It’s always the same routine.

Before each giant merger the companies promise that the new combined entity will deliver the sea, moon, and stars. We’re told the consolidation will result in untold synergies, massive job growth, and incredible new innovation. Yet in a country too corrupt to have functional antitrust enforcement or working regulators, what we get instead are mass layoffs, higher prices, less competition, and shittier product.

That’s been particularly true in media. And it’s been particularly true when it comes to the last quarter century of mergers related to Warner Brothers. Paramount’s latest $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers is no exception, and as a state antitrust lawsuit threatens to topple Larry and David Ellison’s ambitions, the company is making all sorts of promises that this time will somehow be different.

David has already falsely promised the merger will be a massive job creator for California, despite absolutely no meaningful indication that’s true. And this week, hoping to quiet concerns that Bari Weiss will do the same thing to CNN she’s doing to CBS (namely turning it into right wing billionaire agitprop), the company is promising regulators some sort of journalistic oversight board to protect CNN:

“The media conglomerate, whose efforts to acquire CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery have stalled in federal court after a group of 12 attorneys general levied antitrust concerns against the proposed deal, has considered setting up an oversight committee to govern the news giant.”

Like every pre-merger promise, this is utterly meaningless. Rupert Murdoch promised such an entity in 2007 when he acquired the Wall Street Journal, but it’s nowhere to be found today. The Ellisons know they’ve helped gut what’s left of U.S. regulatory integrity via Trumpism, and with the eroded power of unions there’s really nothing requiring they follow through on any sort of promise.

David Ellison recently penned an editorial in the New York Times insisting he’s not political and he’d be a good steward of what’s left at CNN, but nobody at CNN actually believes him. They can see what Bari Weiss is already doing to CBS, and they’re very much right to be worried. Ellison may truly believe a rich nepobaby allied with Trumpism is somehow “not political,” but that belief is just as worthless as this new fake oversight board.

At the same time Ellison is promising this toothless new oversight board and that he’ll protect Hollywood movie production, he’s simultaneously threatening to pull Paramount out of California entirely if he doesn’t get everything he wants. But that’s likely even if the deal is approved, given that migrating film and TV production overseas is an ongoing trend.

Hollywood is still rocked and reeling from COVID, previous pointless consolidation, and massive migration of production overseas. You’ve got numerous high level technically skilled production folks resorting to driving Ubers amidst historic layoffs. Throwing more consolidation and another right wing billionaire into that volatile mix is going to be disastrous, regardless of any promises made.

The only valuable path forward to protect labor, journalism, and informed consensus is scrapping the deal entirely. Then focus on battling corruption, restoring regulatory integrity, embracing antitrust reform, empowering independent journalism and content creation, strengthening unions, restoring media consolidation limits, and kicking back aggressively against the self-serving right wing billionaire effort to dominate every last aspect of modern American life.

As expected, this didn’t take very long. Earlier this week we pointed out that Donald Trump supplanted RFK Jr. as the world’s most infamous anti-vaxxer when he vomited out a bonkers executive order that reduced the recommended childhood vaccination schedule for American children, pared down which diseases were recommended for vaccination, and demanded that the MMR vaccine be split into three separate shots on a spaced out timeline. Combined with Trump outright lying in the ceremony about how the MMR shot was the size of a soda bottle and was “lethal”, the waters around inoculating children against truly horrifying diseases became much more muddy.

The consequences for this will be the result of the actions of two different groups of people. The first are American parents. Because an EO is nothing like a federal mandate, parents will have the greatest influence on what shots their children receive, which is exactly how it should be. What shouldn’t be, however, is having an American population in which 30% proudly wear shirts and hats that say “Trump is right about everything!” and act upon that statement. Which means some not-insignificant percentage of American parents will take Trump’s EO and justifications as gospel and will refuse to get some of these shots for their children. That will endanger their own children, of course, but it will also endanger all the rest of us, too. Less vaccinations mean those that have health conditions so they can’t get vaccinated are put at risk as herd immunity disappears, while the rest of us get to sit around and wonder if the increased presence of these diseases will allow for them to evolve beyond our current immunity protections.

The other group are medical professionals themselves. Fortunately, that group at least is already giving a giant middle finger to Trump and his toilet-paper EO. Here’s a local example from Florida.

