Police departments and officials from Border Patrol used Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to monitor protests hundreds of times around the country during the last year, including No Kings protests in June and October, according to data obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The data provides the clearest picture yet of how cops widely use Flock to monitor protesters. In June, 404 Media reported cops in California used Flock to track what it described as an “immigration protest.” The new data shows more than 50 federal, state, and local law enforcement ran hundreds of searches in connection with protest activity, according to the EFF.

“This is the clearest evidence to date of how law enforcement has used ALPR systems to investigate protest activity and should serve as a warning of how it may be used in the future to suppress dissent. This is a wake-up call for leaders: Flock technology is a threat to our core democratic values,” said Dave Maass, one of the authors of the EFF’s research which the organization shared with 404 Media before publication on Thursday.

Flock has its cameras in thousands of communities throughout the U.S. They continuously scan the license plate, brand, model, and color of every vehicle that passes by. Law enforcement can then search that collected data for a specific vehicle, and reveal where it was previously spotted. Many police departments are also part of Flock’s nationwide lookup tool that lets officers in one part of the country search cameras in another. Often, officers will search cameras nationwide even if investigating a case in their own state. Typically this is done without a warrant, something that critics like the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have recently sued over.

For months, after 404 Media revealed local cops were tapping into Flock on behalf of ICE, researchers and journalists have been using public records requests to obtain Flock network audits from different agencies. Network audits are a specific type of file that can show the given reason a law enforcement searched Flock’s network.

Through public records, both made by itself and others on the public records filing platform Muckrock, the EFF says it obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. Sometimes, the given reason for a Flock search was “protest.” In others it was “No Kings.”

Some examples of protest-related searches include a February protest against deportation raids by the Tulsa Police Department in Oklahoma; another in support of Mahmoud Khalil in March; and a No Kings protest in June, according to the EFF. 

During the more recent No Kings protests in October, local law enforcement agencies in Illinois, Arizona, and Tennessee, all ran protest-related searches, the EFF writes.

As the EFF acknowledges, “Crime does sometimes occur at protests, whether that's property damage, pick-pocketing, or clashes between groups on opposite sides of a protest. Some of these searches may have been tied to an actual crime that occurred, even though in most cases officers did not articulate a criminal offense when running the search.” Some searches were for threats made against protesters, such as a Kansas case which read “Crime Stoppers Tip of causing harm during protests.”

Other examples include searches that coincided with a May Day rally; the 50501 Protests against DOGE; and protests against the police shooting of Jabari Peoples.

The EFF found Border Patrol ran searches for “Portland Riots” and the plate belonging to a specific person who authorities later charged with allegedly braking suddenly in front of agent’s vehicles. The complaint said the man also stuck his middle finger up at them.

Flock declined to comment. The Tulsa Police Department did not respond to a request for comment. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication.

Elon Musk is a better role model than Jesus, better at conquering Europe than Hitler, the greatest blowjob giver of all time, should have been selected before Peyton Manning in the 1998 NFL draft, is a better pitcher than Randy Johnson, has the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” and is a better porn star than Riley Reid, according to Grok, X’s sycophantic AI chatbot that has seemingly been reprogrammed to treat Musk like a god. 

Grok has been tweaked sometime in the last several days and will now choose Musk as being superior to the entire rest of humanity at any given task. The change is somewhat reminiscent of Grok’s MechaHitler debacle. It is, for the moment, something that is pretty funny and which people on various social media platforms are dunking on Musk and Grok for, but it’s also an example of how big tech companies, like X, are regularly putting their thumbs on the scales of their AI chatbots to distort reality and to obtain their desired outcome. 

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The federal government claims that the day after it was sued for allegedly abusing detainees at an ICE detention center, a “system crash” deleted nearly two weeks of surveillance footage from inside the facility.  

People detained at ICE’s Broadview Detention Center in suburban Chicago sued the government on October 30; according to their lawyers and the government, nearly two weeks of footage that could show how they were treated was lost in a “system crash” that happened on October 31.

“The government has said that the data for that period was lost in a system crash apparently on the day after the lawsuit was filed,” Alec Solotorovsky, one of the lawyers representing people detained at the facility, said in a hearing about the footage on Thursday that 404 Media attended via phone. “That period we think is going to be critical […] because that’s the period right before the lawsuit was filed.”

Earlier this week, we reported on the fact that the footage, from October 20 to October 30, had been “irretrievably destroyed.” At a hearing Thursday, we learned more about what was lost and the apparent circumstances of the deletion. According to lawyers representing people detained at the facility, it is unclear whether the government is even trying to recover the footage; government lawyers, meanwhile, said “we don’t have the resources” to continue preserving surveillance footage from the facility and suggested that immigrants detained at the facility (or their lawyers) could provide “endless hard drives where we could save the information, that might be one solution.” 

It should be noted that ICE and Border Patrol agents continued to be paid during the government shutdown, that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” provided $170 billion in funding for immigration enforcement and border protection, which included tens of billions of dollars in funding for detention centers. 

People detained at the facility are suing the government over alleged horrific treatment and living conditions at the detention center, which has become a site of mass protest against the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. 

Solotorovsky said that the footage the government has offered is from between September 28 and October 19, and from between October 31 and November 7. Government lawyers have said they are prepared to provide footage from five cameras from those time periods; Solotorovsky said the plaintiffs’ attorneys believe there are 63 surveillance cameras total at the facility. He added that over the last few weeks the plaintiffs’ legal team has been trying to work with the government to figure out if the footage can be recovered but that it is unclear who is doing this work on the government’s side. He said they were referred to a company called Five by Five Management, “that appears to be based out of a house,” has supposedly been retained by the government. 

