The first attempted revenge prosecution of former FBI director James Comey has gone nowhere. Whatever the DOJ didn’t botch directly was undone by Trump’s persistent refusal to adhere to the rules of political appointments.

The second attempted prosecution of James Comey isn’t going any better. The Trump DOJ willfully pretended an Instagram photo taken by Comey of seashells arranged to read “8647” was a “true threat.” As everyone but the deliberately ignorant knows, “86” generally means getting rid of something. In bar parlance, this means cutting someone off or kicking them out of the bar. In restaurant parlance, it means a menu option is no longer available.

This prosecution is even more shaky than the last one — the one where the administration pretended being misleading during congressional testimony was a criminal act worthy of indictment, even though everybody (and especially Trump appointees) do it all the time. Since the government couldn’t find a universal definition of “86” that meant “kill,” it had to rely on anything from AI prompts to motherfucking Mafia hitman/rat Sammy “The Bull” Gravano to press its case.

Now that it’s floundering again, the DOJ has decided it should double-down on the floundering. Comey is still fighting to have the case dismissed, while also seeking to hold the government accountable for its vindictive prosecution. The DOJ is hoping to hold this together long enough that everyone involved won’t be immediately dismissed for failing to accomplish the impossible.

The end result is that the DOJ’s arguments are more desperate and less minimally coherent. In its latest filing, the DOJ has decided to throw the First Amendment — along with any remaining logic — under the bus.

You read that headline correctly. The DOJ is now seriously (and while under oath) quoting Comey’s 2025 “legal thriller” in a last-ditch attempt to connect seashells with inciting violence against Trump. It has to be read to be believed. I won’t make you suffer through Comey’s sub-Grisham writing. But the DOJ will! Here’s the DOJ Vengeance Squad [PDF] attempting to turn protected expression into evidence of criminal activity:

On May 15, 2025, Comey was staying at a beachfront residence in Emerald Isle, North Carolina. Comey’s novel “FDR Drive” was only five days from public release. As Publisher’s Weekly described the novel, and as posted on Comey’s Instagram, the protagonist is a federal prosecutor “trying to take down Samuel Buchanan, a far-right media personality with a popular podcast.” FDR Drive, Publisher’s Weekly, https://perma.cc/6V82-HQ9A4. [Exhibit 1] The prosecutor “believes Buchanan went far beyond the protection of the First Amendment when he singled out his enemies by name and suggested ‘something should be done’ about them. His fans have obliged, killing or grievously injuring some of his foes.” Id. The novel itself describes the “stochastic terrorism” theory of Buchanan’s offense at length:

Sean nodded. “It’s where a charismatic leader jacks people up but, through the wonder of the internet, avoids a direct connection to what comes next. Stochastic is a term from statistics that means you can estimate the likelihood of something happening, even if you can’t predict who will do it and when and where.”

The words in bold are quoted directly from Comey’s novel. This is only part of it. The DOJ filing quotes Comey’s novel at length. If you want to read more, you can. But considering the argument being made by the DOJ, combined with what I assume is general disinterest in reading Comey’s fictional works, this is the part that matters… at least to the DOJ.

Several paragraphs of subpar political thriller later, the DOJ attempts to connect the dots… or at least the seashells and its pull quote from a book that was published “only days later.” 2+2=CRIME! says the DOJ:

On May 15, 2025, a charismatic leader named James Comey, through the wonder of the internet, posted a coded message to his followers meaning “kill” or “get rid of” (a euphemism for “kill”) President Trump.

Stupid and dangerous: that’s the DOJ we have now. But this is deliberate stupidity — prosecutors closing themselves in hopes of scoring a pair of poorly fitting Florsheims or landing a spot on Trump’s personal legal team post-2028, where anyone sufficiently devoid of personal morality or professional ethics will be rewarded with hundreds of billable hours.

From there, the DOJ continues with its conspiracy theory concoction, claiming there’s no way anyone but Comey could have arranged the “8647” seashells, even though it happened “four miles” away from Comey’s beachfront residence. The filing then cites “evidence” it has had for awhile, hoping that the court will draw inferences that can’t plausibly be implied by the DOJ:

In any event, at 3:12 pm, Comey’s wife sent him a screenshot including what appeared to have been a cropped definition of “U.S. English slang” indicating that “86” means “to get rid of or refuse service.” [Exhibit 5]. Two minutes later, at 3:14 pm, Comey posted a picture of the seashells on his Instagram account with the caption “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

If that hurt your head, prepare to bleed out:

There is no serious dispute that an objective viewer of Comey’s post could read it to mean “Kill President Trump.”

If that were true, the DOJ wouldn’t be in court hoping to salvage its case by suffering through Comey novels and trying to turn a hasty seashell-based joke into a federal crime.

But probably the stupidest thing about this is that the citation of Comey’s novel ignores the context. That section is about the government dreaming up a way to punish someone for something that — on its own — isn’t actually a criminal act. The main characters (government prosecutors) discuss the assassination of Thomas Becket in 1170 AD at the (inferred) urging of King Henry II. Then they arrive at this conclusion/miscarriage of justice:

The room was quiet for a moment before Nora said, “But that’s okay. I don’t think we need to base his intent on the perfect-attack-record thing. I think we just argue that he had to know his words would result in the attacks. He may not have known the identity of his knights, but he knew they were out there and would act on his words. So he just shouted that they were—what were the king’s words? ‘Miserable drones and traitors’?—if they didn’t get rid of the people he named. He knew what his knights would do. That should be enough to prove he intended it to happen.