Pediatricians in Florida are pushing back on President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for changes to the childhood vaccination schedule.

And the state’s leading pediatric medical association, the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said they’re not on board.

“We don’t answer to this nonsense, we don’t recommend changing it,” said Dr. Rana Alissa, president of the FCAAP and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida. “We go by evidence-based science, we don’t go by politics and politicians.”

This is helpful, but it won’t be enough. Still, it is a good thing that the actual medical professionals out there are informing their patients that Trump and Kennedy are medical morons and that they shouldn’t listen to them. Those doctors are going to have some heavy lifting on their hands, specifically because Trump decided to make it harder for those doctors to keep their patients healthy.

In a statement, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics Dr. Andrew Racine called the executive order “dangerous.”

The order “will do nothing to support families of children with autism or advance understanding of the condition,” Racine said in a released statement. “The only purpose of this announcement is to sow confusion so that more people doubt the importance of vaccines. Delaying or skipping shots is risky, especially as measles continues to spread and children go back to school.”

This is where I think it’s worth reminding you all that the case count of measles for 2026 is already at least 2,465, compared with last year’s total of 2,289. And I’ll add on to that the fact that 68% of those cases occurred in children 19 years or younger and 93% of all cases occur in those that are unvaccinated or in which a vaccination status cannot be confirmed.

In other words, the very group of people that are currently being the most harmed by measles are in the crosshairs of this executive order for things to get much, much worse for them. And, and I cannot stress this all, for the rest of us as well.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For decades, terrorism researchers have generally distinguished terrorism from other forms of violence by one defining feature: the intention to intimidate a wider audience beyond immediate victims.

That distinction has shaped both academic research and criminal prosecutions in the U.S. Yet scholars have long debated a deceptively simple question: Is terrorism defined by why violence is committed, or by what the violence is intended to achieve? A new prosecution in Austin, Texas, may test whether that understanding is beginning to change.

The question is now before Texas courts following charges against 17-year-old Cristian Fajardo Mondragon, who, along with two juveniles, is accused of carrying out a two-day series of shootings, vehicle thefts and burglaries across Austin in May 2026. In Texas, 17-year-olds are charged as adults, not juveniles.

According to investigators, the group allegedly fired nearly 150 rounds during 13 separate shootings. They struck homes, occupied vehicles and two fire stations, injured multiple people and prompted shelter-in-place orders.

The case initially involved charges including aggravated assault, deadly conduct and firearm theft. Later, investigators recommended a first-degree terrorism charge, a rarely used offense in a case involving a juvenile suspect.

As a scholar of extremism, I believe this decision reflects a shift in how some prosecutors are applying terrorism laws. Rather than requiring proof of an offender’s political ideology, charging documents often focus on whether the alleged violence was intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, create widespread fear or influence government or public behavior.

No single federal crime

There is no single federal crime called “domestic terrorism.”

Federal law defines it as dangerous criminal acts intended to intimidate or coerce civilians or influence government policy. However, Congress has never created a standalone federal domestic terrorism offense.

Instead, federal prosecutors generally rely on statutes covering murder, firearms offenses, conspiracy, hate crimes or civil rights violations. In many domestic terrorism cases, terrorism is not itself the criminal charge. Rather, terrorism designations can affect investigative priorities and may have specific legal consequences where particular statutes apply.

As my own research on terrorism and political violence has found, legal definitions of terrorism have never been static. They evolve as governments confront new forms of violence and seek legal tools to address them. The question has always been where to draw the boundary between terrorism and other forms of serious violent crime.

This legal gap has existed for decades. Scholars have argued that while the U.S. developed extensive legal tools to prosecute international terrorism after 9/11, fewer mechanisms exist for prosecuting domestic political violence.

As a result, states have enacted their own terrorism statutes. Texas amended its terroristic threats statute in 2023, expanding the circumstances under which certain underlying offenses can be elevated to a terrorism-related offense. It allows prosecutors to charge individuals who commit specified violent crimes with the intent to intimidate the public or influence government policy through coercion or intimidation.

Unlike traditional conceptions of terrorism that emphasize ideological motivation or affiliation with extremist organizations, the Texas statute focuses on the defendant’s intent to intimidate or coerce the public or influence government through intimidation.

