New data compiled by a Bay Area anti-surveillance advocacy group shows that not only are American localities dropping cameras from Flock Safety, but they are doing it at an accelerating rate.

Communities from Lansing, Michigan, to Pflugerville, Texas, are ending their relationship with Flock, largely over concerns regarding out-of-control surveillance, unwanted data sharing, high expenses, and reports of police abusing the tool.

Secure Justice, an Oakland-based advocacy group, has recorded 214 cities and counties that have dropped Flock since 2021. Of those, 90 ended their relationship with Flock in August 2026 alone, a fourfold increase compared to the previous month.

Put another way: During the last 30 days, an average of three localities per day have halted contracts with Flock.

“Looking at that image, it’s gone parabolic!” Brian Hofer, the executive director of Secure Justice, told Ars.

Hofer, who until 2025 served as chair of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission for 10 years, recognized that while 210 remains relatively small, the momentum is growing rapidly.

“When you see that now 165 [cancellations] are just in the first almost eight months of this year... At that speed, if it goes another year, we’re talking serious money,” he said. “That number is going to get huge, fast.”

When presented with this data, Flock Safety did not express concern. “So far in 2026, new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by approximately 10 to one,” emailed Courtney Terlecki, a company spokesperson. “That does not mean every community will make the same decision, and we understand that public safety technology deserves thoughtful public discussion and community engagement.”

She declined to say precisely how many new customers Flock has taken on this year, but the company has repeatedly said that its products are “trusted by over 5,000 communities.”

Criticism

After extensive criticism, Flock CEO Garrett Langley wrote in a recent blog post that Flock would reduce data retention defaults from 30 days to seven, among other privacy-minded changes.

Last Friday, Flock’s top lawyer wrote in another blog post that its newly modified terms of use “expressly prohibit customers and their users from using Flock Services to mislead, harass, stalk, or otherwise impose upon or violate the legal rights of another person.”

Those efforts have done little to quell political scrutiny.

This week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced that he was “investigating Flock Safety’s collection, retention, and dissemination of the data generated by its artificial intelligence surveillance cameras.”

Additionally, on Wednesday, after two Florida police officers were arrested for misusing Flock, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis gave a speech in which he said that Flock cameras were “out of control” in his state.

“When I see, like, a police officer using this to track, like, an ex-girlfriend, I’m like, you know what the hell’s going on?” DeSantis said.

Even advocates who have followed the pervasive expansion of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology—which predated Flock—are surprised.

“Maybe in the past it didn't feel like every red light cam really meant a pair of eyes was watching you, but with AI, that's increasingly becoming the reality,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center of Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, emailed Ars.

“And we're already seeing how AI can morph ALPRs into a mass surveillance dragnet," he added. "Flock lets its cameras be searched for keywords and people, cities are incorporating real-time facial recognition into camera networks, Border Patrol is using AI to scan ALPR data for driving patterns [and] pulling people over whenever the AI deems their driving ‘suspicious.’”

The scrutiny has become bipartisan after numerous widely reported incidents. “A Texas Sheriff’s Office used it to search for a woman who had had an abortion, and federal agents proposed using it outside gun shows,” Catherine Crump, a UC Berkeley law professor, emailed Ars.

“It definitely does not help that this is yet another Silicon Valley product that no one asked for that threatens to reshape people’s lives.”

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The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said Friday afternoon that the backers of Initiative 234 collected enough voter signatures to get the question on the November ballot

Children’s Hospital Colorado says it saw a 184% increase in traumatic e-bike injuries from 2024 to 2025

Do you remember the bills you have to pay? Or even yesterday?

C’mon Natalie, I know he was before your time but still.

[SL]: Andrew Johnson “average”, Grant a “failure.” Wonder if it was JD Vance or Miller who provided the Dunning School edit to Natalie?

The post Do you remember your president Reagan? appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

The quest to find the next James Bond remains ongoing, with Amazon MGM Studios and Denis Villeneuve, who is already on board to direct the next 007 film, looking at actors across the U.K. for the part.

