their guns. IJ attorney Michael Soyfer, who represents residents in the San Jose and Norfolk suits, put the stakes as every one of those stops being a high-risk encounter where a wrong move or a moment of fear can turn deadly, and nobody should have to prove their innocence at the roadside because a camera could not tell a zero from an O. The failure mode is mundane and mechanical: the readers confuse visually similar characters, 0 for O and 2 for 7, and get worse in rain, snow, mud and glare. Flock claims it captures 93 of every 100 plates accurately, which sounds tolerable until it is multiplied by the company's stated ambition of reading 20 billion plates a month -- that leaves well over a billion inaccurate reads in the same period. A police-conducted study in Vallejo, California found up to 37 percent of ALPR hits were erroneous. Separately, a six-month CBS News investigation verified more than a dozen wrongful stops plus several instances of the technology being abused outright. Read this alongside the individual records on this map: they are not isolated failures, they are the expected output of a system operating at that scale and that error rate.

The ACLU has assembled a pattern of Flock Safety giving false information to the city councils and police departments that buy its cameras. In Loveland, Colorado, told a police chief and the press that federal agencies had no access to local data and that federal sharing was moot because Flock held no federal contracts -- then admitted it had CBP and DHS pilot contracts granting direct access. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the council revoked approval one day after granting it -- the shortest approve-to-cancel span on record -- after concluding it had been given bad information. Denver's mayor negotiated secretly with what one council member called Flock's 'discredited CEO.' The through-line of the whole removal wave: cities aren't just worried about what the cameras do, they've stopped trusting what the vendor says they do.

The numbers behind the wave this map tracks city by city, and the denominators matter. Counting Flock alone: 53 municipalities have canceled or rejected Flock Safety contracts -- 39 terminations in the first five months of 2026 alone, per an Institute for Justice tally, across 28 states -- driven by unauthorized data access, changed terms, immigration-enforcement lookups, and cameras that stayed on after cities ordered them off. But most departures are vendor swaps, not surveillance retreats: Axon is winning the replacement contracts, and Denver is the model -- fewer cameras, shorter retention, no national database, mandatory audit trails, and the tracking continues under a fresher logo. Two January 2026 rulings, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk and State v. Simonson, upheld limited ALPR use while flagging scale, retention, and sharing scope as the constitutional variables -- exactly the ones contract language cannot lock across vendor cycles. New Hampshire's three-minute deletion rule and Vermont's approval regime are the standing proof that only state law survives a vendor swap. The independent Who Approved This tracker now documents 168 contracts across 46 states, 55 of them ended. The corporate backstory sharpens the point: Flock and Axon were previously integrating their technologies before a public split when Axon launched its competing plate reader -- and while Axon markets itself as running no national camera network, it holds multiple Department of Homeland Security contracts of its own. As one security researcher who documented Flock's vulnerabilities put it: 'I wouldn't see moving to Axon as an improvement.' The mechanics of the swap, documented July 2026: Flock crossed 100,000 cameras even as 53 cities canceled, and Axon -- which spent years feeding Flock plate data into its in-car systems before ending that partnership in early 2025 -- launched direct competitors to capture the exits: Axon Outpost, a pole-mounted reader, and Axon Lightpole, a streetlight retrofit built with Ubicquia, the same smart-streetlight vendor Flock uses. The pitch to cities is deliberate: similar capability, tighter contract terms, and seamless integration with the body cameras and Evidence.com cloud they already run. The civil-liberties case that the swap solves nothing rests on hard numbers -- the ACLU notes fewer than 1 percent of scanned plates connect to any alleged crime, and the LAPD's own inspector general flagged high rates of false stolen-vehicle alerts that put innocent drivers through stops. Jalopnik warns Axon's deeper integration may raise privacy risk rather than lower it, aggregating data far beyond a plate number. Counting every vendor, the tally is larger: on a July 8, 2026 press call the Institute for Justice put it at more than 113,000 ALPRs operating nationwide and at least 82 jurisdictions that have canceled ALPR contracts or taken the cameras down. Do not add those two numbers together or read one as a correction of the other -- 53 counts Flock cancellations and rejections, 82 counts ALPR departures across Flock, Axon, Motorola Solutions and the rest. IJ attorney Michael Soyfer, whose office brought both the Norfolk and San Jose suits, framed the Chatrie ruling as the Court focusing on the mass-surveillance character of these systems rather than on any single search. This map still adds only named, sourced places, which is why its own verified switch count stays well below every press figure above.

The LAPD Office of Inspector General's review of the department's ALPR system found that during the review period officers acknowledged 161 Flock alerts as accurate license-plate matches, yet later investigations determined the vehicles were not actually stolen -- the kind of stale hot-list hit that can drive unnecessary stops and wrongful detentions. The same review found the department could not produce contracts establishing Flock's data-sharing terms or Flock's access to Axon data, a governance gap the OIG flagged amid national scrutiny of third-party ALPR access. Put the number beside its counterpart: over the same period the OIG credited ALPR reads with recovering 337 stolen vehicles. So the department generated roughly one wrongful stop for every two recoveries, and it attributed those errors not to the cameras but to inaccurate or outdated information in law enforcement databases. The scale matters for reading the rest of this map -- the Institute for Justice could document only 27 wrongful ALPR stops nationwide across eight years, while a single department produced 161 in one review window. The national tallies are not measuring how often this happens, only how often somebody notices. LAPD runs 298 pole-mounted readers plus more than 1,600 mounted on or inside its vehicles, and its Axon and Motorola contracts remain active on the stated grounds that those vendors apply more stringent data safeguards.

Suspended Milwaukee police detective Tehrangi Chapman was charged in July 2026 with felony misconduct in public office for using the department's Flock license-plate system to track two people's movements 20 times, logging the fake search reasons 'test' and 'training.' Chapman had been one of the internal-affairs detectives who investigated former officer Josue Ayala's Flock misuse. Ayala, who searched an ex-partner and her boyfriend more than 200 times, was set to be sentenced a week after Chapman was charged.

Greene County, Georgia deputy Quinsha Goss was arrested July 7, 2026 and fired after a June 30 audit found she had queried the county's Flock system for personal reasons, running searches on at least one license plate over a three-month period with no law-enforcement justification.

Five former Albany Police Department officers -- Tytianna Davis, Jade Jackson, Nicholas Richardson, Brittney Smith, and Issac Whitus -- were arrested on July 6, 2026 and charged with Misuse of License Plate Data and Violation of Oath of Office after an internal audit found they had accessed the city's Flock system for non-law-enforcement purposes; Richardson faced the most counts, 11. All five were fired and booked into the Dougherty County Jail. Flock called it the first publicly confirmed case in which its Audit Assistance records surfaced officer misconduct.