Comey’s novel is a similarly unconcerned with First Amendment rights as Trump’s DOJ. If this hadn’t been written by a former prosecutor and FBI director, someone might have stepped in to shut this shit down. The incredible irony is that the DOJ is doing exactly what the characters in Comey’s book did while simultaneously insisting the man who wrote this book was trying to pull a King Henry II against Donald Trump even though stuff Comey wrote himself made it clear doing so might give the government a path to convict him of threatening the president.

What’s most amazing about all of this is that DOJ prosecutors apparently have the time and discretion to actually read James Comey’s fictional works and parse them for possible “evidence.” I can’t imagine doing this for free. And I think I might even have a problem doing this for pay. But here we are, watching the DOJ claim that Comey knew what he was doing because this one time a bunch of people who never existed said words that Comey put in their mouths. Ridiculous.

Until just recently, Flock never felt it needed to rehabilitate its image, even when several cities were dumping contracts and cameras over persistent surveillance concerns. When cities shut down systems, Flock just kept running. In some cases, it even installed cameras that without proper permits or any other legal authorization.

What’s hurting Flock now is that its biggest user base — US law enforcement agencies — are filled with people who see the Flock camera network as a cool and easy way to stalk their exes, their exes’ friends, families, and new significant others, or aid in harassment of critics, protesters, or anyone else a bored cop might want to track.

While Flock is only now introducing limits that might deter misuse (but that wholly rely on law enforcement agencies implementing the changes), its latest effort to polish its ALPR turd needs to be weighed against its entire history, especially the stuff that happened not that long before the company decided it might be best to engage with the general public’s concerns, rather than just do whatever seemed immediately pleasurable to cop shops.

Joseph Cox brings us the unsettling news that Flock attempted to turn a nation of underpaid gig workers into an extension of its massive, persistent surveillance network:

Flock planned to use dashcams installed in hundreds of thousands Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers’ vehicles to scan license plates those drivers travelled passed, essentially turning Uber and Lyft drivers into roaming surveillance vehicles, according to a Flock presentation shared with 404 Media.

The document provides more details on Flock’s planned partnership with Nexar, a popular dashcam company. 404 Media first revealed the intended partnership last August when multiple sources provided information on the plan. The presentation shows Flock was actively pitching this partnership, and its use of Uber and Lyft drivers, to potential customers right around the time 404 Media reported on it.

Following this leak and 404 Media’s subsequent reporting, Flock went on the record to claim that the reported partnership never materialized. Flock didn’t specify why it chose to drop the pursuit of this extension of its surveillance network, however. It left it up to 404 Media to suss out what had failed, but without the ability to explain why this never came to fruition.

The documents 404 Media obtained showed Flock pitching a Lyft/Uber dashcam partnership to the Georgia Attorney General’s Office. That pitch stated the obvious: a network of cameras already voluntarily enabled by rideshare drivers would be added/infected by Flock’s ALPR system, increasing coverage anywhere ridesharing services were available. Not included in the presentation or documents: any notification of drivers that they were now part of a law enforcement surveillance network.

Also not explained in the documents was how any of this was legal. What Flock was proposing was the hijacking of cameras operated by individuals in their private vehicles. It seems Flock was relying on the simple addition of more boilerplate to already lengthy end user agreements governing ridesharing services to obtain the “consent” necessary to turn these cameras into government surveillance options.

It’s also not clear that Flock has completely abandoned this project. None of the involved parties — Lyft, Uber, Flock, or third-party linkage apparatus Nexar — have responded with an official statement or even a direct “no comment.” So, while my headline suggests this was a failed attempt to expand Flock’s surveillance reach, there’s really nothing on the record that indicates this has been taken completely off the table.

We’re looking at allegations dismissed without prejudice, to borrow a judicial term. Just because Flock might think it’s a bad idea to pursue this now doesn’t mean it won’t make another attempt in the future. And rest assured that the cop shops that loved the proposal won’t lose any sleep during this negative press-provoked pause. All they have to do is wait until Flock tries again and help themselves to whatever this network gathers with or without the explicit permission of the cameras’ owners.

Whenever Trump doesn’t like the facts, he calls it “fake news” or does what he’s doing here: tries to shoot the messenger by threatening them with a lawsuit.

The administration has been sending National Guard troops to various US cities ever since it became clear its mass deportation efforts weren’t nearly as popular with US residents (or the troops themselves!) as they were with the bigoted ghouls who infested the White House.

Trump claimed the National Guard deployments were necessary because the cities they were sent to (Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, etc.) were so gutted by violent crime that the only solution was one that pushes up against the edges of martial law.

Most of the early deployments targeted states or cities where Trump had failed to secure a majority of the popular vote. Later deployments to Tennessee and Louisiana were actually welcomed by state reps who were more closely aligned with MAGA ideals than the rights and liberties of their states’ residents.

But no matter where the National Guard went, the promised reduction in violent crime failed to materialize. It’s an assumption anyone could make, given that it was more a show of force meant to force more cities and states to bend the knee, rather than a well-designed plan to address alleged crime epidemics.

The Center for American Progress released a report early last month, one that showed National Guard deployments weren’t doing much in terms of crime. Instead, the administration was spending more than a billion dollars ($1.7 billion at last count) in an attempt to take credit for the status quo: a long, sharp decline in violent crime rates that long proceeded either of Trump’s two presidential terms.