Texas’ approach reflects a shift away from proving ideological motivation, or why someone committed violence, toward proving what the violence was intended to accomplish – for example, public intimidation or governmental coercion. That distinction is central to current debates over domestic terrorism law and may prove crucial in the Austin prosecution.

Why the Austin case is unusual

According to public reporting on the investigation, Texas investigators have not identified a manifesto, ideological writings or evidence linking the suspects to a recognized extremist movement.

One consistent lesson from terrorism studies is that investigators should avoid assuming motive before evidence becomes available. Mass violence can emerge from multiple pathways. They include extremist beliefs, criminal opportunism, interpersonal grievances or thrill-seeking. And distinguishing among them is crucial.

Instead, prosecutors appear to argue that the shootings themselves created widespread fear throughout Austin while disrupting emergency services after gunfire struck multiple fire stations. The alleged terrorism lies less in an established ideological motive than in the prosecutors’ claim that the defendants intended to intimidate the public and disrupt or influence government operations. That approach represents a significant departure from many of the country’s most widely publicized mass shootings.

The 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting resulted in a New York state conviction for domestic terrorism motivated by hate under a statute specifically addressing certain mass attacks motivated by hatred based on characteristics such as race, religion or national origin.

Likewise, the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting in Texas, which killed 23 people, involved federal hate crime charges alongside state capital murder charges because investigators alleged an explicitly anti-immigrant motive.

Other mass-casualty attacks – including those in Boulder, Colorado, in 2021; Highland Park, Illinois, in 2022; and Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 2021 – were prosecuted primarily as homicide cases by state authorities despite generating widespread public fear.

Similarly, the Pearl Street Mall firebombing in Boulder was prosecuted at the state level as a first-degree murder case, while federal prosecutors separately charged the defendant with a hate crime to address the alleged bias-motivated nature of the attack. In each of these cases, state prosecutors relied primarily on homicide statutes rather than state terrorism laws, either because no applicable terrorism offense existed or because homicide charges provided the principal support for prosecution.

Unlike Colorado, Illinois and Wisconsin, Texas has a standalone terrorism statute that enhances liability when violent crimes are committed with the intent to intimidate the public or influence government policy. This statutory framework gives Texas prosecutors an additional charging option that was generally unavailable in those earlier prosecutions.

The Austin case tests whether prosecutors can prove the intent required by Texas’ terrorism statute without establishing an ideological or political motive.

A broader criminal justice debate

Legal scholars have long debated whether terrorism should be defined by motivation or consequences.

In a seminal work on the subject, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman argues that terrorism has historically involved politically motivated violence intended to communicate a broader ideological message. Brian Michael Jenkins, one of the nation’s leading terrorism scholars, similarly emphasizes that terrorism is violence intended to influence audiences beyond immediate victims.

Others argue that legal definitions should focus less on ideology and more on the deliberate creation of fear.

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord has argued that the absence of a standalone federal domestic terrorism statute creates inconsistencies. Similar acts of mass violence may be prosecuted differently depending on the perpetrator’s ideology and the available criminal statutes.

The Austin prosecution illustrates this tension.

If Texas courts conclude that prosecutors need only demonstrate an intent to terrorize the public through indiscriminate violence, future cases involving serial shootings, coordinated attacks on infrastructure or prolonged community-wide violence may be prosecuted as terrorism even when investigators never establish a political objective.

Are younger offenders becoming more violent?

The Texas defendants’ ages have also attracted national attention. Juvenile violent crime has declined substantially since the mid-1990s. Arrest rates for homicide, robbery, aggravated assault and other violent offenses remain well below their historical peaks.

At the same time, firearm violence presents a more complicated picture. Firearms have become the leading cause of death among American children and adolescents, and firearm homicide rates among young people increased sharply during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some researchers have argued that youth violence increasingly involves fluid peer networks, sometimes connected or intensified through social media, rather than only traditional street gangs.

At present, investigators have released little evidence explaining what motivated the Austin shootings. Without additional evidence, it would be premature to classify the case as ideological extremism, organized gang violence or another form of criminal activity.