The Nelson City Council decided to discontinue the city's use of Flock Safety cameras, reported by the Cherokee Tribune and Ledger News in late July 2026. SOURCING LIMIT, STATED PLAINLY: this record rests on the paper's headline and summary line. The vote count, the margin, the stated reason and the exact meeting date are not established here, and the date is marked approximate. It is on the map because a confirmed cancellation belongs on a map of cancellations even when the detail is thin, and it is flagged because a reader deserves to know which records are thin. Nelson is a small Cherokee County city, and Cherokee County is one of the more active Georgia jurisdictions on this map -- deputies there were disciplined over Flock searches in Jun 2026, and supervisors in the same county were separately implicated. Needs a follow-up pass for the vote.

Residents are pressing the City Council to cancel its Flock contract; no vote has been taken, so this is an active campaign rather than a result. Speaker John Savage told the council the cameras carry fiscal and legal liability, citing an Institute for Justice investigation into nationwide officer misuse -- including a Florida officer said to have tracked an ex-girlfriend's car 69 times -- and audits in Georgia that he said led to firings and criminal charges against more than ten officers. He also described security research attributed to independent researcher Ben Jordan: more than 60 vulnerabilities disclosed to Flock, some police cameras found broadcasting on the open internet without passwords, and law-enforcement login credentials traded on dark-web markets. The security claims are his characterisation of third-party research and are recorded here as testimony given to the council, not as findings this project has verified.

Alameda County's Board of Supervisors approved a $2.4 million Flock Safety extension on a 3-2 vote at the meeting reported July 1, 2026, and the package is considerably wider than plate readers: automated license plate readers that capture the rear of passing vehicles, pan-tilt-zoom cameras giving operators a live view of public areas, and a fleet of drones. The sheriff's department also gets Nova, software that pools computer-aided dispatch and records-management data and pulls in open-source intelligence -- the kind of aggregation layer that turns separate feeds into one searchable picture of a person. The timing is the story: the vote followed the discovery that county surveillance data had been shared with federal authorities in violation of the rules governing it, which is precisely the harm the two dissenting supervisors and a run of public commenters pointed at. Supervisor David Haubert argued the board had no room to wait, saying the sheriff would otherwise fall out of contract, and dismissed the objection that Flock cameras fall unevenly on communities of color, recognizing a Black Oakland business owner in the audience who supported the system. Neighboring Oakland approved its own Flock contract in December 2025 and, months later, its police department still had not finalized it.

Pleasanton is the reverse of the Axon wave: the city ran 30 Motorola Vigilant cameras from 2020, canceled that contract in October 2025, and switched TO Flock -- a five-year, $639,760 deal for 54 replacement cameras. Then at a July 7, 2026 council meeting, a privacy researcher revealed San Diego Sector Border Patrol had accessed Pleasanton's Vigilant data, with a data-sharing report dated after the city thought it had cut federal access. Proof the vendor-swap problem runs in every direction: leaving Motorola for Flock inherited the same federal-access exposure the city was trying to escape.

Suffolk is the extreme edge of the anti-Flock wave: an Air Force engineer, Jeffrey Sovern, 41, faces 25 criminal counts for allegedly cutting down 13 of the city's Flock cameras with a saw. Where most communities fight the cameras through council votes and petitions, this is the physical-removal genre in its starkest form -- one person, a saw, and a felony docket -- a measure of how much anger the cameras have generated in some places.

Killingworth is not renewing its contract for the four Flock cameras on Route 81. First Selectman Eric Couture said concerns about security and privacy surfaced after both the board of selectmen and board of finance had already approved and the town had signed -- the recurring problem of the vendor's risks becoming clear only after the deal is done. Killingworth and Windsor ended their Flock contracts the same week, as a Connecticut state law restricting ALPR use, including a ban on immigration-investigation use, takes effect in October.

Bucking the national trend, Colerain Township's three trustees voted unanimously July 2026 to approve $70,000 for a Flock (or comparable) license-plate-reader trial -- reversing the township's earlier opposition, where prior attempts to buy the cameras never even reached a vote. A reminder that the wave runs both directions: as dozens of cities drop Flock over data concerns, others are signing on for the first time.

Loveland is a linchpin of the case that Flock misleads its customers: Police Chief Tim Doran raised concern that federal agents were reaching the town's ALPR data, and Flock assured him -- and told the press through its CEO -- that federal agencies had no access and that federal data-sharing was a non-issue because Flock held no federal contracts. Both claims proved false: the company was later forced to admit it had pilot contracts with Customs and Border Protection and DHS that gave those agencies direct access. The ACLU cites Loveland as one of a string of cities Flock gave bad information to.

Conroe's council voted unanimously July 23, 2026 to table two Flock-related proposals indefinitely -- one to create a citizens advisory committee on ALPR use, one to ask whether residents could vote on the program -- leaving the city's Flock agreement (running since 2021) untouched. Residents pressed the council to invoke the contract's non-appropriation clause and terminate outright; one asked for an ordinance requiring voter approval before Conroe joins any similar surveillance program. 'We can't have liberty without privacy,' resident Jon Bouche told the council. Tabled, not resolved: the fight resumes with no date set.

Salem is not renewing its Flock Safety contract and will remove the ALPRs installed at the city's entry points and major intersections, Mayor Dominick Pangallo announced July 23, 2026. The stated reason is the one driving the national wave: 'insufficient protections for the ALPR data generated by Flock's systems' -- data, the city said, that should be owned and used only for Salem's own public-safety priorities. The city credits the cameras with a role in nearly every recent major investigation and intends to keep license-plate reading through other means: a data-ownership divorce, not a surveillance retreat.

Grand Chute dropped its Flock ALPR cameras in July 2026 and immediately signed with Axon -- the same automated plate dragnet under a different logo, and a caution for every community counting a Flock cancellation as a win. Axon's Lightpost, built with Ubicquia into ordinary streetlights, pairs plate reading with live-streaming cameras, and Axon's ecosystem ties ALPR to body cams, drones, and AI scene analysis.

Legislation introduced at the July 13, 2026 city council meeting would end Binghamton's contract with Flock Safety, citing privacy, data-misuse, and wrongful-stop concerns. Pending a vote.