In an effort to falsely claim his policies have reduced crime, the president is exploiting the fact that violent crime and murder were already declining in the cities his administration targeted with these extreme interventions. On average, the 11 cities where the National Guard was deployed or threatened to be deployed saw a 14 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling violent crime rate and a 22 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling murder rate from June 2024 to June 2025, before the National Guard was first deployed to Los Angeles.

These recent violent crime trends, predating even Trump’s second inauguration, suggest that, more than likely, violent crime would have continued trending downward in these cities by the end of 2025, regardless of any additional interventions. However, the Trump administration has ignored this fact when reporting year-over-year crime statistics to claim these extreme tactics have made Americans safer.

Trump is the real lagging indicator here. The report was released July 10. It took until a few days ago for Trump to threaten the left-leaning think tank with a bogus libel lawsuit. This threat was delivered by someone in Trump’s personal employ, rather than any of the dozens (or hundreds) of lawyers employed by the federal government, for obvious reasons.

On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file the suit if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter, viewed by The New York Times, was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, a longtime Democratic official who served as a senior adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and to several of its board members.

Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump.

Libel lawsuits are personal causes of action. The federal government cannot file a defamation lawsuit on its own behalf. Hence, the need to portray this criticism of the administration’s policies and claims are being portrayed as defaming Trump personally for the sole purpose of silencing critics of this iteration of the federal government.

The New York Times report doesn’t contain anything specific Trump’s lawyer claimed was defamatory in the threat letter he issued on behalf of his boss. It’s safe to assume Brito provided no specifics, but relied on intentional vagueness in hopes of making the legal threat stick. And because it’s an obviously bogus legal threat, the letter concludes with a phrase almost always deployed by people who know they have no legitimate case to make:

The letter ended: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.”

No problem, said the Center for American Progress lawyers. We are governed accordingly:

“This is utterly absurd,” the lawyer, Kevin H. Metz, wrote to Mr. Brito. “Truth is not and cannot be defamation.”

Mr. Metz went on to say that the center welcomed the opportunity to make its case in court and receive more information on the National Guard deployments through the process of discovery.

We’ll see if Trump tries to press this case or whether he’ll wander off to yell at the next thing that momentarily makes him angry. But even if he moves off of this particular provocation, he’s still got a year to let this simmer on the back burner.

It’s performative but it still serves a purpose: to deter others who might publish facts Trump doesn’t like but may not have the money, time, or legal acumen to fight back when the president decides he wants to sue in his personal capacity. And while we all know this is meaningless and unjustified, the fact is that Trump has pretty much unlimited amounts of time and money and, apparently, enough lawyers on hand willing to jeopardize their careers and reputations for a guy who ultimately may stiff them when it’s time to collect their legal fees.

We’ve moved into a new era where the administration’s constant cruelty, violence, and actual murders simply aren’t enough to keep Trump appeased or entertained. ICE is now goosing its arrest numbers by arresting holders of expired visas at domestic airports. Now we’re being treated to additional abject cruelty in the places where boots are on the ground.

An option only rarely secured by agencies that oversee jails — confined areas filled with convicted criminals that might need more immediate response alternatives — is now the subject of a $20 million no-bid contract. Once fulfilled, this will outfit any number of federal immigration officers with gloves capable of standing in for Tasers.

And while the company selling these G.L.O.V.Es (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters) has draped itself with CYA fine print to offload any eventual deaths/maiming on owner/operators, it’s really just giving them all they need to joy buzzer people into submission/death while absolving themselves of their contributory actions.

Hell, the owner’s manual even pretends Excited Delirium is an actual medical condition, even when the AMA (and others) refuse to recognize a “syndrome” that somehow is only witnessed by cops who have restrained someone to death. It rephrases this as an “Agitated Chaotic Event (ACE)”, which would suggest that agitation and chaos are things cops bring the restraint party while simultaneously suggesting agitation and chaos are things in need of additional force deployment.

Managing chaos in a prison might call for some immediate incapacitation options. But ICE et al are operating out in the open. Any situation that’s uncontrollable is largely the fault of officers who’ve never been properly trained to do the job they’re now doing. CBP historically has handled illegal border crossings, patrolling southern deserts and/or pitching in with Border Patrol operations at border crossing points. Prior to Trump’s revamp of ICE to focus entirely on any migrant anywhere in the nation, ICE spent most of its time handling the customs side of its purview.

Now, every DHS agency (and plenty of voluntolds from the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals Service, etc.) is a masked jump-out squad participating in open-air ambushes and kidnappings. Unsurprisingly, they’re so bad at it that they routinely murder people literally any other law enforcement agency would arrest peacefully, if not ignore completely.

Having realized no one is up for the task — especially since ICE has drastically cut back its training regime while simultaneously loosening entry requirements — the government must now rely on increased violence to meet its arrest goals.

Enter the G.L.O.V.E. And enter Tom Homan, who just sees this as the next step in the “truth, justice, and the American way” continuum:

White House border czar Tom Homan defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to give officers gloves that deliver painful electric shocks, calling them a tool to help officers end confrontations without using deadly force.

“It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not,” Homan said Thursday in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends.” “You can’t just go from 0 to 100, right, and the first thing you go for is lethal force.”

Well, what’s wrong with whips? I mean, that’s a historic method that was used to great effect to make non-whites fall in line while slavery was still the operative policy, as well as for years after the slaves had been freed. How about fire hoses? That takes us all the way up to the mid-60s, where meeting “0 to 100” midway meant pinning people to the wall with water pressure meant to subdue industrial fires.

