Police in Wisconsin used Flock to determine that a man “travels to Michigan frequently,” where marijuana is legal, then back to Wisconsin, where it is illegal. They then used his travel across state lines as tracked by Flock as part of the probable cause justification to search his car for weed; he was eventually arrested on marijuana possession charges, according to court records reviewed by 404 Media.
The searches came to light in a Wisconsin criminal complaint against Edward Abrams-Phillips, who was wanted for bail jumping on domestic violence charges. But the criminal complaint makes clear that beyond the bail jumping and domestic violence charges, police specifically studied Abrams-Phillips’ interstate travel to create the pretext for searching his car for marijuana. The bail jumping charge was dismissed; Abrams-Phillips was found guilty only of weed possession in the case, according to the court records.
An excerpt from the "Probable Cause" section of the court records.
The complaint explains that Abrams-Phillips was tracked via Flock’s network over the course of the day to determine that he drove from Wisconsin to Michigan, a “known source state for marijuana as it is legal there,” the complaint states, adding that previous Flock hits indicated that he “travels to Michigan frequently.” Police note that, using Flock, they were able to track Abrams-Phillips driving from Wisconsin to Michigan, then back to Wisconsin over the course of several hours, where he was pulled over and arrested. The Flock searches and arrests happened in April 2025.
“The vehicle was observed hitting flock on several occasions to include 41 northbound from Brown Rd, 41NB and County Line in Marinette [Wisconsin], and 41 NB on Bridge St. going into Michigan. Based on prior flock hits, the vehicle travels to Michigan frequently which is a known source State for Marijuana as it is legal there,” the charging document notes. “Around 3:56 p.m., the vehicle was seen on Flock heading southbound on interstate 41 towards Green Bay [Wisconsin]. Deputies made a coordinated effort to intercept the vehicle on 41 from Brown Rd. Deputy Kowalski initiated a traffic stop on the vehicle as the driver matched the description of Edward.”
El-Sayed, an epidemiologist, backs Medicare for all and decries corporate money in politics. He beat Rep. Haley Stevens, whose supporters said she would have had a better chance in the fall.
Suddenly making itself the most essential app of the post-Jeremy Renner Official era, Dropout has announced it has licensed some of the most influential animated works of the century: the complete works of Don Hertzfeldt. Dropout CEO Sam Reich announced today that, after writing a letter to Hertzfeldt, the animator agreed to license all of his work to the platform. It’s the first time the entire Hertzfeldt collection has been available on a single platform.
“As we went about exploring licensing content for Dropout, knowing Don is a champion of all things indie, I thought he might take kindly to our indie streamer, and so I wrote him a love letter, and lo and behold, he responded,” Reich said in the video announcement. “We got to talking, saw an opportunity to work together, and now the complete works of Don Hertzfeldt, yes, even the Oscar nominees, are now available in one place for the first time, and that place is Dropout.”
Hertzfeldt’s work has had a profound impact on the humor of the early internet, and by proxy, the current internet. Beginning with 2000’s Rejected, Hertzfeldt’s absurd existentialism and beautifully animated stick figures supercharged independent animators across the web. Now all of his works, including the student films Lily And Jim and Billy’s Balloon, as well as his longer works, It’s Such A Beautiful Day and World Of Tomorrow, are streaming on Dropout. Hertzfeldt’s latest feature, the Sundance Special Jury Prize winner, Paper Trail, lands on the streamer on September 1, so everybody dance!
Trump Media has officially launched its $100,000-per-month data feed giving trading firms machine-readable access to Truth Social posts milliseconds before the public. According to Fortune, five Wall Street firms have already signed up for the service, which "would generate about $500,000 in monthly revenue, or $6 million annually."
Critics argue the service could let President Trump, who owns about 41% of the company, profit from early access to market-moving presidential communications. "I'll be blunt," Gian Luca Clementi, an economics professor at NYU Stern School of Business, told Fortune. "This is insider trading by definition."
"He's going to monetize the role of the office of the president of the United States," he said. "The undisputable fact is that somebody is going to earn some more money than before, and that's the president of the United States." From the report: Trump's media venture has struggled to build a profitable social media business despite its lofty valuation. Truth Social has reported significant operating losses since going public. According to the company's earnings report for Q1 2026, Trump Media & Technology Group netted a roughly $405 million loss and raised less than $900,000 in sales.
Not everyone agrees the arrangement meets the legal bar for insider trading. Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Trump Media & Technology Group, has pushed back on the characterization, telling Quartz that Truth API "offers customers the fastest way to ingest publicly available Truth Social data" and that critics "must have invented a new theory of 'insider trading' based on publicly available information."
Classic insider trading law hinges on trading on secret, material information in breach of a fiduciary duty, and Truth Social posts are, by design, meant to become public within moments -- raising real doctrinal uncertainty about whether faster access alone qualifies. But other legal experts argue the greater risk lies ahead. Richard Painter, former White House chief ethics counsel, has argued that the arrangement could violate federal law once Trump posts genuinely market-moving news -- on tariffs, military action, or other policy decisions -- before it's public, with Truth Social effectively acting as a paid "tipper" on the president's behalf. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said he plans to introduced legislation Tuesday to ban the president from selling expedited access to his statements.