Elkton's town council voted in July 2026 to remove its Flock cameras, joining Harrisonburg in a Shenandoah Valley wave of de-Flock decisions -- even as the Page County sheriff credited the cameras that same week in tracking a rape and abduction suspect. The valley became a live case study in the safety-versus-privacy argument, with councils siding with removal.

Oakland police are seeking to expand the city's Flock network, monitor it in real time, and integrate PRIVATELY owned cameras into the police system. The Public Safety Committee vote stalled when a July 2026 meeting lost quorum, with supporters and opponents rallying outside City Hall. Folding private cameras into police monitoring extends the dragnet beyond anything the council originally approved -- and past the reach of the city's own oversight framework.

Choctaw's council took up whether to keep or remove the city's four Flock cameras at its July 21, 2026 meeting, with the mayor framing the question as where the community sets the balance between public safety, privacy, transparency, and individual liberty -- part of the statewide Oklahoma reckoning that also has OKC's renewal in the balance and lawmakers pushing an interim legislative study of ALPRs.

Douglas County dropped Flock -- and doubled down. On July 14, 2026 the Board of County Commissioners approved a nearly $22.8 million contract with Axon that replaces the sheriff's 50 Flock cameras with 100 Axon Outpost plate readers plus a countywide 'first responder' drone network. Officials cited data-privacy and ownership concerns with Flock, but the switch expands the county's surveillance footprint: twice the cameras, plus drones, under a different logo. Residents questioned letting the sheriff's office audit its own use of the technology.

Newport residents pushed back at a July 2026 city meeting on a proposal to keep at least six Flock license-plate-reader cameras permanently, questioning data tracking, data safety and misuse. Pressed on who could see the data, a city official acknowledged every officer has a login for the system. One resident summed up the mood: they trusted the police, but not Flock.

A packed Perry City Council meeting in July 2026 turned into a nearly 90-minute debate over expanding the city's Flock camera program, with residents sharply split over data security, oversight and civil liberties. After a Flock presentation, testimony from the police chief and close to an hour of public comment, the council voted to postpone any decision to its next meeting so the full council could take part, while the current trial continues.

Following months of public comment questioning its automated license-plate readers, Mill Valley officials adopted new safeguards and cut data retention for its Flock systems. Residents had repeatedly urged the city to reconsider the contract, citing reporting from Mountain View where an internal audit found Flock systems had been set to allow nationwide lookups contrary to local policy.

Renton paused police use of its automated license-plate readers -- Flock Falcon cameras plus Axon in-car and Genetec systems -- on May 4, 2026 so the council could answer public concerns about data access, surveillance, misuse by authorized users, immigration enforcement access, and tracking of people seeking abortions. On July 6 the council tabled a motion to switch them back on until every member completes training on the technology, leaving the cameras off.

Westland let its Flock Safety contract lapse in July 2026 rather than renew it, with the existing cameras to come down when the contract expires. A councilmember said months of public meetings raised questions about privacy, government surveillance, transparency and oversight, and called the outcome proof that resident voices shape city decisions. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. Note the mechanism, which differs from every other Michigan case -- Police Chief Kyle Dawley simply DECLINED TO BRING the expiring contract to the City Council for renewal, so no vote was ever held. Dawley said the council was "deeply split," and the city expected to be without cameras by the end of July 2026. A chief letting a contract lapse to avoid a losing vote is a different political route than a council defeating one, and it leaves no roll call to point at.

The Windsor Town Council voted 5-4 on July 6, 2026 to permanently turn off the town's 16 Flock Safety cameras and end its contract, closing a months-long fight that began with a February 18 vote to switch them off while officials pressed Flock over who could access the data. The mayor said the company could not guarantee residents' privacy. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. The council voted 5-4 to turn off all 16 cameras PERMANENTLY and end the contract, with the mayor's stated reason being that Flock could not guarantee residents' privacy -- a vendor-trust rationale that does not by itself rule out a different supplier.

Fort Wayne's council has repeatedly stalled a $120,250 renewal for the city's 36 Flock cameras. The contract first failed 5-4 in May, was tabled, and on July 14 the council voted 6-1 to hold it another six weeks -- to August 25 -- while members draft amendments on data retention, information sharing, and auditing. Dozens of residents have spoken against the program at successive meetings.

Kaukauna Police announced in early July 2026 that the city did not renew its contract with Flock Safety, joining nearby Appleton, Grand Chute, Oshkosh, and Sturgeon Bay in dropping the license-plate-reader vendor over data-sharing and privacy concerns. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. Kaukauna acted after watching the Fox Valley around it leave -- Appleton, Grand Chute, Oshkosh and Sturgeon Bay -- though note Grand Chute left Flock and signed with Axon rather than stopping. Neenah is the holdout still under pressure. Local context: Menasha officer Cristian Morales was charged with misconduct in public office, a felony, for accessing Flock off duty in October to track an ex-girlfriend's car.

Mayor Jake Woodford moved to stop the city using Flock cameras, requesting removal no later than July 31, 2026, with the Common Council voting July 15 on ending payments and adopting public oversight. Crucially, Appleton also passed Resolution 9-R-26 -- requiring that ANY future ALPR or AI-driven mass-surveillance technology be reviewed and approved by the Common Council before a trial or contract, regardless of vendor. The police department publicly confirmed it has not sought an Axon contract or recommended replacing Flock with Axon. That vendor-neutral review requirement is the guardrail that keeps a Flock removal from quietly becoming a vendor swap. SUCCESSOR CHECK -- NOT AN EXIT. Appleton officials are working to establish new ALPR standards BEFORE INSTALLING NEW CAMERAS, so the city intends to keep automated plate reading with a different supplier and better terms. Reporting on the wider Fox Valley wave says the same of several of its members: they will not work with Flock, but many are working to find a new ALPR vendor. Read the northeast Wisconsin cluster as a rejection of one company plus a procurement reset, not as a region abandoning the technology.

West Hollywood moved to launch a one-year, $750,000 Drone as First Responder pilot using LA County Sheriff's drones by the end of July 2026 -- the only city contracting with the department for DFR -- after years of starts and stops and community concern over where the footage ends up.