Why this case matters

From the perspective of terrorism research, the most important question may not be whether the Austin defendants are convicted. Instead, it is whether courts accept a legal understanding of terrorism that does not require proof of an ideological motive.

If they do, the Austin case could become an important precedent, encouraging prosecutors elsewhere to consider terrorism charges in cases that previously would have been prosecuted as attempted murder or homicide. That would mark an important example of how state terrorism statutes are being applied to nonideological mass violence.

Art Jipson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Dayton

The administration has no legitimate justification for this action. It’s all about inflicting as much literal pain as possible on anyone ICE officers happen to encounter.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals.

ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and agents by March, according to a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security.

It’s a Taser but it’s a glove. It’s something hardly anyone in law enforcement has ever needed. And yet, there’s a $20 million no-bid contract that is going to make (lol) Compliant Technologies that much richer. Compliant Technologies describes the G.L.O.V.E. (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter) this way [all quotation marks in the original]:

The G.L.O.V.E. quickly transforms into a CD3 (Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device) when used within the Force Continuum to supplement existing tools for law enforcement, corrections, security, EMS and the military. It is available as an “invisible partner” to enhance the user’s effectiveness when operating within their agencies’ already established tactics, techniques and procedures. This is why we call the G.L.O.V.E. the “Force Multiplier” and how it operates within the Force Continuum as “The New Protocol in Peace Keeping.”

Oh my. “Force multiplier.” “Invisible partner.” “New Protocol in Peace Keeping.” That’s a whole lot of jargon right there. It’s an ambush tactic (a glove with a juiced up joy buzzer inside) that will definitely be a “force multiplier” (if by “force,” you mean “excessive”) in/on the hands of ICE officers.

I mean, they’re really not showing any restraint now, whether they’re raiding flea markets, subjecting migrants to continuous rights violations in ICE detention facilities, or straight up murdering people in the streets.

I’m not kidding. It’s basically Taser, but in glove form. The user’s manual (embedded below in case the company decides to make it disappear) compiled by Compliant Technologies even uses Taser’s jargon for “but the person died of something other than continuous electric shocks:”

AGITATED CHAOTIC EVENT (ACE) PREVIOUSLY KNOWN AS EXCITED DELIRIUM SYNDROME (EXDS) AND SUICIDAL CONSIDERATIONS

Compliant Technologies does not prescribe any protocols for using a CD3 device in a situation involving an ACE or suicidal people. It is the responsibility of the officer to deal with these cases according to their agency’s protocols and procedures.

Yeah, that ought to keep the blood off Compliant’s hands. (But not so much the ICE officers whose electro-gloves may now be covered in the blood of people who’ve had the privilege of being subjected to the “new protocol in peacekeeping.”)

The manual makes it clear there will be plenty of opportunity for “friendly fire:”

It is recommended to have an additional officer on scene to cuff/restrain while the G.L.O.V.E. is being deployed. Always advise other officers of G.L.O.V.E. deployment by saying, “G.L.O.V.E. ON!”

Hmmm. I wonder how many times be-GLOVEd officers’ “GLOVE on!” shouts will be misheard as something about a gun. Shout that phrase loud and fast with as much “rapidly-evolving situation” tension as you can apply. The hard G alone will probably be enough to bring multiple ICE firearms into the firing position. Repeating the phrase for clarity will probably just make ICE officers believe they misheard correctly the first time.

To date, almost every user of this device is someone working in a correctional facility where this probably makes a bit more sense. I’m not saying there’s any reason for these gloves to exist at all, but when you’re trying to subdue someone while surrounded by convicted criminals, any help is probably appreciated.

As for any comments from ICE about officers receiving appropriate training before being given a pair of stun gloves, the agency can go fuck itself. It’s been on a hiring spree since Trump took office. To maintain the number of officers needed to make the administration’s bigots happy, ICE has gutted its training program and lowered its hiring standards.

And even if officers are receiving the full load of training, it’s hardly specific to the roving-gang-of-masked-thugs work most officers are doing now. Prior to everyone calling for ICE’s abolishment, ICE spent most of its time seizing things, rather than people — something one would expect from a customs enforcement agency. For years, immigration problems were largely handled by the agencies that dealt with the largest number of immigrants: CBP and the Border Patrol.