Longtime Slashdot reader neoRUR shares a report from Game Developer: EA Sports FC and Battlefield publisher EA has been taken private by an investor consortium led by Saudi Arabia's sovereign Public Investment Fund (PIF). The move means the U.S. juggernaut is no longer a publicly-traded entity and is now majority owned by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through its PIF investment arm. Other investors include Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the latter of which was established by U.S. president Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The $55 billion transaction was financed via a combination of cash from PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners as well as roll-over of PIF's existing stake in EA -- constituting an equity investment of approximately $36 billion. Notably, $20 billion of debt financing was provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank. The deal cleared the necessary regulatory hurdles in July, paving the way for its completion at the close of trading on August 4, 2026. It was approved by regulators in major markets such as the European Union and the United States without incident, despite lawmakers and union leaders in the U.S. calling on the Federal Trade Commission to heavily scrutinize the leveraged buyout over geopolitical and employment concerns.
On Wednesday morning, Ted Cruz’s Senate Commerce Committee will convene on five bills aimed at age verification and “child safety.” The bills each have their own issues when it comes to privacy, data collection, parental rights, and free speech. But one bill, the partisan Republican SCREEN Act, is a Christian nationalist nightmare.
Utah Senator Mike Lee introduced the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act in February 2025, alongside exclusively Republican cosponsors and supporters Senators John Curtis, Jim Banks, and Representative Mary Miller.
The SCREEN Act would require every website that includes even one piece of what the legislation describes as “harmful to minors” to verify visitors’ ages. It defines “harmful to minors” as content that “depicts, describes, or represents, in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or lewd exhibition of the genitals;” is “obscene” or “child pornography;” or “appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion.”
Unlike the many laws now in place around the U.S. that apply to sites made up of at least one third adult content, like porn sites and some social media platforms, SCREEN would place the burden and risk of verifying users’ ages to every website on the internet that falls under the law, which would be most sites with user-generated content and also mainstream entertainment platforms like Netflix. It also attacks virtual private networks (VPNs) by requiring sites to verify based on IP addresses; many people in states that have age verification laws in place use VPNs to get around submitting sensitive personal data like ID and biometrics to a smattering of third-party websites in use today. Critics say the SCREEN Act would be a privacy and free speech disaster.
And the agenda of its sponsors is clear: “Internet pornography has infected our culture and corroded the vulnerable minds of America’s kids, with the average age of initial exposure being 12 years old. That’s appalling,” Banks said in Lee’s press release.
A number of religious, conservative, Christian nationalist, and anti-pornography groups are in support of the bill, according to the press release from Lee’s office. They include the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (which recently represented a Kansas mother who sued multiple porn sites because her son found her old laptop and used it to watch Chaturbate), the National Decency Coalition, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (which is “working to apply the riches of the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics,” according to its website), the Family Policy Alliance (whose stated mission is to “advance biblical values through civic engagement”), the Family Research Council (whose “mission is to serve in the kingdom of God by championing faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview”), and many more.
Heritage Action, a conservative lobbying group and one of the organizations Lee lists in support of the SCREEN Act, is a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025. Heritage Action “works with lawmakers to implement Heritage Foundation solutions,” according to the Heritage Foundation website. This is important because of how Project 2025, the playbook for right-wing and extremist conservative leadership, has influenced policies and lawmaking in America in the last few years of the Trump Administration. That stretches from attacks on programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, to attacks on trans and queer people, to turning the FBI into a political entity.
One of Project 2025’s stated goals is to redefine and eradicate pornography: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection,” the playbook says, calling for imprisonment of pornographers but also educators and librarians. “And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
The Senate Commerce Committee will also debate and mark up the text of the Youth AI Privacy Act which would require chatbots to disclose they’re not human among other features like limiting data retention; the CHATBOT Act which would require AI companies to build “family account” systems where parents can monitor kids’ activity; the Children’s Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act which would create a federal study into toys that include AI components; and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
KOSA would impose a legal “duty of care” on social media platforms to prevent and mitigate promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and advertisements for products like tobacco. KOSA has been introduced, and failed, multiple times since its first introduction in 2022; it has bipartisan lawmaker support but is extremely unpopular across all sides of the political spectrum among groups that care about freedom of speech because of its potential to increase censorship.
“Whatever disclaimers and exceptions the bill includes, the practical effect is unchanged,” the Electronic Freedom Foundation recently wrote about KOSA. “When platforms face liability for content that someone later claims contributed to harms like anxiety, eating disorders, or substance use, the safest response is to remove lawful speech or shut down forums discussing those topics altogether.”
Unlike KOSA and many of the other age verification laws that have spread across the country, the SCREEN Act does not have bipartisan support. It’s the latest in Lee’s repeated attempts to criminalize content he and his co-sponsors personally consider immoral. Last year, Lee introduced the now-stalled Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA) for the third time. IODA would change the 1973 “Miller Test” for determining what qualifies as obscene, and seeks to make all pornography illegal at the federal level. “Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children,” Lee said in a press release. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”
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