Residents organized as DeFlock OKC, with Oklahomans for Privacy and the ACLU of Oklahoma, are pressing the City Council to reject a third renewal of its Flock Safety contract, remove the cameras, and refuse any replacement ALPR vendor. The city pays Flock about $270,000 a year for 90 contracted cameras, though a community count maps roughly 299 across the metro, and records requests surfaced an OKCPD memo admitting no access controls, use policies, audit procedures, or transparency reporting. More than 100 residents packed a May 27, 2026 town hall and a petition has drawn hundreds of names; council members Cooper (Ward 2), Hamon (Ward 6), and Pennington (Ward 7) back removal. The renewal vote is expected in July 2026 -- pushed toward Tuesday, July 21 -- with residents filling council meetings July 7 and 21. Update, July 2026: the renewal vote set for July 21 was pushed to August -- the police department said it needed more time on the contract, and DeFlock OKC noted the item slid behind the data-center agenda again. The numbers driving the fight: the contract says 90 cameras, the community's crowdsourced map counts 299, and OKCPD confirmed in writing that no oversight exists -- no access controls, no use policies, no audit procedures, no discipline standards. Residents have packed 'Citizens to be Heard' at three straight meetings.

Virginia's authorization for local police facial recognition EXPIRED on Jul 1, 2026 by its own sunset clause, and the law reverted to a default prohibition. The 2022 act (SB 741, Acts of Assembly c. 737) had built the permissive regime: fourteen enumerated authorized uses, algorithms NIST-tested to at least 98 percent true positives with minimal demographic variation, no real-time tracking of an identified person in public, no image databases built from live video, a facial-recognition match barred from probable-cause affidavits but admissible as exculpatory evidence, published agency policies, annual public reports each Apr 1, query-level logging including the demographics of people searched, and misdemeanor liability plus mandatory termination for operators who ran unauthorized searches. Clause 3 of that act set it to expire Jul 1, 2026. It did. Code sections 15.2-1723.2 (local police) and 23.1-815.1 (campus police) snapped back to their 2021 text, and 52-4.5, the State Police model-policy section, lapsed outright. The standing rule now: no local agency may purchase or deploy facial recognition unless expressly authorized by statute, and a statute that does not name the technology is not authorization. Any authorizing statute must keep the system under the agency's exclusive control, keep the data confidential and unsold, and gate access behind a warrant. READ THE TRADE, because this is not a clean win: the sunset removed the oversight apparatus along with the permission. Nothing in the reverted text requires a report, a log, an accuracy standard, or a penalty for misuse. Virginia is now stricter at the gate and blind behind it, and the Apr 1 reports that let outsiders audit FRT use have no statutory basis. Commercial air service airports are exempt from the section entirely, then and now. CAVEAT ON CURRENCY: the Code of Virginia page carries a May 18, 2026 currency date and the 2026 Regular Session bill list showed no reauthorization, but a late reenactment would not appear in a May snapshot -- confirm against the 2026 Acts of Assembly.

After organized community opposition, five Flock cameras were removed from the Galveston neighborhood in June 2026. The renewal of the city's fixed-camera Flock ALPR contract has since been tabled twice -- pulled from the July 16 agenda and pushed to the August 13, 2026 regular council meeting -- with residents vowing to pack chambers again.

HF 864 (2026)

Signed by Gov. Reynolds June 1, 2026; in force since July 1, 2026. Applies to sites/apps where a substantial portion (one-third or more) of content is pornographic for minors; allows digital-ID, transactional-data, or AG-approved verification; bars retention of identifying data. Civil penalties up to $10,000/day.

Seward County commissioners voted on the morning of June 30, 2026 to impose a one-year moratorium on data-center construction, set to lapse either on a vote to extend or as soon as the county finalises data-center regulations -- whichever comes first. Commission chair Misty Ahmic put the reasoning in terms worth quoting for how much of this map it describes: a moratorium is not a decision and is not saying no, it is saying the county needs to be sure that if business arrives, it is right for Seward County. Her stated fear was procedural rather than environmental -- that absent both a pause and a rulebook, a developer could muscle through a regulatory process that was never designed for projects this size. Seward became at least the tenth Nebraska county with a moratorium in force.

A Chilean court on Jun 30, 2026 sentenced a former judge and a former army general to five years in prison for illegally spying on investigative journalist Mauricio Weibel Barahona while he was reporting Milicogate -- his 2015 investigation for The Clinic into the theft of the army's copper reserve fund. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the decision unprecedented for Chile. Two details give it weight beyond the country: the surveillance was run through the machinery of state -- a judge and a general, not a rogue operator -- against a journalist for the act of reporting on the military that employed one of them; and accountability took eleven years from publication and six years of judicial process to arrive. Custodial sentences for state officials over journalist surveillance remain rare enough worldwide that each one is a record; this is Latin America's counterpart to Greece's Feb 2026 Predatorgate convictions, and unlike Greece's suspended terms, these are prison sentences.

The Burien City Council approved an emergency one-year moratorium on new data centers on June 29, 2026, effective immediately. The interim city attorney said Burien has no staff with data-center expertise, so it borrowed Seattle's definition; the pause gives staff time to study resource use and job creation.

The House passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act -- a package bundling a revised KOSA (minus its duty of care), a COPPA update for teens, the SCREEN Act and other bills, with age-verification mandates for mature content -- by 267-117 under a fast-track suspension vote, sending it to the Senate, where sponsors have signaled a tough path.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie v. United States that geofence warrants -- which sweep up location data from every device near a place and time -- must satisfy the Fourth Amendment, and sent the case back to the lower court. Legal observers say the reasoning casts doubt on warrantless ALPR dragnets like Flock's national network.

Nebraska's Parental Rights in Social Media Act (LB 383), signed May 20, 2025, required platforms to run a reasonable age-verification method on every user and obtain express parental consent for anyone under 18 -- one of the strictest state measures of the wave. It was set to take effect July 1, 2026 and did not. On June 27, 2026, four days out, Senior Judge John Gerrard preliminarily enjoined the core provisions in NetChoice v. Hilgers (D. Neb., No. 4:26-cv-3149), holding the Act facially content-based, applying strict scrutiny, and finding it not narrowly tailored: account creation is itself expressive conduct, so conditioning it on an ID check and a parent's permission burdens the First Amendment rights of users and platforms alike. The injunction is partial. Under the Act's severability clause the parental-monitoring provisions and the remainder survive and may still be enforced by the Attorney General. Gerrard's order is preliminary rather than final, and an appeal to the Eighth Circuit is expected. Note the split it creates with the Supreme Court's 2025 Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton decision, which sustained age checks for adult content under a more forgiving standard -- the courts are drawing a line between pornography sites and social media generally.

Days before Nebraska's Parental Rights in Social Media Act (LB 383) was to take effect July 1, a federal judge preliminarily blocked its age-verification and parental-consent provisions in NetChoice v. Hilgers, ruling that forcing users to hand over a digital ID to reach lawful speech likely violates the First Amendment.

