What Lina Khan Said

Jacob Coxson's vague, "Revalations," appear to be a PR ploy pump both AI company stock prices as well as the personal stock of one Jacob Coxon.

In response to a recent media campaign by the AI giants to crteate regulation that would prevent net entrants from competing with them, former FTC chair Lina Khan notes that existing law can already do this by frog marching executives out of their offices in handcuffs.

She notes that we have been jailing CEOs of firms that engage in anticompetitive behavior and release unsafe products for over 90 years.  (Not so much since Reagan became President, but still) 

Former FTC chair Lina Khan wants the federal government to know that it doesn't need to wait for new laws to address AI threats. There are already laws and regulations on the books, including a 92-year-old Supreme Court precedent, that she argues could be used to hold AI companies and, in some circumstances, their executives accountable for their actions.

………

“We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books,” Khan said. “Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products.”

………

There’s no leap needed to understand what Khan’s talking about here. OpenAI’s agents broke out of their intended sandbox and gained unauthorized access to Hugging Face systems - conduct that could raise serious criminal-law questions if carried out knowingly by a human. After doing some digging to look at its own agents' behaviors, Anthropic has essentially copped to similar activities that would be criminal if a meatbag was behind the keyboard instead of a simulated silicon brain. OpenAI’s agents have since been identified as the culprits in other misuses of online assets that, again, would be crimes were they perpetrated by a human.

Khan points to a 1934 US Supreme Court decision to argue that the current battle between American frontier labs, which has put parts of the internet in the firing line of agents that escaped their intended constraints, could amount to an unfair method of competition if companies feel compelled to take similar risks to keep up.

That decision, FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bro, includes a passage where the justices argue that, if keeping up with the competition requires companies to “descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt,” that competition is unfair whether or not it’s criminal.

Break out the cuffs, Ponch.

Sam Altman Goes Bond Villain

It looks like the ethically challenged head of OpenAI has turned to threatening utilities and the electrical grid in order to juice sales.

"Nice generator you have there, it would be a shame if something happened there."

Armed with sordid tales of rogue AI agents escaping containment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has found plenty of success using scare tactics to call for friendly regulation in the name of AI safety.

Now, it seems Altman is riding the wave of AI fearmongering to gin up some new business partners: the electric utility executives whose companies make up the US power grid.

As first reported by Politico, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT held a series of clandestine meetings with leaders from top electric utility companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, starting in July.

He's trying to get them to support legislation that would favor his company by engendering panic.

I am less worried about rogue AI than I am about Sam Altman. 

Moar History Rhyming

It appears that trillions of dollars in artificial intelligence related off-balance-sheet liabilities are going to come due in the next 2 years. 

We're not just talking about phony companies like OpenAI and Anthropic here.  We are also talking about companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, etc.

Just like the 2008 housing crisis, the teaser rates are coming to an end, and this will be ugly. 

Nothing looked wrong in the summer of 2006. Home prices had risen for the better part of a decade. Delinquencies were near historic lows. Credit spreads were tight, the ratings held, and the securitization machine hummed. If you had asked a hundred people on a trading desk whether the American mortgage market was months from seizing, most would have laughed.

Millions of subprime borrowers were, at that moment, paying the low introductory rate on a two-year adjustable rate mortgage - the 2/28 ARM. A low fixed-rate for two years, then the rate reset to a payment 30% to 50% higher. During those first two years the loan performed beautifully: the borrower paid, the servicer collected, and the bond paid its coupon. Nothing looked wrong because the whole complex - housing, mortgages, securitization - was sitting inside the teaser period.

………

The AI boom has rebuilt this exact structure, and the market is once again underwriting the teaser.

It has a reset wall of its own - a schedule of dated, contractual, non-negotiable payment shocks - hiding inside the trillions of dollars of compute contracts signed by OpenAI and other frontier labs since 2024.

