Weekly Member Update - August 24, 2026

This past Thursday, a group of 60 New York State Legislators, including our own representatives, Senator Patricia Fahy and Assembly Member Gabriella Romero — where you at, Assembly Member John McDonald? — signed a letter calling on Governor Kathy Hochul to finally sign the Responsible Data Center Development Act (RDCDA). As the Legislators’ letter points out, the Governor’s recent Executive Order No. 62 data center moratorium, while a decent first step, does not go far enough in making sure that our State takes the lead in data center regulation and insures that affordability and our climate, jobs and resources are protected in whatever New York communities choose to host data centers going forward. We appreciate that Senator Fahy and Member Romero recognize that the RDCDA remains a priority, especially since the Governor’s Executive Order moratorium explicitly does not apply to the Kenwood Data Center project proposed for Albany’s South End.

Because enactment of the RDCDA is so important, and particularly so here in the Capital District, we’re thrilled that the lead Senate sponsor of the RDCDA, State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, has chosen to make Albany one of the more than a dozen stops on her statewide New York Fights AI Data Centers organizing tour, which got underway over this weekend in Western New York. This coming Thursday, August 27, Senator Gonzalez will be leading a rally and press conference at Albany City Hall starting at 10:00 a.m. Even more importantly, another focus of Thursday’s press conference is to encourage our own City of Albany Common Council to enact its own data center moratorium to fill the gap and put a pause on Kenwood. Our own draft local moratorium proposal has so far fallen on deaf ears over at the Common Council, so we’re hoping that Senator Fahy’s and Member Romero’s participation at Thursday’s rally and press conference is a signal that they are ready to pressure their friends on the Common Council to take the steps necessary to protect their constituents until the RDCDA finally gets signed. We hope to see a big turnout on Thursday to press for both enactment of the RDCDA and a City of Albany moratorium in the interim.

Tomorrow night, August 25, we’re joining with our friends at RCV Albany and the 9:01 Albany Democratic Club for a presentation on RCV Albany’s ranked-choice-voting, single-unified-election ballot proposal for the City of Albany. There’s an awful lot of misinformation being pushed out by party-establishment types about RCV Albany’s proposal, and the Albany Common Council has slow walked taking action on RCV Albany’s petition — despite the fact that the petition has garnered way more signatures than any Common Councillor had actual voters in their last election — in order to make sure that the proposal doesn’t get on the ballot this fall. So, if you’re interested in hearing the actual facts instead of party spin, and want to learn about an idea whose time has come, please come join us. Doors open at 6:00 and space is limited, so sign up here.

Image Courtesy of Good Trouble Projection Group

The Week in Flock

Thanks to all of you who joined us at any one of the three events we held last week as part of the NoALPRs Week of Action; it was quite a week! WAMC did a piece on our Flock Safari in Washington Park, which is definitely something we’re going to try and replicate in the future. While the NoALPRs Week of Action is now in the rear view, Flock keeps making So. Much. News.

• The news concerning Flock surveillance has two consistent themes every single week; stories about cops misusing the cameras to do sketchy shit and stories about municipalities saying Get the Flock Out. This week is no different:

  • Cops Behaving Badly

    • A part-time dispatcher in Highland Heights, Ohio misused Flock surveillance cameras thousands of time over a two-year period.

    • An officer with the Haines City Police Department in central Florida tracked his estranged wife’s vehicle 717 times over a 21-month period,

    • A Sheriff’s Lieutenant in Colleton County, South Carolina was fired after conducting more than 2,700 unlawful searches over the past year. Notably, Flock was able to look back at a full year’s worth of Colleton County data in order to assist in the investigation. But, remember, Flock only retains data for 30 or 7 days. Make it make sense.

  • Get the Flock Out

    • East Bridgewater, Rhode Island

    • Henry County, Illinois

    • Hopkinton, Massachusetts

    • St. Charles County, Missouri

    • Stow, Massachusetts

• Remember, not all cops are bad. Wired has the story of one Pawtucket, Rhode Island officer who called out his Department’s use of the technology. That cop was coincidentally then subjected to five internal affairs investigations over the ensuing two years.