UW-Madison's police department did not renew its Flock ALPR contract, which ended June 26, 2026; the equipment was deactivated and is being removed, and UWPD says it will seek community input before choosing a new vendor. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor chosen, and the department is openly reconsidering which ALPR it uses, if any -- privacy advocates on campus are pressing for community involvement in that decision, which makes this a live procurement rather than a closed one. The scale it exited is the part worth keeping: before discontinuing, UW-Madison police shared their camera data with 168 other agencies and were receiving data from 467, per Flock's own transparency portal, and the department cited outside access including CBP and DHS. Hardware lagged the decision here too -- the contract ended June 26 and removal was announced July 3, but the solar-powered cameras were still in place and uncovered afterward, with police saying only that they were operating on the assumption the cameras were no longer collecting data.

After a nearly two-hour public hearing, the East Fishkill Town Board approved a three-year moratorium on data centers on June 25, 2026, barring permitting or consideration of any data center until July 1, 2029 pending federal and state studies of power and water use, noise and heat. It joined more than 100 active local moratoriums nationwide.

After months of resident organizing led by the group Framingham Fights Back, the Police Department decided not to renew its Flock contract. Access is shut off June 30, 2026 and the cameras decommissioned. The City Council is weighing a Trust in Local Law Enforcement ordinance to govern any future plate-reader use. SUCCESSOR CHECK: no replacement vendor. Police declined to renew on about Jun 25, 2026 after residents had pressed since February through public meetings, letters and council testimony. Two things make this record carry beyond Framingham. First, City Council Chair George King said the quiet part out loud about what a municipal cancellation actually achieves: people need to remember the cameras are everywhere, stores like Home Depot and Lowe's have them in their parking lots, so the cameras come off city streets without leaving the city. Second, the council is drafting an ordinance restricting the technology rather than simply walking away -- which matters because Waltham's city solicitor told its council it was NOT permitted to do that, so whether a municipality may legislate on ALPRs at all is unsettled between neighbouring Massachusetts cities.

The East Fishkill Town Board voted after a public hearing to impose a three-year moratorium on data centers through July 1, 2029, pending studies of power, water, noise and heat impacts -- one of more than 100 active local moratoriums nationwide.

Ohio's Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act (HB 33, 2023) requires verifiable parental consent before a child under 16 can hold a social-media account. A federal judge blocked it in January 2024 and struck it down in April 2025 -- and then, on June 18, 2026, a divided Sixth Circuit panel reversed and remanded with instructions to enter judgment for the state (NetChoice v. Yost, No. 25-3371). The reasoning is the part worth watching: the lead opinion held that NetChoice cannot assert minors' First Amendment rights on their behalf, because a trade association funded by platforms that profit from those minors' attention is in conflict with them. Having narrowed who could complain, the panel treated the Act as content-based, applied strict scrutiny anyway, and found the law survives it, while rejecting the vagueness challenge. The three judges split three ways on how to get there. NetChoice filed a petition for rehearing en banc on July 16, 2026; until it is resolved the Act stands. Every other entry in this cluster is a law being blocked. This is the one going the other direction, and the standing holding is the mechanism.

Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act (HB 33, 2023)

Ohio's Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act (HB 33, 2023; Ohio Rev. Code 1349.09) requires covered platforms to obtain verifiable parental consent before an unemancipated child under 16 can agree to their terms. Its nominal effective date was Jan 1, 2024, but it never took effect: Judge Algenon Marbley granted a TRO on Jan 8, 2024 and struck the Act down on summary judgment Apr 16, 2025. On June 18, 2026 a divided Sixth Circuit panel REVERSED (NetChoice v. Yost, No. 25-3371) and remanded with instructions to enter judgment for Attorney General Yost. The panel split three ways: Judge Clay announced the judgment, holding NetChoice lacked prudential third-party standing to assert minors' First Amendment rights because the platforms' profit motive conflicts with the interests of the minors they purported to represent, and that NetChoice had not carried the burden for facial invalidation; the court treated the Act as content-based, applied strict scrutiny, and held it survives, also rejecting the vagueness challenge. Judge Batchelder concurred in the judgment on the narrower Moody scope/applications ground; Judge Ritz dissented. NetChoice filed a petition for rehearing en banc on July 16, 2026, which is pending, so the posture can still change. Treat the Act as in force in the Sixth Circuit unless a further order says otherwise. This is the clearest counter-example to the run of decisions blocking state social-media age laws.

A divided Sixth Circuit panel reversed the ruling that had struck down Ohio's Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act (HB 33) and remanded with instructions to enter judgment for the state. The lead opinion held NetChoice could not assert minors' First Amendment rights on their behalf given its members' conflicting commercial interest, then applied strict scrutiny and found the Act survives. It is the sharpest break yet from the run of decisions blocking state social-media age laws. NetChoice petitioned for rehearing en banc on July 16, 2026.

An SFPD audit found federal and out-of-state agencies improperly accessed Flock data, with a separate report counting 1.6 million shares in a year. The chief revoked one intelligence center access, but the department defended the system as residents demand the contract be terminated.

On June 16, 2026 residents filled the district courtroom in Beatrice and spilled into the room next door for a four-hour Gage County Planning Commission meeting on a data-center moratorium. When Janice Jacobsen of Adams asked the room how many supported it, close to every hand went up; her read was that these were people wanting assurances that safety would be addressed. The objections were water and electricity, and underneath them the question of who the projects are actually for -- Wanda Garrett of Beatrice put it as the people putting the data centers in not really caring about Gage County. The state senator backing Nebraska's data-center buildout responded to hearings like this one by saying her understanding is that most facilities use closed-loop water systems, which is the crux of the dispute rather than an answer to it.

HB 4412 (2026)

HB 4412 (2026) -- adult-content age verification for sites where a substantial portion of content is harmful to minors; effective June 12, 2026, making West Virginia the 26th state with an adult-AV law in force. Accepts the West Virginia Mobile ID or other government-ID / transactional-data methods; bars data retention; private right of action and civil penalties up to $250,000.

City Council voted unanimously to remove all of the city's Flock cameras after privacy concerns; several had already been taken down before the final vote. SUCCESSOR CHECK: NO SUCCESSOR FOUND -- and note the grade of that answer. State-level and national searching surfaced nothing indicating a replacement vendor here, but no source positively confirms what the agency did next, so this is negative evidence rather than a verified exit. Two cheap ways to firm it up: Flock's own transparency portal marks departed agencies "[Inactive]" and publishes their data-sharing counts, and the Who Approved This tracker records how each contract was authorised.