Why is shocking people with electrified gloves suddenly a smart option when ICE, CBP, etc. have never had to rely on this tech prior to this point? Homan pretends it’s about compliance when it’s really about subjugation and maximum pain infliction. He says the gloves are something that sits between the “0 to 100” scale of law enforcement violence, deliberately ignoring the fact that ICE officers will choose the option closest to 100 no matter where on the 0-100 scale the threat level actually is.

If we could trust immigration officers to not murder people simply because they’re (1) inconvenient or (2) driving vehicles, we might be able to accept a “compliance” tool in limited situations, like detention centers or border crossings. But Homan — and the agencies he (sort of) represents — want to see these used everywhere, all the time. Why limit yourself to punching someone when you can immobilize them before handing out a beating? Why consider de-escalation when everything you wear and everything you hear from your supervisors says do unto others first.

A nation that has still managed to raise its voice against Trump despite being beaten, shot, stripped of due process rights, and depicted as “garbage” from “shithole countries” is going to be silenced, immobilized, and violated by officers who now get to add stealth stun options to the “roving death squad” loadout they’ve preferred ever since Trump took office again. Homan is just here to blame the victims for their own injuries or deaths.

This news will come as no surprise to anyone. Those who have been following police misconduct revelations for years have seen this happen time and time and time and time again. Those who are in the business of engaging in police misconduct have known for years that it’s easy to do and it seldom gets punished.

While Flock Safety is currently hoovering up most of the negative headlines about tech-enabled stalking by law enforcement officers, it’s a relative newcomer. Cops (and federal officers) have been exploiting database access for years to do everything from harass complainants to stalk their exes to dig up info on people they’d like to coerce into a sexual relationship.

The documents obtained by Wired come from the DHS OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility). The last time we saw a DHS-adjacent OPR take any action, it was to open investigations into people opposed to ICE, rather than limit itself to the confines of its office: investigating complaints about ICE officer misconduct. So, it’s nice to know the DHS OPR isn’t completely compromised. On the other hand… well…

Internal records obtained by WIRED reveal how, for years, United States Customs and Border Protection employees and contractors were accused of abusing sensitive government databases for reasons that had nothing to do with their jobs. The records contain hundreds of allegations of misuse of law enforcement databases, including federal agents querying data to look up romantic interests, monitor family members, expose various personal information and, in some cases, provide intelligence to suspected smugglers or drug-trafficking organizations.

Acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests to CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, the records reveal the breadth of alleged database abuse by CBP employees spanning more than a decade. 

It is as it is everywhere. If you give someone access to tons of personal data and tracking information and then simply trust that they’ll do the right thing, you’ll always be disappointed. If you wouldn’t trust AI with this access, why would you trust humans? Their goals are far more simplistic, banal, and perverse.

And yet, this is what we’ve been doing for decades: allowing officers to access tons of personal info and providing them tech that can convert digital voyeurism into physical acts of stalking. The databases may be a necessary part of government functionality. But once you add license plate readers, facial recognition tech, and expensive algorithms to the mix, a bit of click-wrap is never going to be enough to deter officers (and government contractors) from using this wealth of information to um… enhance their personal lives.

In one case, a CBP officer allegedly used government databases to contact a flight attendant. In another, an officer was accused of pulling information from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. Other CBP employees were accused of providing border-crossing data to someone involved in a “heated divorce.” And yet another DHS employee allegedly used controversial ad-tech-derived location data to track several coworkers’ cell phones—which appears to be the first known internal abuse case involving DHS use of ad-tech-derived mobile location data.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. What’s seen here is just what’s been caught and documented. But everyone who wants to do this sort of thing learns stuff from those who have been caught. And it’s not just officers doing the expected ex-stalking. According to the documents, DHS employees and contractors have been caught supplying inside info to drug traffickers and other criminals.

And it’s not going to get better any time soon. Most officers are allowed to resign rather than face discipline or criminal charges. And the private sector’s revolving door just means contractors abusing their access will move on to other jobs in the same field, because surveillance tech companies are similarly uninterested in punishing employees for abusing access to surveillance tech and government databases.

Will this revelation result in meaningful change? Obviously, it won’t. Previous revelations have done little in terms of accountability or oversight. And this administration in particular is deeply opposed to accountability and oversight. Trump himself is openly supportive of law enforcement misconduct. That means the most likely response will be re-tasking the CBP Office of Professional Responsibility to align more with ICE’s bastardized version. The focus will no longer be internal. Instead, the OPR’s power and personnel will be redirected to target Trump critics and amplify the administration’s narratives. The only thing CBP officers and contractors will learn from this is: “Don’t get caught.”

After immigration officers murdered two people in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the DHS made some noises about outfitting officers with body cameras. Six months later — and following even more killings — nearly every officer was still bereft of state-owned recording devices.

The administration offered this excuse for its lack of compliance with its own promises:

While talking to reporters Tuesday, White House Border Czar Tom Homan said “hundreds” of cameras were purchased and sent to Minnesota following the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

“But there wasn’t enough cameras to outfit every ICE agent, I was waiting up for more money,” Homan said.

MORE MONEY? That’s the excuse?!? Literally unbelievable. The “Big Beautiful Bill” had been passed months before the killings and nearly a year before Homan turned out his pockets to do his imitation of the “POOR TAX” Monopoly card.

The legislation makes U.S Immigration and Customs and Enforcement the largest federal law enforcement agency, giving it $45 billion for building new detention centers in addition to $14 billion for deportation operations. It also includes $3.5 billion for reimbursements to state and local governments for costs related to immigration-related enforcement and detention.