Adding this to the arsenal just means more people are going to be seriously injured or killed. It will do absolutely nothing to make ICE better, more efficient, or capable of meeting sky-high arrest quotas. The misanthropes running this government are apparently just googling up whatever new means of pain/torture they can get their hands on/in. We can only hope a lot of officers will forget they still have their gloves engaged when doing things like adjusting their masks or scratching their balls.

It still amazes me that there are people out there who think that Donald Trump is a supporter of free speech. It has never been true. Anyone who looks will note that the Trump administration regularly engages in clearly unconstitutional attempts to suppress speech. But because he and his supporters like to claim he’s a free speech supporter, they believe it.

But here’s yet another story showing how that’s bullshit. The Wall Street Journal has a detailed report on how Trump’s personal secret police militia, ICE, is actively investigating, intimidating, and silencing people who criticize them online.

In recent months, ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet—from Facebook to Instagram to X—for speech that could endanger the agency’s mission. The government has paid millions to private contractors to surface everything from potential threats to agents to activities that could disrupt ICE’s operations, according to federal documents, contractors and former Homeland Security Investigations agents.

The program has ensnared U.S. citizens and activist groups that alert community members about ICE activity. Contractors prepare daily reports and dossiers on threat actors, identifying the poster’s name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history when possible. 

To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE “may” be a crime.

Criticizing ICE online is not a crime. It’s protected speech under the First Amendment. I’d point out that all of this clearly violates Trump’s early executive order on free speech, but did anyone ever take any of that seriously? It was always just red meat to throw out to his cultish base, rather than anything real.

Indeed, you can see that in the fact that the very same MAGA trolls who falsely insisted that the Biden admin was actively “censoring” people on social media will be quick to defend what ICE is doing here, even though it’s way more clearly an attack on the First Amendment rights of ICE’s critics.

DHS sent administrative subpoenas to Reddit for the information of 11 accounts that had posted “content critical of federal actions” between July and December of last year, the company’s most recent transparency reporting period, according to a person familiar with the matter.

While the article notes that Reddit (thankfully) pushed back on these requests, this is still quite different from the reports the Biden administration occasionally sent to social media companies, which tended to be much more “does this violate your rules?” not “reveal who these critics are.”

The article notes that these attacks on free speech appear to be ratcheting up as ICE and Trump grow more desperate to control the narrative around their secret police activities. That escalation now includes seeking grand jury subpoenas for critics’ information. And now that Trump gave ICE a lot more money, they’re investing millions in surveillance tech to track down online critics:

In the past year, OPR spearheaded an initiative to dramatically expand the agency’s ability to monitor online critics and potential threats, according to contractors, federal documents and former HSI agents.

Teams of contractors now scour the internet using sophisticated surveillance tools to find commentary that the agency regards as potentially dangerous.

ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants has surged, reaching $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in the White House, a 57% increase from the same period a year prior, according to the Journal’s analysis.

ICE has inked at least six contracts that involve scanning public records for “threats,” paying out nearly $50 million since 2020. More than half those funds were obligated since last January, and another award potentially worth up to $50 million the agency continues to extend. The most recent awards call for contractors to help the agency geolocate individuals labeled as “extremists,” compile reports on individuals and cross-reference information with government databases, contracting documents show.

Of course, MAGA folks will claim they have to track down “threats,” but much of the content doesn’t sound threatening at all. For example:

… a New York poll worker named Paigelynne Gonyea received a voicemail from a man identifying himself as an agent with Homeland Security. 

“We were just calling you in reference to a post that we believe you made on Instagram where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January,” said the caller. 

Shortly after, two agents from ICE OPR arrived at the voting site where she was working. 

They held printed screenshots from her account, she said, including the post in question. The agents flipped by it quickly, she said, but she caught one thing: The post included a photo of Ross, the immigration officer who killed Good.

The file that agents were holding also contained Gonyea’s address, date of birth and what looked like a picture of her taken at airport security, she said. They told her to take down the post and asked her to sign a letter acknowledging she had been informed that she “may” have violated federal law with her social-media account.

Gonyea said she was only able to find one post that spoke about a specific ICE agent:  ”I think today is a great day for Jonathan Ross to be indicted!” the 40-year-old influencer and author had written in the post, referencing the Minnesota Star Tribune article that first named him. 