SB 2420 (2025)

App Store Accountability Act, signed May 27, 2025, set for Jan 1, 2026. Judge Pitman preliminarily enjoined it Dec 23, 2025 (CCIA v. Paxton), but the 5th Circuit stayed that injunction and the law took effect June 4, 2026; it is in force while the First Amendment appeal continues. App stores must verify age at account creation and obtain parental consent for minors' downloads/purchases. Challengers (CCIA and SEAT) then filed an emergency application at the U.S. Supreme Court in mid-June 2026 to reinstate the injunction; Texas opposed it on June 22, 2026, and on July 6, 2026 the Supreme Court denied the application, declining to block the law; it remains in force while the First Amendment appeal continues. Update, July 6, 2026: the U.S. Supreme Court declined to lift the Fifth Circuit's order allowing the law to take effect while litigation continues, leaving the app-store age-verification mandate in force. The tech industry group challenging it argued no state had ever required proving age to read a newspaper or enter a bookstore.

In June 2026 a developer withdrew plans for a data center at North Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, after strong opposition from residents and the local council. The Blue Mountains mayor called the withdrawal a win for council and community activism. The developer, MAK Urban Group, said it had listened to local residents and community groups while maintaining that data centers can benefit regional areas.

After hundreds protested a proposed data center near McMaster University, Hamilton's city council voted in June 2026 to advance a one-year construction moratorium, in what a councillor described as the first such municipal pause in Canada.

By the end of June 2026 at least ten Nebraska counties had data-center moratoriums in place, with five more weighing them, according to Nebraska Public Media News -- a state-level pattern assembled entirely out of county votes, with no statewide ban. Two things make Nebraska distinct. First, it is the only state served entirely by public power: there are no investor-owned utilities, so every kilowatt a data center draws is bought from a utility owned by its own customers, and the ratepayer-subsidy argument that is abstract elsewhere is arithmetic here. That is the premise behind the legislative push to require that new generation and transmission built for data centers be billed to those data centers rather than to households -- as Sen. DeKay framed it, keeping ratepayers from having to build generation they will not use and will not benefit from, and putting the financial onus on the private entity. Sen. Rita Sanders argued the opposite side, that Nebraska needs the capacity because everything from hospitals to robotics needs more electricity, and said her understanding is that most data centers run closed-loop water systems. Second, the county officials involved are not framing this as opposition. Jon Cannon of the Nebraska Association of County Officials expects counties to conclude they need their regulations in order and to pause a range of development, not just data centers -- which is why so many of these lapse automatically once rules are finalised rather than on a further vote.

In Utah's June 2026 primaries, Box Elder County commissioners who advanced a massive data-center project lost their seats, and state Sen. J. Stuart Adams -- who backed the site through a state authority -- was defeated by a challenger running on opposition to it. 'Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,' conceded Commissioner Lee Perry. In a county Trump carried by double digits, the electoral lesson crossed party lines: alongside Festus, Missouri recalling half its council and Warrenton, Virginia turning over its entire pro-project majority, voting for a data center is becoming the most dangerous vote a local official can cast.

After a Canadian CEO proposed building what he called the largest alternative-energy data center in the world -- 10,000 acres with New Mexico Tech, possibly powered by small modular reactors -- Socorro County residents packed town halls for months, commandeering a university forum in May. On June 9, 2026 the county commission unanimously adopted a yearlong moratorium on data centers and related infrastructure, and stood up an advisory committee of residents and experts to write the rules before any application lands. The CEO had told the community: if you oppose us, we're out. They took him up on it.

For months developer Sebastian Rucci said his Imperial Valley AI complex would not touch Colorado River water. In June 2026 his company, Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing, sued the Imperial Irrigation District for about 880 acre-feet a year -- roughly 260 million gallons, the annual water of some 7,300 residents -- after the district rejected its application in May and recycled-water talks with Imperial and El Centro collapsed. A cooling load of about 750,000 gallons a day, litigated out of the most water-strained river system in the country, in a valley where the river is the only fresh water there is. The county that approved it is now fighting it on every track: the City of Imperial sued challenging the project's CEQA environmental review, and local voters are gathering referendum signatures to ban data centers countywide -- weeks after Monterey Park became the first US city to ban them outright.

Monroe Township banned data centers by ordinance on April 22, 2026 after months of packed, hours-long meetings over water quality, pollution, and noise. Developer Hexa Builders answered with a $300 million lawsuit -- now removed to federal court -- claiming the ban violates equal protection and even free speech, after the township denied its application for a 1-million-square-foot data center and warehouse. The case tests whether a town that says no can be litigated into yes, and its price tag is aimed at every other municipality weighing a ban.

On the final day of the 2026 session, Delaware's legislature passed a trio of large-load energy bills aimed at data centers: one requires them to bring their own power generation within ten years, one (SB 326) caps the infrastructure costs Delmarva Power can pass to customers, and one makes data centers first to be cut off during a blackout. Backers warn new data-center demand could double the state's electricity use. The bills head to Governor Meyer and mostly take effect on signature.

Woodbury County supervisors approved a one-year moratorium on data centers in unincorporated areas at a June 23, 2026 meeting, leaving existing and previously approved applications untouched. Leaders said they knew of no ongoing projects in those areas.

Capstone Technology Campus LLC withdrew all rezoning and annexation requests for a proposed data center at 6321 Pickett Road on June 26, 2026 after organized opposition; residents are pressing the City Council for an 18-month moratorium to set safeguards before any future project.

Residents mounted sustained opposition to a proposed data center at the Bonner Mill site across from the district's only school, citing water use, noise, air quality and Montana's constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment. County staff repeatedly deemed the developer's special-exception applications incomplete through the first half of 2026.

San Jose -- home to at least 40 data centers, second in California only to Santa Clara -- directed its city manager to draft data-center guidelines in 2026, though critics are skeptical given a 2025 PG&E partnership to ease development.

Lake County moved to impose a temporary moratorium on data centers in unincorporated areas while it develops guidelines, amid intense opposition to the Grayslake T5 campus.

The Montgomery County Executive signed an executive order pausing data center permit applications until Maryland completes a statewide impact assessment and the county sets rules.

Hundreds of residents in the Town of Tonawanda spoke out against Riverview Innovation and Technology Campus, a 2 billion dollar, 500,000 square foot, 300 megawatt data center proposed for the former Tonawanda Coke site, citing pollution, utility costs, and noise.