Having thrust its way back into the headlines in the worst way possible, DHS is finally setting a deadline for a full rollout of body cameras:

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Saturday it expects every officer and agent in the field to be equipped with a body camera by the end of August, a rapid expansion that could provide an unprecedented visual record of the federal government’s immigration enforcement operations.

Good news? Well, maybe. I mean, it’s been known for years that body cameras do more for law enforcement officers than they do for things like accountability or transparency. Pinning cameras to ICE officers probably isn’t going to alter that reality… especially when ICE has made it clear from the outset that it’s rarely, if ever, going to make body camera footage public.

[T]he agency’s body-worn camera policy could mean taxpayers who are pitching in tens of millions of dollars to pay for the cameras may be kept in the dark about some high-profile confrontations, at least in their immediate aftermath.

The policy says ICE will promptly release video of shootings and other encounters in which its agents cause death or serious injury only after determining “it is in the best interests of the agency” to do so. That gives its director discretion to release recordings that reflect well on the agency’s image while working to keep others secret, experts on body camera policies said.

This policy dates back to the first months of Trump’s second presidency. Issued on February 18, 2025 (and updated a day later), it gives ICE considerable discretionary control over body cam footage releases, even as it pretends ICE might release recordings of injuries or deaths “in custody” within 72 hours of their occurrence. By adding a bunch of asterisks to something that’s supposed to look like a release-by-default directive, ICE retains the power to block releases of footage deemed to be of public interest if it decides its own interests are more important.

ICE has responded to this reporting of things its body cam footage actually says by claiming what’s been reported isn’t actually what the policy will allow the agency to do. Here’s acting ICE director David Venturella with the spin:

“ICE policy permits expedited release when appropriate — and clarifies that it’s not appropriate to release footage when doing so could compromise investigations or privacy,” Venturella said. “This approach mirrors other federal law enforcement agencies’ policies and is fully consistent with the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act.”

He continued: “At the same time, we’re committed to transparency and accountability, and we’re on track to equip every officer and agent in the field with body-worn cameras by the end of August, ahead of our original timeline.”

Venturella is affirming the same reporting he’s disagreeing with. One assumes every ICE shooting or confrontation resulting in severe injury will be “investigated.” Whether these investigations will be sincere and/or objective hardly matters. All that matters is that ICE can say the incident is still under investigation and refuse to release footage until the investigation has been concluded. There is no statutory time limit on internal investigations, which means that ICE can withhold this footage indefinitely. So, the reporting Venturella claims is false is actually just an accurate portrayal of the ICE’s body cam footage policy — a portrayal that’s been stripped of the legalese and dissembling ICE would prefer remain in place.

ICE officers are getting cameras… allegedly. But it looks like the general public will be unable to verify this rollout via ICE releases or public records requests. And officers who kill or main American residents and citizens will not only be allowed to review their recordings before filing reports/making statements to investigators (another feature/bug of the February 2025 policy), but are pretty much guaranteed their potentially damning recordings will be buried by the agency that employs them.

Flock’s ALPR (automated license plate reader) tech spread from HOAs to police departments at an alarming rate of speed. What was once a toy for the over-privileged soon became the go-to source of license plate images. Flock became the Ring of ALPRs, to mix a metaphor. And that’s when the bad news began to roll in.

Everything happened pretty much all at once. Cops were revealed to be using this tech to track people who simply wanted to seek legal abortion options in other states. Federal officers were revealed to be leaning heavily on local law enforcement to generate Flock ALPR searches federal officers weren’t legally allowed to perform on their own. And once the spread of Flock cameras reached an inflection point, cops did what cops have always done:

When blessed with persistent tracking tech, far too many officers tend to run searches targeting ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, their new paramours, and anyone else an officer might have a less-than-professional reason to be tracking.

Flock has felt the heat. It is now making extremely belated changes that might limit abuse in the future, but only if cop shops don’t choose to opt out of the default settings. Meanwhile, cities all over the nation are ditching Flock tech. And they’re finding out it’s almost impossible to do because Flock seems to prefer activated cameras to complying with the desires expressed by their now-former customers.

Flock is struggling to defend its contribution to easily abused surveillance. And cops aren’t doing themselves any favors by continuing to abuse this surveillance tech. Because no one asked him to do it, Atlantic contributor Charles Lehman has decided that now is the best time to defend Flock.

If you don’t know Charles Lehman, that’s fine. No one really does. But we’ll let his body of work speak for itself. Here’s Lehman arguing against the DEA siding with most of the nation by removing marijuana from federal drug schedules. Here’s Lehman arguing against mass transit because it’s (allegedly) too dangerous. Here’s Lehman claiming New York City is in the midst of a criminal apocalypse, despite the city enjoying historical lows in violent crime rates. Here’s Lehman — in his debut for the Atlantic — arguing that cops need to be paid more.

Given that background, it comes as no surprise that Lehman’s defense of Flock is as abhorrent as it is abysmally stupid. Let’s go to the leadoff, which suggests that there’s not enough data to support arguments against the efficacy of Flock’s ALPRs — an argument that deliberately chooses not to engage the data that has already been collected in this country.

Opening with anecdotal “evidence” provided by a single podcast guest, Lehman rolls into a mess of his own making:

Although research on Flock’s effectiveness is still in the making, ALPRs are likely a valuable tool for any modern police force. Privacy concerns can be best addressed through smart regulation, not bans. Indeed, in our surveillance-saturated society, police cameras can help make the criminal-justice system both fairer and less punitive—if we let them.

