Weekly Member Update - August 3, 2026
HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
We start this week with the scourge of artificial intelligence. So much of our collective work is inextricably linked with AI; Flock cameras feeding a vast AI database, a rapidly expanding police state powered by Palantir and other anti-democratic tech companies and oligarchs, data centers polluting our world in service to the ravenous thirst of AI infrastructure, hell, even the propaganda operation of Trump and his allies is founded on AI slop. A healthy loathing and repulsion towards AI is, in some ways, a necessary prerequisite to so many of the causes we care about.
The human brains of artists and writers gave us fictitious AI villains like HAL 9000, Skynet and Ultron, but OpenAI and Anthropic showed us how close we are to making those fictions a reality this past week. First came Open AI, the company behind the ubiquitous ChatGPT, which revealed on July 21 that its AI agent had escaped from its testing environment, accessed the Internet without human direction and hacked into the data processing systems of the AI start up Hugging Face. The CEO of Hugging Face called it "an attack unlike anything we've seen before” and, while the attack was made possible by the human decision to switch off certain specific safeguards in the testing environment, it is clear that OpenAI’s models acted autonomously in choosing the target of its cyberattack. "It went off and did this hack all by itself, as far as we can tell," said Colin Shea-Blymyer, a cybersecurity research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. "This is the highest level of autonomy that we've seen in the use of a large language model for cyber operations." And then, in response to OpenAI’s revelation, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, reassessed its own cybersecurity evaluations and soon revealed that its models had accessed the Internet and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations. This coming August 29 will be the 29th anniversary of Skynet becoming self-aware, lest we forget.
Do you like books? AI is literally consuming them and discarding their desiccated husks. AI companies, including Anthropic, are purchasing antique and out-of print books by the thousands, lopping their spines off with mechanical guillotines and feeding the page contents into their AI models. When they’re done, the pages are reduced to pulp, the knowledge, poetry and prose from those pages now transformed into data to be commoditized by mega corporations.
And then there is AI business model. Five companies — Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon — dominate global markets, together comprising 30% of the S&P 500 Index, the greatest concentration of value in that Index in 50 years. Many analysts consider the AI boom and the companies behind it to be highly overvalued, setting the stage for a potential AI-bubble stock market crash that would make the dot-com crash of the aughts look like child’s play. To that end, AI companies are estimated to be looking to spend upwards of $3 billion on data center construction through 2028, and most of that financing is leveraged on debt. Open AI, for one, has annual revenue of about $20 billion, but its debt obligations are nearly 75 times their revenue, tipping the scales at $1.5 trillion according to CEO Sam Altman. And the debt-to-income ratio of these five companies may even be worse than we know; Nikkei Asia and Futurism report that the big five have an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt which isn’t reported on its books. It’s no wonder that a top Microsoft executive has openly worried that the AI boom will falter if people don’t start accepting the garbage they are force feeding us with greater enthusiasm. It’s because they’ve built a financial house of cards on a foundation of slop.
In sum, the picture created by AI is bleak. Vampiric technology designed to consume and monetize the entirety of human creation, with the capability of shedding the constraints imposed by mere mortals and rampaging autonomously across the Internet. Meanwhile, the creators of the technology imperil the world economy with the promise of transformative technology that nobody actually wants. Count us out, thanks.
The Week in Flock
Another week, another deluge of stories about police misuse of Flock surveillance technology. The Washington Post has detailed reporting on the ordeal that one victim endured because of her cop ex-boyfriend who seemingly always knew exactly where she was and had been. The Post reporting also documents at least 50 other cases where law enforcement officers have been accused or charged with misusing Flock surveillance technology, and the Post is frankly undercounting the problem. Just recently, there was the cop in Charlotte, North Carolina who was criminally charged for using the cameras for unspecified non-law-enforcement purposes, or the cop in Baytown, Texas who is currently under simultaneous internal affairs and criminal investigations for his unauthorized use of Flock. In Conyers, Georgia, a supervisor in the “Real-Time Crime Center” allegedly accessed Flock to track a vehicle driven by her domestic partner. Meanwhile, four cops and a pair of civilian staffers in Savannah, Georgia were nabbed for conducting Flock searches on acquaintances and family members. It’s an epidemic, pure and simple.
The Troy PD released the results of it 60-day Flock audit. Alissa Andersen has the story on Instagram, and WAMC also has reporting on what members of the Troy City Council are calling an “incomplete” audit.