All of this is textbook behavior for thin-skinned authoritarians unwilling to tolerate even the mildest criticism. But in America, we’re supposed to have rights, including the right to free speech. But somehow all the people who claimed that Biden was suppressing speech have gone completely silent about stories like this one. Trump claiming to be the free speech president and claiming to outlaw anyone in the government from suppressing free speech means absolutely nothing as activities like the ones described here continue to happen daily.

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The easiest way to tell that Flock Safety doesn’t really care that its massive network of ALPR (automatic license plate reader) cameras is being abused by cops to stalk their exes and harass residents is to judge it by its actions. When confronted with court case after court case detailing these allegations (and those are just the cops who actually got caught!), the company says two things: first, we’re not personally responsible for the actions of “bad apples” and second, some vague “fixes” are on the way at some indeterminate point in the future.

The other way you can tell Flock doesn’t care about anything but future profitability is this: when cities pull the plug on Flock systems due to local backlash, Flock has — one more than one occasion! — decided to to simply turn the cameras back on.

Dayton, Ohio ended its contract with Flock following public complaints and some apparently forbidden sharing of data with federal immigration officers. But the city had to resort to covering Flock cameras with garbage bags to prevent further recordings since even the PD seemed unsure of whether or not it could actually control this function and Flock itself remained deliberately vague about when (or if!) it would be showing up to remove the recording equipment that contractually still belonged to it.

Dayton’s government had good reason to be concerned about Flock:

Last week, for example, the mayor of Menominee, Wisconsin said that Flock cameras in the city “have been activated without city council approval.”  

[…]

[Evanston, Illinois] previously ordered Flock to shut down 19 cameras (18 stationary and one flex camera that can be attached to a squad car) provided by the company and put its contract with Flock on a 30-day termination notice on Aug. 26. The company took down 15 of the 18 stationary cameras by Sept. 8, only to reinstall all of them by Tuesday. 

Neat, huh? That’s on top of an audit performed by the South Carolina Secretary of Transportation that found more than 200 unpermitted Flock cameras operating on public roads.

Now, we can add Littleton, Massachusetts to the growing list of Flock’s ALPR+DGAF activities:

Like in dozens of communities across the country, many Littleton residents were displeased to learn about the installation of Flock Safety’s automatic license plate-reading cameras earlier this year. In May, following backlash, town officials voted to shut down the six cameras on public roads.

Last week, police discovered Flock had restored power to the cameras without notifying the town.

The discovery, detailed in a Littleton Police Department notice this week, led the department to order the cameras remotely powered down, disable system login access for officers, and confirm a Flockwork order was in place to remove the cameras from utility poles “as soon as possible.”

That’s pretty fucked up. That’s Flock saying that not only is the customer never right but the customer shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions. It’s Flock unilaterally deciding that the rest of the nation’s users of Flock’s ALPR systems shouldn’t be deprived of access to Littleton’s cameras just because the entity paying for its services decided it no longer wanted to do business with Flock.

The Littleton PD did everything it could to abide by the vote and the town’s wishes. Flock, however, went the other way seemingly simply because it could. While PD officials have said this might have been the result of some miscommunication between the PD and Flock, it would seem an existing Flock work order to remove cameras would not have honestly resulted in this:

According to the statement, Littleton Police Chief Douglas Landry met with a Flock technician following the incident, and that “given the volume of vandalism and tampering incidents the company has dealt with nationally, it would not necessarily be treated as unusual on [Flock’s] end” to have a camera need to be turned back on unexpectedly.

Do what now? Flock was told to remove the cameras. Instead, Flock decided this meant it could flip the on/off switch as often as it wanted to until it actually got around to removing the cameras, due to vague concerns about backlash Flock has absolutely earned.

And I can guarantee you whatever things Flock is saying at this point, it’s only saying because it got caught. I have yet to see an incident where Flock has informed cities or PDs of inadvertent activation or illegal access. In every case, it’s always Flock making excuses after the fact for things it could have done more of to prevent (illegal access) or abusive things it did itself (re-activating/re-installing cameras) that contradicted the intent of city residents and their governments. These are not the actions of a trustworthy tech provider. These are the actions of a company that clearly believes it cannot be fucked with because it has managed to corner this market.