Lehman opens up with an assumption he can’t back with data (“likely”). Then he heads directly into claiming mass surveillance tech can be brought to check by “smart regulation.” Finally, he makes the literally unbelievable claim that adding more surveillance tech will make policing less biased and more forgiving — something that has never been the case no matter how much tech cop shops buy. If anything, adding surveillance tech tends to amplify these existing problems by allowing cops to target whoever they want while feeding compromised data to systems that are “trained” to output garbage if their only inputs are garbage.

Lehman is a rube: a guy who hears that this one time Flock cameras caught a guy in a stolen car and has extrapolated that singular event to signify a wholesale improvement in public safety. He’s no different from the people who see the 1-in-a-thousand “good guy with a gun” takedown of a mass shooter and declare gun control to be a public harm.

But let’s allow Lehman to speak for himself… at least as far as he’s capable of doing so:

The case for Flock is simple. Cameras help police catch criminals. That reduces crime through two channels: incapacitating offenders who are caught and convicted, and increasing the certainty of apprehension, which theoretically should deter criminals from offending in the first place. But is it true in practice? Although the research base is still developing, the answer is “probably.”

When your closing argument is “probably,” you’re basically just overstating the probability of “maybe?” and hoping no one will notice the difference. Dumping a “theoretically” between two statements you want to connect by bridging them with a term that scientifically demonstrates uncertainty absolutely subtracts from the conclusion Lehman hopes his fellow rubes will derive from this poorly-conceived construct.

You may think this argument in favor of a massive network of Flock cameras couldn’t get any stupider. But that may be because you’re hoping Lehman himself couldn’t get any stupider because you’re actually starting to feel bad for him — like he’s a substitute gym teacher who suddenly got asked to fill in for an absent sociology professor.

Don’t. He wanted this published and the Atlantic agreed to it. Let’s just let him wallow in his amazing arguments in favor of his “Flock is good actually” theory, especially when he decides the best proof that surveillance tech works can be found in countries where human rights and civil liberties are barely an afterthought:

An analysis exploiting the quasi-random distribution of cameras in Medellin, Colombia, found that they reduced crime by about 19 percent. Another paper showed a 25 percent reduction in crime in subway stations in Stockholm, Sweden, after cameras were installed in them. A third found a 20 percent reduction in areas of Montevideo, Uruguay, where cameras were introduced. And a fourth estimates that nearly tripling cameras per capita in China reduced crime by about 10 percent. 

Medellin’s violent crime rate has been dropping for years. The recent introduction of cameras hasn’t appreciably changed anything about this downward trend.

Citing a study focused on Stockholm is just inadvertently funny, because no one has ever thought of Stockholm as a criminal hellhole in need of maximal surveillance. While crime rates have been trending upward, some of that is due to law enforcement’s positive relationship with the people they serve — something that tends to result in more crimes being reported because the public actually feels law enforcement cares and will try to do something about it.

(And because I’m going to be far more fair than Lehman when dealing with this issue, I would assume some of our historical lows in crime rates are due to US citizens preferring not to interact with US law enforcement if at all possible, especially when they know some criminal acts will be ignored and that far too many cops will use a criminal investigation excuse to engage in warrantless searches, subject victims to harassment, or do the bare minimum needed to pencil whip an investigation checklist.)

But let’s really focus on the last sentence: here’s a person arguing in favor of persistent surveillance by citing supposed success in China. Let that sink in for a bit. Even ignoring the fact that Lehman thinks something that happened in a totalitarian nation supports his argument for increased surveillance of US people, we’re still left with the even more unseemly aspects of this citation in favor of Lehman’s pro-Flock theories: that crime reduction stats provided by a nation-state that completely controls the narrative are trustworthy. Good lord, man. Have some self-respect. Because if this is what you think is trustworthy data, you’re going to do nothing but spin in whatever direction Flock Safety PR reps or local law enforcement officials tell you to spin.

Lehman tries to temper that by saying he knows some people “will blanch” at using data from China to support ALPR cameras. And while he claims to recognize a trade-off is being made (often without our consent) to sacrifice privacy for law enforcement “efficiency,” he uses the term “security” to disguise the fact that this is just about cops wanting to get everything they want as quickly and easily as possible, no matter what harms it may pose to US residents and their rights.

After all of this fumbling towards a justification for increased surveillance, Lehman attempts to tie things up with a paragraph that isn’t actually supported by his arguments, his cherry-picked data, or his momentary asides in which he claims he’s respectful of civil rights and liberties:

Flock cameras are an easy target for a populist backlash. But although some of the concerns are reasonable, a panic about a “slave state” shouldn’t determine public policy. Intelligently regulated, ALPRs can be one among many tools in the toolbox of smarter—and therefore less severe—police forces. Dumping the cameras would just be foolish.

This is all bullshit. First, Lehman tries to diminish any rejection of mass surveillance systems and opposition to Flock and its tactics/services as “populist.” That’s pretty rich, coming from a fabulist who thinks he can add 2+2 and get 5 by pointing to data that doesn’t actually say what he thinks it says (and data that only says what the Chinese government wants it to say). Then he conjures up the theory of “intelligent regulation” before making it clear that any regulation he would consider to be “intelligent” would not result in the ditching of Flock ALPR systems. According to Lehman, “intelligent regulation” is limited to regulation he personally agrees with. Anything else is just “populism.”

To sum up: Lehman says persistent surveillance is right and everyone else is wrong. So long as it results in a few more arrests, the public should consider itself lucky to involuntarily be relieved of its constitutional protections.

Sure, the town’s insurance will pay most of this, but it’s probably fair to say most of this small county’s population (11,823 at last count) wasn’t supportive of local law enforcement’s decision to violate as much of the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment as possible in the apparent hopes of making one local business owner happy.