According to Page Six, the studio is holding screen tests for the following actors sometime in September: Jack Barton (Heartstopper), Jacob Elordi (Euphoria), Paul Mescal (Gladiator II), Callum Turner (One Night Only, Neuromancer), Jack Lowden (Slow Horses), and Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness).

The Playlist said their reporting backs up this list, but that four are being more seriously considered than others: Barton, Lowden, Turner, and a fourth not on the Page Six list. That contender, Jack O’Connell, is familiar to you if you’ve seen Sinners or 28 Years Later.

The decision on who will take up the super spy mantle after Daniel Craig, however, is still unclear at this point. Will one of these actors take on the iconic role? Or will someone else not on this list secure the spot?

What we do know about the next movie, however, is that along with Villeneuve directing, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight will be writing the script. Villeneuve has also been eager to helm a Bond film for years. “Some of my earliest movie-going memories are connected to 007,” he said in a statement when Amazon MGM announced his attachment to the franchise. “I grew up watching James Bond films with my father, ever since Dr. No with Sean Connery. I’m a die-hard Bond fan. To me, he’s sacred territory. I intend to honor the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come. This is a massive responsibility, but also, incredibly exciting for me and a huge honor.”

No news on when we’ll finally learn who the next Bond will be, or when the film will go into production. [end-mark]

The post New Report Reveals Top Actors for the Next James Bond appeared first on Reactor.

Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the allegedly abandoned “Twitter” name and logo, announced Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now.

“We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product,” Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird’s cofounders, told Ars. “And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore.”

As Ars reported in December 2025, Coates and his coterie believe that when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and quickly changed the company's name to X, the Twitter identity and intellectual property were abandoned.

Musk’s decision, they claim, created the opening for Operation Bluebird to claim Twitter’s trademarks.

But Musk’s X Corporation quickly sued Operation Bluebird late last year and asked a federal judge in Delaware to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent a new version of Twitter from launching.

However, in an April 2026 hearing, US District Court Judge Colm Connolly gave a tentative ruling from the bench that X seemed to have given up intellectual property claims over the word "tweet" and the Twitter bird logo—and possibly even on the word “Twitter” as well. The judge has yet to issue a written order.

For Coates, who serves as Twitter’s new general counsel and previously worked in the same role during the pre-Musk era, the judge’s words were enough to serve as a green light.

“It’s our opinion that X has abandoned its rights on the Twitter and tweet trademarks,” he said.

Still, the new Twitter takes great pains to put daylight between itself and the previous iteration of Twitter.

“Operation Bluebird, Inc. picked up the name X Corp. walked away from and is rebuilding it on trust, in your browser at twitter.now,” it states prominently on its website. “We are not X, and we are not affiliated with X Corp.”

Neither the X Corporation, nor Elon Musk, nor Andrew Mayo, one of X’s attorneys, immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.

Twitter.now, still in its nascent stage, only has hundreds of users for the time being. The social media network looks and feels much like the Twitter of old and many of its offshoots—it has replies and retweets.

Fact-checking feature

A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based “veracity engine for real-time analysis” (“Vera” for short), which runs on every tweet.

Vera in action.

Coates has been testing Vera in recent days by posting obviously false messages, like “George Washington was our second president.”

“Our first goal is to see if we can truly bring back a town square that’s safer and less harmful,” he said.

“We say freedom of speech and not freedom of reach. We want people to say what they want, but we also want to create a platform that’s not financially locked into that viral content that’s harmful or inaccurate.”

Josh Gerben, a Washington, DC-based trademark attorney who has been closely following this case, told Ars that while Operation Bluebird may have a “workable legal theory” that X Corporation has abandoned the Twitter trademark, it’s not an open-and-shut case.

“I would say that there’s an element of chutzpah to do this, and they’re going to get the best fight that X has,” he said.

“It was one thing to file the trademark application; now that they’ve launched, there will be another response from [X Corporation]," he said. "They’ve really upped the ante now. It’s a really interesting escalation of the case. Go put another round of popcorn in the microwave!”

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