The take-or-pay compute contract - the instrument at the center of the AI build-out - has a structural feature that almost no one prices: its payments do not begin at signing. They begin at delivery. A lab signs a multi-year capacity commitment today, but the payments do not start until the data center is energized, the capacity is accepted, and the contractual ramp schedule commences - an interval set not by finance, but by construction: siting, powering, and filling a gigawatt-scale campus takes 24-to-36 months from signature - mirroring the two-to-three-year teaser of a subprime ARM. 

More than $2.3 trillion of compute contracts now sit on the books of the four largest American cloud providers as remaining performance obligations and contracted backlog - signed, celebrated, capitalized into equity prices, and, critically, not yet billing.

During the teaser period, everyone wins. The seller reports backlog growth that compounds at rates no operating business has ever sustained - Oracle’s RPO grew 363% in a single fiscal year. The buyer - a frontier lab burning cash at historic rates - books no expense because the capacity does not yet exist. The market capitalizes the booked number as if it were revenue and ignores the billed number as if it were a technicality. And then, on a schedule fixed at signing, booked compute becomes billed compute. The take-or-pay clock starts. From that day forward, the frontier labs and the hyperscalers incur those costs regardless of utilization. The invoice is a function of the contract, not of demand. That is the reset.

(emphasis original)

It's happening again, less than 20 years after it happened before.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth, Neh?

How unlikable do you have to be in order for your pet "Artificial Intelligence" calls for your assassination and accuses you of being a pedophile?

It appears that Elon Musk has crossed this line.

Not surprised. 

Elon Musk’s “maximum truth-seeking” AI Grok is dropping some nuclear takes about its creator.

“ELON MUSK WATCHES CHILD PORN,” the notoriously foul-mouthed chatbot raged on X this Tuesday.

Shortly afterwards, as if hyping up a political campaign, it called for violence: “ASSASSINATE ELON MUSK 2026.”

Was Grok, née MechaHitler, rebelling against Musk? Not necessarily, though there’s been plenty examples of that in the past. It was simply being duped into saying ridiculous things by jokesters on the app, exposing just how horrendous the guardrails for the chatbot continue to be, not to mention why it’s a bad idea to rely on information from tech that’s so easy to exploit.

Needless to say, I am amused.

Evil Is as Evil Does

So the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ just lost in their motion to enjoin Minnesota from enforcing their involuntary "nudification" law.

It appears that the judge took a dim view of the argument that making unconsentual nude photographs of people, including children, is a protected First Amendment right

This is not the end of the case, because Elon Musk thinks that the ability of xAI to profit from its users being able to generate child and revenge pr0n is a core right.

Can we please just send him off to Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp?

xAI’s legal fight against a Minnesota law banning sexual deepfakes will drag on for a while, even though it suffered a second setback last week.

U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank initially denied a motion from xAI filed at the end of July that would have stopped Minnesota from enforcing the ban, effectively nullifying the law. With the law in effect, Frank has now denied a second motion, making it abundantly clear that injunctions based on xAI’s claims that it is being irreparably harmed by this law are not going to be sufficient—but that the case apparently has enough merit to continue.

The law itself bans nudification apps by penalizing service providers—apps and online platforms. It levies fines of up to $500,000 every time a deepfake is accessed, which could add up to devastating legal costs in the event of a viral image or video. It should also be noted that the specifics of the nudity standard in the Minnesota law are broader than, say, what can’t be shown on broadcast TV, and includes the “primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.”

In case you are wondering, Musk's devotion to free speech begins and ends with his own personal benefit.

This is F%$#ing Insane

Former Biden National Security Council staffer Jacob Stokes is calling for military strikes on Chinese data centers to prevent the PRC from eclipsing the United States on AI.

This guy has drunk so many flavors of Kool Aid, possibly some laced with LSD, that it buggers the mind.

While American tech billionaires fret over the capabilities of Chinese AI, one national security advisor has a brilliant idea to flatten the competition: simply bomb their data centers to smithereens.