In the Sacramento suburb of Roseville, California, Flock cameras misread the license plates in a staggering 71% of the alerts it sent to police.
We previously reported that the City of Los Angeles Police suspended its use of Flock surveillance last month. Democratic Socialist Mayoral candidate Nithya Rahman made clear this week that the suspension will be permanent is she gets elected.
NPR has reporting on the DeFlock movement in deep-red Missouri and Kansas.
South Kingstown, Rhode Island has voted to Get the Flock Out.
A 77-year-old Florida Republican has taken to sitting next to his neighborhood Flock camera every day in order to block it with his pool skimmer.
Have I Been Flocked is reporting that three out of every four police agencies allow other entities to access their systems; “This is what ‘local control,’ ‘accountability,’ and ‘data ownership’ look like in practice: unnamed third parties with no Flock contract run queries through your local police department, with no adequate logging and no oversight.”
Flock and the mass surveillance state got the John Oliver treatment last night.
Odds & Ends
It’s official! The Albany City Clerk has certified that the petition circulated by our friends at RCV Albany has the required number of signatures to bring ranked choice voting and a single unified election to the City of Albany. Absent a lawsuit by Democratic Party Machine loyalists — which is entirely possible, of course — the ball is now in the hands of the Albany Common Council. Will the Council advance the half-loaf counter proposal by Councilman Jack Flynn? Or will they do what 2,600+ Albanians have asked them to do and let the voters decide for themselves this November? At the end of the day, this is really a simple question of democratic values; does the Common Council trust the will of their constituents, or does the Council think that it knows better? And, if you are an registered voter in the City of Albany who has yet to sign RCV Albany’s petition, you can still lend your signature to the cause; if RCV Albany can garner another 1200 signatures, it will be able to force the Common Council’s hand and get their ranked-choice, unified-election proposal on the ballot regardless of what the Common Council wants to do.
The case of Crothers vs. State of New York is currently scheduled to get underway later this month in the NY State Court of Claims before Judge Ramon Rivera in Syracuse. Times Union Managing Editor Brendan Lyons has the painful story of the quarter-century ordeal that Elizabeth Crothers has suffered following her 2001 rape allegation against the Chief Counsel to then-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
The Department of Justice has moved to dismiss the pending criminal vandalism charges against Olympian Davey Hearn, admitting what everyone already knew, that the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed catastrophically because of shoddy workmanship by Trump’s no-bid contractor. Kudos to DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro for having the chutzpah to defy Trump and tell the truth for once; we didn’t think Judge Box-o-Wine had it in her. Judging by Trump’s reaction to Pirro’s motion, this seems likely to cost Pirro her job and an excommunication from the MAGAverse. Pity.
Cyberattacks hit water systems in seven states this past week, and US intelligence agencies suspect Iranian involvement. Not Trump though; the President of the United States blames Minnesota and Governor Tim Walz. Meanwhile, Wired has recent reporting on the potential for cataclysmic consequences in the event of a successful widespread attack on US water infrastructure.
Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz was deported to Guatemala by ICE last year and his wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, thereafter self-deported with the couple’s American daughters in order to be with her husband. This week, the pair was found dead in a Guatemalan sugar cane field, bound, gagged and showing signs of torture. Their 14-month-old daughter was found crying by her mother’s body.
ICE is surging in NYC and targeting tomato plant workers outside Rochester. True to form, ICE agents are also using masking technology as they monitor people’s social media accounts. Wired has a story about DNA harvesting by ICE and reports that hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including children, now have their DNA stored permanently in a federal database.
Meanwhile, ICE and DHS are preparing for the mass deportation of more than a quarter million Haitians. With no room to imprison these longtime American residents, ICE is instead calling Haitians in for immigration “check-ins” and sending them home with ankle monitors manufactured by GEO Group, the notorious private prison contractor. So GEO Group gets to keep padding its bottom line while Haitians wait for the coming day when ICE comes to take them away. And the nascent purge of Haitians from our communities has already impacted the Capital Region, even if you’re not Haitian yourself; the Times Union has reporting on how the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian migrants, and the resulting termination of their work authorizations, is imperiling the home care workforce and putting local patients at risk.
Finally, the Cappellos — of Taste of Italy infamy — have set up a Go Fund Me to help allay the consequences of their actions. No word if any portion of the funding will go toward their outstanding sales tax warrants.