The backstory is long and convoluted. It involves a local business owner who wanted a liquor license (but had been cited/arrested from drunk driving), her estranged spouse (who shared some documents with Marion County Record reporters), a local attorney who just wasn’t up to the job, a police chief who was far too friendly with the business owner, and a bunch of other law enforcement agencies that pitched in with the constitutional violations just because. And all of that is on top of then-police chief Cody’s animus towards the paper, due to its reporting on his past misconduct.

Here’s a summation of the events leading up to the raid.

There’s Kari Newell, a local business person who was seeking a liquor license for a new business when her previous drunk-driving record became public. There’s County Attorney Joel Ensey, who claimed to have no knowledge of the raid until public records showed he actually knew plenty about it beforehand. There’s the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which also disavowed all knowledge, until it became clear it had knowledge as well, at which point it began publicly condemning Chief Cody and his department. There’s the mayor who didn’t like his deputy mayor and seemed to be all too willing to indulge the police chief. There’s the judge who signed off on the search warrants without reading them and then tried to distance herself from actions — a judge who apparently had some drunk driving problems of her own. There are the communications Chief Cody made to Kari Newell, informing her he was going to raid the newspaper to shut down its coverage of her and, presumably, any further investigation into his law enforcement past. In the middle of all of this, there’s some bullshit computer crime charges, which were invoked despite the newspaper accessing driver record data legally through a third party.

Following the raids — that’s right, raids — multiple lawsuits were filed. Not only did the Marion County PD (under the leadership of Gideon Cody, whose past misconduct was being examined by the local paper) talk a local court into blessing its raid of the newspaper’s office, it also raided the home of the paper’s owner, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who died less than 48 hours after the raid.

Pretty much every lawsuit filed by the victims of these raids has paid out. Last November, the county agreed to pay $3 million to three of the affected journalists and one of the town’s city council members, who was also subjected to an illegal raid by local officers.

That large settlement followed a $235,000 settlement the town agreed to pay to Marion County reporter Deb Gruver, whose computer was seized along with her personal cell phone by local law enforcement officers.

That brings the total to $3,235,000 (at minimum!). The latest settlement — one that will be paid to another of the paper’s reporters — now means county residents will be asked to contribute to a tab that has now surpassed the $4 million mark:

Phyllis Zorn, the reporter whose acts of journalism served as an excuse for the August 2023 police raid of the Marion County Record, will get $850,000 from the city of Marion to settle her federal lawsuit over the raid.

This is the sort of thing that should make all good Americans yank on their imaginary suspenders and get their rural lawyer shtick on. We should — as a unified drawl — make it clear that we, as the collective “small town lawyer,” think this is some disturbing bullshit. And we should fervently argue in favor of large settlements, even if we know this just means our fellow Americans will be asked to give a little more the next time the budget’s on the agenda.

While I do think its sucks that the public has to pay the price for government malfeasance, things like this encourage more people to vote with their wallets. That doesn’t mean funneling money into some PAC. That means protecting your earnings by expelling the people who were on board with these blatant violations of constitutional rights. And Marion County residents aren’t done paying for the perverse acts of prosecutors, law enforcement, and the mayor who had the cops’ back all the way through this debacle:

Zorn previously received $600,000 from the county, which settled various lawsuits over the raid for a collective $3 million last fall. The city has not yet settled lawsuits filed by newspaper publisher Eric Meyer and former city Councilwoman Ruth Herbel. Former reporter Deb Gruver settled with the city in 2024 for $235,000.

The county government is making things right. That it’s doing this with other people’s money doesn’t mean the settlements are meaningless. We, the people, should simply rejoice in our magnanimous nature. Even though we’re getting fucked, we can at least take heart in the fact that we were invited to the climax.

Things used to be normal. We used to be doing alright here in the United States, limiting ourselves to catching people at the borders or picking up migrants with criminal charges or convictions with detainers at local jails.

Now, it’s just a constant swarm all day, every day. “Worst of the worst” has long been abandoned as a pretense. Under Trump, it’s “anyone of anyone,” so long as they fit the profile: not white from whatever countries Trump claims are “shitholes,” especially if they speak with an accent.

No more targeting. No more plugging holes in the migration dyke with border-focused deterrents. These days, its masked officers storming hardware store parking lots to grab day laborers, hanging around immigration courts to pick off people just trying to follow the naturalization process, leveraging surveillance tech and government data to find people with un-American surnames, and generally terrorizing entire neighborhoods — if not entire cities — just to satiate this administration’s bigoted bloodlust.

Now, we’re doing this, which is yet another thing we’ve never done before because there was never a reason to do it, much less the will or the desire.

The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired U.S. visas as they travel through airports, including spouses of Americans, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with immigration lawyers — a tactic that opens up a vast new pool of people for deportation.

Immigration agents in plain clothes have whisked away targets at check-in counters and arrival gates, with enforcement actions in at least 15 airports in recent weeks. Some of the arrests have occurred quietly, while others have happened as angry fellow passengers filmed the encounters.

The obvious question is “why?” Why do we need to do this? Why are we ambushing people boarding or disembarking from planes over something as menial as an expired visa? Is this going to make America greater or safer? Or is it just going to cement our reputation as a nation of bigots who were just waiting for a white nationalist-leaning blowhard to finally start massaging our repressed id?

Whatever it is, it’s fucking ugly. And it doesn’t look like America. It looks like some “lets round up the Jews” action from Nazi Germany, except that Trump’s “Jews” are people who come from any country that doesn’t have a Caucasian majority.