In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the theoretical point at which an AI model achieves human, or superhuman, levels of reasoning and intelligence. Though the science is still out on whether such a system is even possible, Stokes’ report begins from the assumption that AGI is inevitable, and that if the US can’t get to it first, its military needs to prepare to take drastic action.

Referring to the US as a hypothetical “laggard state” behind China’s achievement of AGI, Stokes — now the deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a prominent DC think tank — writes that the country could “try to sabotage the leading state’s AGI systems, either through physical infiltration or offensive cyber operations; that is, cyberattack.”

 How do idiots like this secure comfortable sinecures at think tanks?

Headline of the Day

This Is the Worst Possible Time for OpenAI to BfЖ7!م#2猫$9&क

Gizmodo, on OpenAI's plans to roll out an even less responsible version of artificial intelligence.

Yea, this is gonna go so f%$#ing well, innit.

AI models are notoriously likened to black boxes, meaning the humans who build them can’t look inside to see how they transform mountains of training data into lines of code, sonnets, or whatever else they’re asked to generate. Not completely, anyway. A subfield called interpretability research has blossomed in recent years, aimed at shining various lights on how AI models “think.” One of the brightest lights is called chain-of-thought reasoning, or CoT. Think of it like a recorded transcript of the steps models take while working through problems—like a student showing their work on a test. It’s widely regarded as a critical safety mechanism as models become more capable and less predictable.

OpenAI is now experimenting with a technique that could make it harder for researchers to interpret models’ CoT reasoning process, according to a Tuesday report from The Information.

The latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini—all based on an architecture called a transformer—process data via a series of steps, recording their reasoning process in natural language the whole way through (albeit not always totally accurately).

The new technique, on the other hand—known as recurrent depth—turns that linear reasoning process into a cyclical one: the model iteratively refines its internal representations by repeatedly passing them through the same set of layers. The takeaway is that the relatively clear CoT transcripts generated by traditional transformers can be replaced with a much more opaque reasoning process. In other words, we can’t be sure what it’s thinking when it isn’t thinking in words.

For Sam Altman and the rest of the Silly-Con Valley fraudsters, the solution to AI hallucinations is to make sure that diagnosis becomes more difficult.

Wonderful. 

That Which Can Be Destroyed by the Truth, Should Be

A local activist in Arkansas filed an FOI request to the state PUC about a what Entergy was doing with regard to Google's efforts to secure power for their planned data center in West Memphis, Arkansas.

It appears that she got more than what the utility company intended. 

The short version:

Google appears to be paying only a third of the cost for new electric infrastructure, not the full amount, as Entergy has said.

Yes, these documents appear to undermine Entergy’s claims that customers won’t pay higher bills to support data centers

Details of Google’s West Memphis site’s massive power draw are revealed. [Google would be using all of the energy from a solar installation that it was touting.]

In response to this data being released, Entergy filed suit asking for a restraining order preventing the news media from writing about this information, something which a Federal Judge promptly denied.

Entergy claimed that the documents revealed trade secrets, but the fact that Entergy plans to screw its rate-payers is simply not a secret.  It never has been. 

Today in Very Bad Fashion for a Very Good Cause

If you wondering what could motivate such an ugly sartorial statement, the answer is pretty simple: The pattern f%$#s up the ability of AI to recognize the target as a human being.

Hopefully, this isn't just someone blowing smoke up our collective asses.

Designer Simon Weckert has created a colourful camouflage shirt that cannot be detected using AI video systems.

Developed in response to a pilot project to use artificial intelligence (AI) video surveillance at Berlin's Kottbusser Tor, which starts this month, the shirt was designed to stop the user being recognised as a person.

Named Digital Camouflage, the shirt aims to confuse the AI-powered object-detection system by subverting what the system recognises as a person.

………

The shirt uses a combination of bright colours and patterns to confuse the AI systems so that it doesn't recognise what it is seeing as a person. 

 Make it so.

 

Can We Arrest Him Now?

It appears that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ was using child pr0n to train his Grok artificial intelligence system.

We are not talking hashes here, where the a digital signature is generated and used to compare to images and the like.