The roughly 330 MW Imperial Data Center drew a multi-front fight. The City of Imperial filed a CEQA complaint over the missing environmental review; residents began gathering signatures for a November 2026 'Imperial County Data Center Prohibition Act' ballot measure; and in June 2026 county supervisors reversed course, declaring a 45-day moratorium and forming an advisory commission. Developer Sebastian Rucci responded by seeking a court restraining order against the moratorium.

A statewide initiative to bar data centers above 25 MW gathered more than 73,000 signatures. Organizers said it would not make the 2026 ballot but would continue. Industry groups warn such a cap would block large AI projects.

A one-year moratorium about 40 miles from Chicago while the town weighs zoning and utility rules.

An effort to cancel tax incentives for a Meta data center failed on a 5-3 vote after nearly 180 residents spoke over eight hours; supporters cited jobs and investment.

Monterey Park became the first U.S. city to permanently ban data centers by ballot: voters approved Measure NDC on June 2, 2026 by 88% (10,321-1,362), amending the General Plan to prohibit data centers citywide. The vote followed the withdrawn HMC StratCap / DigiCo project at 1977 Saturn Avenue.

Charlotte approved a 150-day moratorium on new data centers to update planning rules, after grassroots opposition to two east-side projects.

Section 112 of Thailand's Criminal Code punishes defaming, insulting or threatening the King, Queen, Heir-apparent or Regent with three to fifteen years -- per count. Counts stack and there is no cap, so each post is charged separately and the sentence becomes a function of how often someone posted rather than of any harm caused. The Computer Crime Act adds up to five years and a 100,000 baht fine per count on top, and permits courts to order content permanently deleted. The statute does not define insult, does not require proof of harm, and does not turn on the speaker's intent or the context. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights records at least 291 individuals prosecuted in at least 321 cases, within a wider total of at least 4,076 prosecutions for political participation and expression since the Free Youth protests began in July 2020. For scale: between TLHR's founding in 2014 and 2019, 65 people were charged under Section 112. Conviction rates run high -- 83% in the figures submitted to Thailand's Universal Periodic Review, and 79 guilty against 21 acquitted in the 100 first-instance verdicts delivered between Nov 2021 and Oct 2023. At least 20 of those charged were under 18. Two features make it a tool rather than a law: anyone may file a complaint against anyone, and at least 169 of the recorded cases began with a report from a member of the public, some filed tactically in remote provinces so the defendant must travel the length of the country to answer them. Bail is routinely denied both during investigation and pending trial. Activist and lawyer Arnon Nampa was given four years for three Facebook messages and four more in a separate case over a 2020 rally -- prosecuted, in other words, while acting as counsel for others facing the same charge.

In Feb 2025, just before the North Dakota trial began, Greenpeace International sued Energy Transfer in Amsterdam District Court, invoking a newly adopted European Union directive designed to protect people in the EU from abusive lawsuits aimed at stifling democratic participation. The claim is that Energy Transfer's North Dakota case against Greenpeace International was baseless and filed to silence and punish opponents. The Dutch case was still advancing as of Jun 2026. It matters beyond Greenpeace: it is the first substantial test of whether an EU forum can be used to push back on a US judgment obtained against a European defendant for protest activity, which is the question every internationally organised campaign now faces. The EU directive is new enough that there is no body of decisions interpreting it, so the outcome here will set the reference point.

Semyon Skrepetsky (real name Robert Kuzovkov), an exiled Russian caricaturist known for satirising Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenka and Ramzan Kadyrov, was shot dead in June 2026 in Biala Podlaska, Poland, where he had lived since fleeing Russia in 2021. Days earlier he had staged a one-man protest outside the Russian embassy in Berlin. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the killing bore the hallmarks of a political assassination; the perpetrators remain unconfirmed.

Dr Mahrang Baloch, founder of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee -- a movement against enforced disappearances in Balochistan -- was detained in Quetta on 22 March 2025 under a public-order law. On 22 June 2026 an anti-terrorism court sentenced her and Sibghatullah Shah to life imprisonment after a closed 'faceless' trial held inside the jail. Amnesty International and UN experts called it a violation of fair-trial standards and a criminalisation of peaceful dissent.

Melissa Crook taught at Creston Community School District in Iowa. She commented on a family member's Facebook post after Charlie Kirk's death, writing that she wished death on no one but that his absence was a blessing. She was fired. She settled with the district for $145,000 and full benefits, and left the school as a term of the settlement -- so the money is a vindication and the job is still gone. She said she sued to protect the right of public educators and other public servants to take part in public discourse, and that her priority afterwards shifted to moving on in the profession she loves. Worth noting what the comment was and was not: it was a reply on someone else's post, about a public figure, containing no threat and naming no colleague or student.

Maria Ruhtenberg had been an Iowa public defender for 15 years. After Charlie Kirk was killed in Sept 2025 she wrote posts visible only to her Facebook friends, one of them the proverb about living by the sword and dying by the sword. One person -- a Facebook friend she barely knew -- complained to her employer. The office received that single complaint and one media inquiry. She was fired. In its federal court filings the state justified the decision on the basis that her words were weighed for whether they had created, or could likely have created, workplace disharmony, impeded her own or colleagues' performance, or otherwise harmed operations. She won reinstatement through a civil service appeal after nine weeks, which she described as one of the hardest stretches of her life, and later settled her federal lawsuit for $125,000. She says she felt targeted, hopes others will defend their rights the same way, and no longer discusses politics on Facebook -- which is the outcome the process produced regardless of who won. Placement note: the reporting does not name her office, so this record is pinned at Des Moines and marked approximate.

Two ICE agents approached a Syracuse poll worker at a polling place and handed her a written notice that they were investigating threats against ICE personnel, telling her to remove or discontinue an Instagram account. It was tied to a post that named, citing a newspaper, the agent who shot Renee Good. ICE framed it as a threat inquiry; an elections official said the agents had no legal basis to be there, and a civil-liberties lawyer called the post protected First Amendment speech.

Illinois HB 5511 would verify users' ages through the device operating system and impose default limits -- on algorithmic feeds, nighttime notifications, and profile visibility -- for minors' accounts. It passed both chambers on June 1, 2026 (Senate 57-0, House 113-0); Governor Pritzker, who proposed it, pledged to sign it. EFF, the ACLU of Illinois, and NetChoice urged a veto, warning device-level age checks would end anonymous smartphone use for every resident.