• 404 Media got its hands on an internal Flock presentation showing that the company had a plan to turn Uber and Lyft ride shares into roving Flock cameras.

• Not everyone hates Flock. Darth Vader spoke in favor of the surveillance system in San Diego.

• Both Mashable and TechCrunch have stories about noRecognition, the start up that is designing clothing and car wraps to make automobiles and people invisible to the artificial intelligence programs used by surveillance companies like Flock.

• Wired has reporting on the next-generation AI that Flock is already supplying to police and confirms what we’ve already suspected, that Flock cameras are not mere license plate readers. Flock’s new “Investigate” operating system allows police to search a particular place over the passage of time to look for patterns of behavior; for example, vehicles seen most frequently at a given location at a particular time of day can be identified and matched to the vehicle owner and home address. Or, a Flock user can look for vehicles that have visited multiple retail locations in a city over a span of given time, or who have visited gas stations more than once after midnight. None of the searches require the police user to identify a particular target or or a given incident. Instead, if your pattern of behavior matches the police search terms, whatever those happen to be, you’re suddenly a person of interest.

• CBS News has reporting on what happens when license plate readers get it wrong.

• Attention Senator Fahy! Unoccupied Waymos parked on the streets of Nashville are actively recording everything around them; both audio and 360-degree video are stored indefinitely.

• The Columbia County Sheriff has 10 Flock surveillance cameras at its disposal, but the question of whether County procurement rules were followed — including the suggestion that a private party may have offered to finance the cameras in 2023 — is now the subject of an investigation.

• Will East Greenbush be the first 518 locality to say Get the Flock Out? It’s not on the Town of East Greenbush’s online Board agenda as of yet, but word on the street (Reddit) is that Flock will be on the Town Board agenda on the evening of Wednesday, September 16. With EG’s five Flocks coming up for renewal, Flock surveillance representatives gave a presentation to the East Greenbush Town Board on July 15, and the skepticism of Board members and citizens was palpable.

• And then there is Troy. While Trojan leaders quibble about whether Flock “data retention” should be 48 hours or 72 hours or longer under Collar City law, the results of Flock’s Troy audit are reported in this morning’s Times Union, and they are truly horrifying. If you live in Troy, or even if you’ve just visited the Farmers Market or Troy Savings Bank Music Hall between April 2024 and this past March, keep these stats in mind: 5,000 agencies outside of New York have accessed the data produced by Troy’s 26 cameras, for some unknown reasons, during that two-year span. The Houston (Texas) Police Department alone accessed Troy’s cameras more than 1.1 million times. Customs and Border Patrol accessed Troy’s data 2,714 times, and Department of Homeland Security Investigations searched Troy 531 times; we don’t need to guess what all those searches were for. According to the TU — we haven’t seen the data ourselves, yet — “the 26 cameras within [Troy] city limits have been accessed by law enforcement agencies around the country tens of millions of times this year alone.” Not a single search warrant preceded any of it.

  A couple of points bear emphasis here. First, the results of the Troy audit are just telling us what we already knew from sources like the Saratoga Springs Flock Transparency Portal. Flock camera data is widely shared with agencies all over the Country. And it isn’t just Troy or Saratoga Springs cameras either. Albany cameras. Green Island cameras. Cohoes cameras. East Greenbush cameras. All of it fed into Flock servers to be accessed by God knows who for God knows what. And that brings us to the second point, which is that “data retention” rules or guidelines, whether set out by Flock’s contracts or some local law, are essentially meaningless. Troy has had 30-day data retention under its Flock contract since its inception, but Flock can still go back in time today and see who was accessing Troy’s cameras in April 2024? Doesn’t that mean that Flock is retaining the data (in some form or another) for more than 30 days? After all, what good is Flock’s “irrevocable and perpetual” license to use the data it collects if Flock can’t retain the data in perpetuity? So, when City Councillors debate whether data retention should be 48 hours or 72 hours, they are really just talking about how long local police can access the data. The data is retained by Flock forever and ever, regardless of what Troy’s local laws say. Your local laws only tell local police what they can access, for how long, and for what purpose, and that’s great. But until you actually Get the Flock Out, a corporation in Georgia is still harvesting images of Trojans and Albanians and Green Islanders and all of us and feeding it into its AI database for its perpetual use. The cameras are the problem.