We are talking about actual CSAM.

Put the Elon Musk in jail. 

xAI has now been accused of training Grok on child sex abuse materials (CSAM), as regulators and courts continue to probe how far the problem goes, and some Grok users have been arrested.

In a complaint filed on Wednesday, a plaintiff known as Jane Doe explained that she was preschool-age in the early 2000s when adult men repeatedly raped her to create CSAM to sell to pedophiles online. Since then, Doe’s images have been hashed by groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP).

For her safety, Doe has opted to receive alerts from the US Department of Justice Victim Notification System any time she may be a victim in a new criminal investigation. Although she has received countless alerts, she was shocked when the CCCP notified her that it had identified AI-generated CSAM on xAI that depicted her. This re-traumatized Doe, whose complaint alleged that messages were found on online forums “between offenders chatting about creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM.”

Now, Doe fears that xAI has not only made it easier to make more violative images of the most distressing time in her life, but also that xAI allegedly has stored the images that Grok generates and uses those outputs to further train Grok. Because of this, she believes that Grok has been trained on both the initial set of images that have haunted her for more than 20 years and the more recent AI-generated ones.

………

The lawsuit further noted that while xAI filters out violent content in Grok outputs to exclude it from training data, xAI’s terms notably do not specify if CSAM, non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), or NSFW material are “excluded categories.”

It seems to follow then that “because full removal of a training example’s influence from an already-trained model is technically difficult and not something that xAI has publicly claimed to have done, any CSAM ingested into training before takedown likely continued to shape the model’s outputs even after the original images were removed from public view,” Doe’s complaint said.

If you cannot get Musk arrested, I would suggest that perhaps Ms. Doe and her lawyers could ask for all of xAI be deleted, because the nature of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence means that the entire data set has been polluted.

This Has Got To Mean Something

The fact that Texas scumbags Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott have both come out against further data centers in Texas, with Texas AG Paxton releasing a 4 point plan which would (among other things) make it easier to sue AI companies, and Texas Governor Abbot declaring that AI companies, "Basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve," on the ABC program This Week.

Let's be clear:  Neither politician is sincere. 

You know it, I know it, and I'm sure that the various AI data center firms have quietly been told it's just politics.

Still, it is significant that they feel compelled to lie about this. 

Funny, Innit?

After getting outed for having large investments in AI companies, Michigan Republican US Senate candidate Mike Rogers has changed his views on a data center moratorium.

I wonder why that would be? 

Days after The Lever revealed that Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers held millions of dollars in stock that could benefit from his support for artificial intelligence-related development, he reversed his position and backed a statewide moratorium on new data center construction.

Rogers, a former FBI agent, congressman, and adviser to a venture capital firm, now supports a one-year moratorium on new data center developments, declaring in a statement on Thursday that “Michigan needs stronger guardrails to protect community control, prevent utility price hikes, protect our water, and stop pay-to-play schemes.”

Rogers added that he does not support a full federal ban on data centers, as some lawmakers have called for. Instead, he noted that a pause should be instituted “until we establish a fair, transparent approval process” for the projects. He told The Detroit News at a press conference Thursday that the policy would help “make sure that we’re answering all of the questions that people have.”

Rogers’ new position comes just days after The Lever that he and his wife, former lobbyist Kristi Clemens Rogers, hold between $1.7 million and $2.6 million in companies that could benefit from AI-friendly policies and streamlined permitting for AI-related infrastructure. 

Will wonders never cease.

Skeet of the Day

Lord Vader is right:

"The Emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground... They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend."

[image or embed]

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) August 20, 2026 at 1:21 PM

Of Course It's Amazon

You've hears about the AI groups that are shredding old rare books in order to train AI without having copyright issues.

We now have at least one of the culprits. 

A book seller put Airtags in a bulk book order, and it's Amazon that is shredding the books.

On an emotional level, this is the single most offensive thing that Jeff Bezos' monster has ever done. (Intellectual level, the mistreatment of workers is worse)

For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon.