“We tried to engage with the government through our IT specialist, and we hired a video forensic specialist,” Solotorovsky said. He added that the government specialist they spoke to “didn’t really know anything beyond the basic specifications of the system. He wasn’t able to answer any questions about preservation or attempts to recover the data.” He said that the government eventually put him in touch with “a person who ostensibly was involved in those events [attempting to recover the data], and it was kind of a no-name LLC called Five by Five Management that appears to be based out of a house in Carol Stream. We were told they were on site and involved with the system when the October 20 to 30 data was lost, but nobody has told us that Five By Five Management or anyone else has been trying to recover the data, and also very importantly things like system logs, administrator logs, event logs, data in the system that may show changes to settings or configurations or deletion events or people accessing the system at important times.”

Five by Five Management could not be reached for comment.

Solotorovsky said those logs are going to be critical for “determining whether the loss was intentional. We’re deeply concerned that nobody is trying to recover the data, and nobody is trying to preserve the data that we’re going to need for this case going forward.”

Jana Brady, an assistant US attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security in the case, did not have much information about what had happened to the footage, and said she was trying to get in touch with contractors the government had hired. She also said the government should not be forced to retain surveillance footage from every camera at the facility and that the “we [the federal government] don’t have the resources to save all of the video footage.”

“We need to keep in mind proportionality. It took a huge effort to download and save and produce the video footage that we are producing and to say that we have to produce and preserve video footage indefinitely for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, indefinitely, which is what they’re asking, we don’t have the resources to do that,” Brady said. “we don't have the resources to save all of the video footage 24/7 for 65 cameras for basically the end of time.”

She added that the government would be amenable to saving all footage if the plaintiffs “have endless hard drives that we could save things to, because again we don’t have the resources to do what the court is ordering us to do. But if they have endless hard drives where we could save the information, that might be one solution.”

Magistrate Judge Laura McNally said they aren’t being “preserved from now until the end of time, they’re being preserved for now,” and said “I’m guessing the federal government has more resources than the plaintiffs here and, I’ll just leave it at that.” 

When McNally asked if the footage was gone and not recoverable, Brady said “that’s what I’ve been told.”  

“I’ve asked for the name and phone number for the person that is most knowledgeable from the vendor [attempting to recover] the footage, and if I need to depose them to confirm this, I can do this,” she said. “But I have been told that it’s not recoverable, that the system crashed.”

Plaintiffs in the case say they are being held in “inhumane” conditions. The complaint describes a facility where detainees are “confined at Broadview inside overcrowded holding cells containing dozens of people at a time. People are forced to attempt to sleep for days or sometimes weeks on plastic chairs or on the filthy concrete floor. They are denied sufficient food and water […] the temperatures are extreme and uncomfortable […] the physical conditions are filthy, with poor sanitation, clogged toilets, and blood, human fluids, and insects in the sinks and the floor […] federal officers who patrol Broadview under Defendants’ authority are abusive and cruel. Putative class members are routinely degraded, mistreated, and humiliated by these officers.” 

Rebecca Heineman, the game developer and winner of the first American video game competition, has died. Heineman died after a short battle with lung cancer, her friend Heidi McDonald announced on BlueSky yesterday. She was 62.

Known for co-founding Fallout publisher Interplay, porting Wolfenstein 3D and Doom to the 3DO, and for her penchant for keeping burgers in her desk drawer, Heineman will be remembered for her foundational contributions to the medium. Leveraging her win at Atari’s National Space Invaders Championship in 1980 into writing for Electronic Games Magazine, Heineman took whatever way into games she could. She made her own development kit for the Atari 2600 in order to consult with companies looking to develop for the system. Over the years she would go all over the industry, working as a programmer on the 3DO versions of Doom and Out of this World, designer on The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate, and many ports to the Apple Macintosh. She was working on new ports after acquiring the MacPlay branding this past year.

Coming out as a transgender woman in 2003, Heineman became even more notable as one of the first visibly queer women in the industry, an activist for LGBTQ rights and part of GLAAD’s board of members. Even though she was closeted in her early years, her visibility and use of her platform served and continues to serve as an inspiration for gender marginalized developers.

While at PAX West in September, Heineman noticed she was short of breath from minimal exertion and was soon diagnosed with “aggressive” adenocarcinoma. Although she stayed chipper in her updates throughout the chemotherapy, blood clots and breathing problems persisted. On November 15, her GoFundMe was updated to say that she was being taken by helicopter to St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston; two days later, Heineman posted “It’s time. According to my doctors, all further treatments are pointless.” 

She encouraged people to keep donating to help with funeral costs and urged people on social media to look at the career of her wife and “goddess of technology” Jennell Jaquays, who passed away last year. After seeing an outpouring of commemorative messages, she signed off with “Fuck cancer. Fuck it in the ass.”

As said in our initial piece on her diagnosis, the games industry takes people for what they have and churns them out. Many titans like Heineman are forced to rely on people’s kindness in their final days in lieu of equitable wage or public healthcare. It is heartening that she did not pass away in obscurity and got her flowers while she was still here, unlike many of her peers and precursors.

Her final months were painful but bolstered by the support of her friends and the wider games community. Accolades and eulogies have been coming in even before her passing and her GoFundMe campaign set up to shoulder her medical—and, now, funeral—bills is beyond $150,000, tens of thousands past the initial goal. She is survived by her five children, with her daughter Christina arranging the funeral. Our thoughts are with everyone Burger Becky loved and inspired at this time, the industry a poorer place for her passing.

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