Flock Safety, the company behind the dystopian surveillance systems popping up in U.S. cities, is training law enforcement officers to use its products to surveil “No Kings” protests, 404Media reported Thursday.
In November, Caity Peak, Flock’s director of market management, led a webinar that explained how law enforcement officials could use FlockOS Real-Time Crime Centers to monitor “everything from small parades, to unexpected protests, to unprecedented disasters.” One example she used was tracking demonstrators at an anti-Trump protest.
“Now imagine that you’re an incident commander, and you’re working this No Kings protest. For the sake of the call, we put this in Denver as an example,” Peak said, explaining that an officer could review a response plan while watching live video footage of an event.
“I’ve got the video footage to monitor when things go sideways, I know when the environment is starting to shift. But I also know a lot of other things as well,” she said.
No Kings protests, which have been recurring since the beginning of the second Trump administration, are historically extremely tame, and generally attract older liberals who love America but hate Trump’s policies. The temperate collective action would likely not be far-left enough for any radical anti-fascist. Historically, it’s far more likely that counterprotesters or federal law enforcement would escalate violence at these events.
Still, the milquetoast demonstrations have managed to inspire outrage from Republicans and the Trump administration—marking their attendees as targets for the president’s police state.
Law enforcement officials, including police officers and border patrol, have used Flock’s automated license plate readers to track protesters at No Kings protests in June and October, as well as other demonstrations protected by the First Amendment, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The group found more than 50 instances of law enforcement agencies using the company’s data servers to search for activity related to protests, and specific activist groups.
One of America’s largest newspapers made an elementary-level error in its obituary for Gloria Steinem.
Thousands of readers who learned of the trailblazing feminist’s death via The Washington Post’s social media notifications Thursday were met with an image of former New York Representative Shirley Chisholm—the first Black woman elected to Congress—rather than Steinem.
Steinem was in the photograph, seated beside Chisholm, who was pictured center. However, due to Steinem’s far-left placement in the image, she was cropped out of most of the paper’s social media posts.
The paper corrected the error by using an entirely different image of Steinem, though the original image still exclusively showed Chisholm on Google’s search engine for a few hours.
Steinem died Thursday morning, age 92, according to a statement published to her Instagram account.
She was one of the most famous feminists of the twentieth century, emerging as a leader of the second-wave feminist movement through the 1960s and ’70s. She often served as the face of a movement that—in no small part due to her influence—witnessed the development of Title IX, laws and regulations guarding women’s legal and financial rights, the passage of Roe v. Wade, the first United Nations World Conference on Women, and the national expansion of rape crisis centers, turning what had previously been a private issue into a political debate on equality.
Steinem’s journalism career was similarly profound. She broke into the national writing scene in 1962 with a feature for Esquire on contraceptive use that became a vehicle for Steinem to argue against the contemporary demands placed on women, forcing them to choose between having a career or having children. She went on to use her editorial prowess to advocate for and champion women’s rights.
The Post, meanwhile, has been on a downward spiral since Jeff Bezos decided to play a larger role in its operations in 2023, an enormous change after having mostly left the venerable newspaper to its own devices since purchasing it in 2013.