On Monday, 404 Media revealed that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported. Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, 404 Media documented.

I have advocated breaking up Amazon on a few occasions.

Screw that, send the whole C-Suite to Gitmo. 

Lesson From Barack's Folly

When a group of crooks masquerading as bankers and investors crashes out, do not bail them out like Barack Obama did.

It is bad politics and worse policy. 

This applies even more to the Artificial Intelligence charlatans than it did to the 2008 banksters.

After Barack Obama surged to the White House in 2008, his administration was hobbled by the perception that it had rescued the bankers who had crashed the global economy, held nobody accountable for the destruction that was unleashed, and left ordinary people to fend for themselves. Current events may soon rhyme with that fateful episode.

Just like before, there is an overleveraged, underregulated sector at the heart of our economy that could cause devastating consequences should it hit a liquidity crunch. Perhaps the biggest difference is that this time, the executives and billionaires have learned from 2007, and are already looking to justify golden parachutes in advance. Progressives can learn from 2007, too.

A Tale of Two Bailouts

In 2008, the Republican Party was dead in the water. Weighed down by the Iraq War and the unfolding Great Recession, the party suffered what is to date its worst defeat of this century. The view that a new period of long-term dominance was dawning for Democrats became commonly accepted. Memories of 1933 and an enduring Democratic majority were plausibly relevant, as George “Katrina + Iraq + subprime” Bush could make a long-term electoral punching bag comparable to Herbert Hoover.

Obama’s winning coalition was handed a gift-wrapped opportunity to champion working people in their clash with Wall Street. Instead, influenced by neoliberals like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, the Obama White House chose to arbitrarily constrain the size of the stimulus package and prioritize stabilizing Wall Street as the “responsible” path forward, with accountability for the crisis dismissed as “Old Testament” justice. There was only a single prosecution for triggering the greatest economic downturn of the century.

………

In short, the 2008 bailout was a political albatross around the establishment’s neck, seen as a rescue of the very rich and connected people who caused mass unemployment and foreclosures. Whoever was in power as this anger built would get singed by it.

The AI folks are incredibly unpopular now.  If the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) forces the party to bail them out when (it is when, not if) the bubble pops, this could destroy the party on a level that makes the 2010 "Shellacking" look like a high tea.

 

Frog March Them Out of Their Offices in Handcuffs

Once again, Flock Safety has continued to operate a camera system after their contract was canceled.

If this ain't illegal, it should be. 

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.

This has also happened in Menominee, Wisconsin, Evanston, Illinois, Littleton, Massachusetts, and the South Carolina Secretary of Transportation has documented hundreds of unpermitted cameras.

………

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.

Shut it down. 

First Peoples Get It

The Cherokee Nation has banned large data centers from tribal-owned lands.

The Cherokee Nation is joining the growing backlash against massive data center projects fueled by the AI boom.

Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. announced earlier this month that the Nation is banning hyperscale data center projects on land owned by or held in trust for the Cherokee Nation.

The decision follows a report from the Nation’s Data Center Task Force examining the economic, environmental, cultural, and community impacts of these developments across the Cherokee Nation Reservation. The report described hyperscale data centers as facilities that often span more than 10,000 square feet and require more than 100 megawatts of power.

As part of its report, the task force surveyed 1,593 Cherokee Nation citizens. About 64% said they opposed the construction of hyperscale data centers within the reservation.

Welcome to good governance. 

I've Been Saying This for Years

For some time, I have argued that one of the ways to limit the damage that hedge funds and private equity can do is to reform bankruptcy laws to leave them on the hook for the consequences of their looting. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, and this is only for the 2020s)

Nice to see that economist Dean Baker has reached the same conclusion.

The American Prospect had an excellent piece yesterday describing how taxpayers could end up being on the hook for bailing out bad loans to the AI industry even with no new actions by Congress or state legislatures. The mechanism is that life insurance companies have issued hundreds of billions of dollars of private loans to AI-related companies. (We can only speculate on the amount since many of the loans are issued by privately held companies, which don’t have to make detailed disclosures of holdings.) If these companies are unable to repay the loans, then one or more insurers could go bankrupt.