The KIDS Act (H.R. 7757) bundles a revised Kids Online Safety Act with more than a dozen internet bills. It passed the House 267-117 on June 29, 2026 and heads to the Senate. Beyond default safety settings for minors, critics including EFF warn it would push services to verify all users' ages and adopt government-directed moderation policies, chilling lawful speech.

In June 2026 the UK Home Office switched on number-plate checks through the EU's Prum data-sharing framework, letting officers query overseas-registered vehicles across EU member states and get vehicle-keeper details back in about ten seconds instead of days or months. It bolts cross-border reach onto Britain's already vast plate-reader system -- commonly cited at around 11,000 ANPR cameras reading roughly 50 million plates a day into the National ANPR Data Centre, where records are retained for a year. The government framed the link-up around border security, illegal migration and organised crime.

In June 2026 Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley announced the most significant expansion of live facial recognition in London to date: static LFR cameras mounted on street furniture across the West End and Soho by the end of 2026, meant to grow into a citywide infrastructure programme rather than time-limited van operations. It followed a six-month Croydon pilot (October 2025 to March 2026, 24 operations, 173 arrests, more than 470,000 faces scanned) and an April 2026 High Court ruling that the Met's LFR policy was lawful, now under appeal. Big Brother Watch urged the force to stop until Parliament legislates, noting the UK still has no specific statutory framework for LFR.

Russia moved to build a centralized 'digital profile' of foreign nationals and stateless people, expected by mid-2026, pulling extensive personal and biometric information from multiple agencies -- part of a broader expansion of surveillance targeting foreign visitors and residents.

Automobile journalist Tim Esterdahl was pulled over by police in Scotts Bluff after a Flock camera misread the license plate of a Range Rover he was testing. He wrote it up as being ambushed for no reason, and the significance is that he had the standing and the platform to trace the cause: systemic ALPR error rather than one bad read. A second automotive writer was tracked the same way in Plymouth, Minnesota the same month, also over a Range Rover test plate -- two cases in one month from the same niche, which says something about how many ordinary drivers experience this without ever learning why.

Flock is not the only ALPR company being sued. On June 18, 2026 a class action was filed against Motorola Solutions and its subsidiary Vigilant, alleging the companies unlawfully shared California drivers' plate and location data across jurisdictions and with federal agencies -- naming Pleasanton, Sacramento, Modesto, Merced, and Livermore. Vigilant is the legacy ALPR heavyweight: EFF documented its database reaching up to 1,000 agencies and, via Digital Recognition Network, selling plate data to lenders, insurers, and debt collectors, while ICE has held a $22.8M contract for database access through 2026. The vendor names change; the surveillance model is the industry's, not one company's.

The City of Greer terminated police Corporal Kareem Lynch and Officer Sebastian Echeverry in late June 2026 after an AI-driven audit of the department's Flock license-plate system flagged that they had violated the agency's ALPR policy. The firings added to a growing national tally of officers disciplined for misusing plate-reader data.

EFF investigator Dave Maass reported on Jun 25, 2026 that Sparks Police Department had the FBI NCIC Immigration Violator hotlist toggled on in its Flock Safety configuration. The contradiction is the record: the department's own public ALPR transparency portal lists immigration enforcement among its prohibited uses, while its settings subscribed it to an immigration target list. One of two agencies EFF confirmed enabled. A written policy and a checkbox disagreed, and only the checkbox governed what the cameras did. READ THE DENOMINATOR BEFORE READING THE FINDING: of at least 13 agencies that had answered EFF's public-records requests by Jun 25, 2026, two had this hotlist enabled and eleven had it switched off, across a Flock network of more than 5,000 communities with the investigation still open. Two confirmed cases and eleven confirmed negatives is not evidence of prevalence; the several thousand agencies that have not answered are the actual finding. HOW THE PLUMBING RUNS, because it is not a direct ICE feed: Flock told EFF that local agencies add and remove plates, that the FBI curates the NCIC list and pushes it to subscribing agencies, and that once it leaves the FBI the bureau sees only additions and removals rather than the alerts themselves. A hit goes to the municipal agency, which decides whether to call ICE. The Immigration Violator File is still populated exclusively by ICE -- the NCIC operator manual makes ICE the only agency authorised to enter or maintain records in it -- and its entries rest on administrative warrants issued by ICE agents without judicial review. That indirection is why the integration stayed invisible in procurement papers and transparency portals.

EFF investigator Dave Maass reported on Jun 25, 2026 that the Flock Safety ALPR administrative interface carries a drop-down where an agency subscribes to FBI NCIC topics, and that one of those topics is the Immigration Violator File. Blue Island Police Department was one of two agencies EFF confirmed had it enabled, so every plate its cameras read was matched against a federal immigration target list -- turning cameras a council approved for stolen-vehicle recovery into an immigration screening tool, without the checkbox ever appearing on an agenda. READ THE DENOMINATOR BEFORE READING THE FINDING: of at least 13 agencies that had answered EFF's public-records requests by Jun 25, 2026, two had this hotlist enabled and eleven had it switched off, across a Flock network of more than 5,000 communities with the investigation still open. Two confirmed cases and eleven confirmed negatives is not evidence of prevalence; the several thousand agencies that have not answered are the actual finding. HOW THE PLUMBING RUNS, because it is not a direct ICE feed: Flock told EFF that local agencies add and remove plates, that the FBI curates the NCIC list and pushes it to subscribing agencies, and that once it leaves the FBI the bureau sees only additions and removals rather than the alerts themselves. A hit goes to the municipal agency, which decides whether to call ICE. The Immigration Violator File is still populated exclusively by ICE -- the NCIC operator manual makes ICE the only agency authorised to enter or maintain records in it -- and its entries rest on administrative warrants issued by ICE agents without judicial review. That indirection is why the integration stayed invisible in procurement papers and transparency portals.

The Drive journalist Joel Feder was tracked for days by Plymouth, Minnesota police via Flock license-plate cameras and then boxed in by four squad cars, with a drone overhead, in a Kohl's parking lot in late June 2026. A manufacturer plate on his press-fleet Range Rover (34 10 DTM) was misread as a plate reported lost in Los Angeles that a police report had truncated to '34 DTM.' Flock's system flagged every Jaguar Land Rover fleet car sharing the 34 ## DTM format as stolen nationwide, and four other such cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week.

The Cherokee County, Georgia Sheriff's Office charged and fired two of its supervisors for allegedly misusing the county's automated license plate reader system, weeks before a similar case in Albany.