And it’s even worse than jumping travelers at the gates. In some cases, ICE officers — greatly enabled by new TSA data sharing provisions — are attempting to board planes to arrest people.

On July 25, a Southwest agent prevented ICE from boarding a flight from Dallas to Orlando, according to documents reviewed by the journal. The gate agent reportedly wouldn’t allow officers to board without a judicial warrant signed by a judge.

Following the incident, Southwest said in a statement that it “has longstanding policies in place to ensure appropriate legal documentation is presented by law enforcement personnel before any information about customers is shared.”

The journal also reported that an unnamed airline at a southern airport recently declined to assist ICE in accessing a jet bridge so they could arrest a man traveling with his family.

The DHS has defended its actions. And by “defended,” I mean has issued yet another “we’re right and everyone else is wrong” bit of pissiness.

“This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport,” a spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department said in a statement. 

I’m sure another equally bitter statement will greet “Welcome to the Resistance… Southwest Airlines?” activity. While the federal government is free to move about airports, it is not free to board private property (the planes themselves) without the proper paperwork. Good to know Southwest staffers can tell the difference between an “administrative warrant” (which is not a “warrant” in the generally accepted definition of the term) and a real, judicially authorized warrant. When even front line employees are willing to push back, you know the administration has pushed too far.

On the other hand, this is same airline:

In one widely circulated video, Chantal Morales Rojas, a 27-year-old from Ecuador, was detained by plainclothes officers as she boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Denver to Oakland, Calif., on July 20. She had been spending the weekend with the family for whom she had worked as an au pair, according to the family.

When Ms. Morales Rojas scanned her boarding pass, an alarm sounded and the gate agent asked her to wait. Moments later, two plainclothes agents intercepted her in the jetway.

However it all shakes out, it reeks of desperation. The administration can’t keep its arrest numbers up which means immigration agencies are becoming increasingly opportunistic. None of this has anything to do with public safety, crime reduction, or just enforcing the rules. It’s a war on migrants being waged on as many fronts as the DHS can at all times. It’s the government padding its stats while satiating the xenophobes that make up most of its party, as well as its voting base.

It all looks a whole lot like things this country swore it would never do (or never do again). It’s rounding up and caging undesirables who will also be blamed for any or all societal ills. And it’s not that far removed from pursuing escaped slaves who went north in hopes of actually partaking in the American dream.

MAGA, the GOP, and the Trump administration don’t really care about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking. The MAGA GOP made a lot of noise during Biden’s single term because they were sure the files would show a Pizzagate’s-worth of Democratic political figures engaged in the ritual abuse of underage girls.

Once Trump was elected in 2024, the furor died down. While the MAGA faithful were willing to take down their own just to put a few Dems’ heads on spikes, they were suddenly less audible once they realized any document dump would take down a few of their own. Even Donald Trump seemed to know this, which is he why he shifted his focus elsewhere.

It took a literal act of Congress to get the Epstein files released, despite Trump and other GOP figures having promised to put this at the top of the MAGA to-do list if they retook the White House. Trump engaged in multiple rounds of spin, hoping to make it look as though demanding the release of the files and refusing to release the files were both the same side of the MAGA coin.

Trump’s DOJ then reluctantly began complying with the law. Millions of records were withheld. Those that were released were riddled with redactions, forcing politicians on the other side of the political divide to demand more releases with fewer redactions. Meanwhile, a handful of leaks and unforced errors revealed the Trump DOJ was doing whatever it could to cover for Trump and anyone else Trump might want to have redacted from rolling Epstein File releases.

FOIA requests are incapable of expediting the full release of the Epstein Files. But they are capable of sniffing out the details of the Trump administration’s attempts to maintain control of the “this was mainly Dems” narrative even as it seeks to satiate the MAGA base that has been demanding access to these files for years.

This report for Bloomberg — written by “FOIA terrorist” Jason Leopold and Harry Wilson — not only details FBI Director Kash Patel and former DOJ deputy director Dan Bongino attempts to spin Trump’s refusal to release documents as demonstrative of his “full transparency” promises.

It also shows the DOJ’s pre-release review of the files had President Trump in mind the entire time. While pretending to be engaging in radical levels of transparency and complying with both the letter and the spirit of law, the DOJ was actually flagging anything that might include Trump for the apparent reason of keeping these files out of the public’s hands.

In addition to the discussions about Ferguson and Hervey, the documents contain other noteworthy details, including a spreadsheet dated March 25, 2025 and titled “DOJ Document Flag List.” The first page, labeled “FLAGGED Items List, per case – per DOJ guidance,” includes a case number associated with the FBI’s 2006 investigation of Epstein by its Miami field office.

[…]

There are 16 entries on the list where the reason for the flag was simply marked “POTUS.” Those items include magazine and newspaper articles, message pads, phone message books and one unidentified record.

The report notes that some of these flagged files have since been released. But others have not and this FOIA release by the DOJ perhaps points to why they have not been. The DOJ could have cleared everything up with an explanation, but of course it didn’t, because why would it.

DOJ referred a request for comment on the “Flag List” to the FBI, which declined to comment.

Assuming every “no comment” is an admission of guilt is as fatuous as assuming everyone who pleads the Fifth is guilty of whatever they’ve been accused of. We won’t be doing that here. But it is strange that agencies that treat every request for comment as an opportunity to engage in attacks on journalists and/or personal attacks on the person making the request would have absolutely nothing to say here. Read into that what you will.