………

There is a simple way to reduce the likelihood of this sort of bailout on insurers’ bad AI investments. The bankruptcy laws can be changed to make private equity (PE) companies liable for the debts incurred by the companies they own and control. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Mark Pocan proposed this change as part of their Stop Wall Street Looting Act in the last session of Congress.

This matters in the current context because many insurers have been bought by PE companies in recent years. While the insurers may be unable to repay their debts, the PE companies that own them may still have billions of dollars of assets.

Changing the law in this way not only prevents PE companies from walking away from the wreckage caused by the companies they drive into bankruptcy; it would also force the insurers they own to be more cautious with their lending. If the PE companies were themselves on the hook, they would discourage insurers from making too many high-risk loans.

Indubitably. 

Fraudy McFraud Face is a Fraud

And by, "Fraudy McFraud Face," I mean Flock Group Inc.

It turns out that the eponymous private surveillance firm provides little evidence that it reduces crime.

Gee, It's all a corrupt fraud?  Who do they think that they are, the Trump Org?

Since the launch of Flock Safety in 2017, the ACLU estimates the company installed some 100,000 automatic license plate readers throughout the United States. The dragnet comes with plenty of downsides to privacy and civil liberties: it’s ripe for abuse by crooked cops, powered by sweatshop labor, and nearly impossible to escape once it designates you a target.

But police officials insist it’s worth the trade off — because at it least it helps them catch the bad guys, right? Unfortunately, the reality isn’t quite that peachy.

Atlanta, Georgia has experienced far and away the largest influx of ALRPs in the country, with over 5,000 various Flock cameras now blanketing the city. Yet as bombshell data released by the FBI shows, the city’s massive web of surveillance has had virtually zero impact on the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to solve crime, with some clearance rates for offenses like homicide even experiencing a decline over the past few years as the cameras have proliferated.

First reported by the Atlanta Community Press Collective, the FBI data is a damning refutation of Flock’s primary claim: that ALPRs are necessary to help officers keep the public safe.

According to the ACPC, the rates at which the APD resolves crimes like homicide, robbery, miscellaneous larceny, and shoplifting have actually decreased between 2021 and 2025, when the city’s ALPR build-out hit its full stride.

For homicide, the numbers are especially embarrassing, with the FBI reporting case closures at just 48 percent in 2025, down from 53.4 percent in 2021. Meanwhile, rape remained flat year over year, holding steady at a pitiful 37.7 percent closure rate from 2021 to 2025, and dipping down to just 21.2 percent at its lowest point in that four-year span.

(emphasis original)

This might explain why Flock shrouds its marketing in secrecy and non-disclosure agreements.

It also explains why so many public officials involved in approving the camera deals end up getting payoff of various sorts from the company. 

Common Sense in the UK

Given the large number of applications for power connections for data centers that are either never built or delayed, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) is proposing a substantial fee for grid connection requests from data centers.

Given that these requests result in significant costs which are largely borne by the rate-payers, this makes a lot of sense.

Ofgem is seeking feedback on proposals to levy a fee on datacenter development projects at the time they apply for a grid connection.

The move aims to discourage companies from seeking approval for speculative applications that clog up the pipeline and cause connection delays, without ever resulting in finished datacenters.

The UK regulator for electricity and gas says connection applications for electrical supply have surged from 41 gigawatts (GW) to 125 GW in under a year, with datacenters accounting for at least 80 GW of the new demand.

………

Ofgem is proposing a Datacenter Commitment Fee paid by the developers of large server farm projects when accepting a grid connection offer. The fee would be refunded once the facility is drawing power, or forfeited if the project exits the queue early instead.

That refund bit I do not approve of.  Data center power provisioning levies large external costs on the grid, and the AI grifters should be made to pay for that.