• ICE Watch

• An Ecuadorian family of four, including children aged 9 and 5, were abducted on Hackett Boulevard in Albany on August 10 and are now in detention, although not together of course, because that would just be too humane. A GoFundMe for the family is up and running.

• Local activist Red’s Radical Reflection was featured on the Eyes on Ice Substack as she documented the immediate aftermath of an abduction in Selkirk/Glenmont.

• A Texas NBC affiliate has the story of two American teens left to fend for themselves after ICE deported their parents.

• A Key West handyman, originally from Nicaragua, but a US resident for 19 years, was arrested on Saturday while his son serves on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

• Independent Catholic News has the story of a 78-year-old, retired Anglican priest from Uganda who has been in ICE detention at a facility run by GEO Group for more than a year. He’s suffering from malnourishment and a probable case of active tuberculous and is getting inadequate medical care for either condition, because the abuse and his suffering is the point, apparently.

• Remember the story last September of ICE and CBP storming a Chicago apartment building with a Blackhawk helicopter in order to “root out” the Tren de Aragua street gang? ProPublica now has the real story, in podcast form.

Odds & Ends

• As the national debt hits the incomprehensible $40 trillion mark — nearly 30% of which has accrued in the less than 6 years that Trump has been President — the Financial Times has reporting on just how disastrous the “Golden Age” economy of Donald Trump really is.

• Progressive California State Sen. Aisha Wahab defeated an AIPAC-funded challenger to fill the Congressional seat left vacant by the resignation of Eric Swallwell. Wahab becomes the first Afghan-American elected to Congress.

• On the same day that a CBS News/YouGov poll demonstrated that 90% of self-identified Democrats want the Democratic Party to focus on enacting universal healthcare, wannabe House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries announced his opposition to the policy. A week later, news comes that Jeffries has met secretly with Jared Fricken’ Kushner to find “potential areas of common ground” in a conclave arranged through a “mutual friend.” We want Democrats of every ideological stripe to win everywhere this November, especially in races to regain control of both Houses of Congress; it’s imperative and existential. But if a blue tsunami comes and the left regains control of Congress, only to entrust leadership to feckless and timid souls like Jeffries, we guarantee that Democratic control will be short-lived. The Trumpian disaster gives the left an opportunity to build a durable majority for a generation here, but it ain’t going to happen with corporatists like Speaker Jeffries running the show.

• Speaking of control of Congress, when pressed on whether he would return campaign donations from his Republican colleague, the alleged domestic abuser Max Miller, Hudson Valley Congressman Mike Lawler got defensive. Spoiler alert, he’s keeping Miller’s money, along with the $1.1 million he’s gotten from AIPAC. Cait Conley is Lawler’s opponent this November, in case you’re curious.

• When people ask why antipathy against AIPAC and the Israeli government is rising, show them the odious Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who wants to see the targeted assassination of 30 to 40 Gazans every night.

• The Trump toady running the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York, John Sarcone, was not lawfully appointed to his position, rendering subpoenas issued by his office against NY Attorney General Letitia James null and void. Oh, and Sarcone thinks that Flock cameras are the only thing standing in the way of our State Capitol getting blown up by “ISIS.”

• The Orange King had his widdle feelings hurt by reporting confirming that the $1.4 billion deployment of the National Guard to Washington DC has not reduced crime in the City, so now the petulant President is threatening to sue. Here is the report by the Center for American Progress which has Trump’s diaper in a bunch.

• Suicides or lynchings? Emerald Book has a deep dive on the alarming rise of black people being found hanged from trees across the United States.

• The lawyers defending Taste of (Sh)Italy owners Frank and Alyssa Cappello against a defamation suit by 518 Foodies want out, citing an “irretrievable breakdown” in the attorney/client relationship. Color us shocked.