Weekly Member Update - September 14, 2026
A “Happy Retirement” balloon adorns the aluminum post where a Flock surveillance camera once stood in Kinderhook, Columbia County. Hat tip to Jennifer for the photo!
All About Flock
In our last newsletter before the Labor Day holiday, our literal parting words were a rhetorical question of how many “cops-abusing-Flocks” stories we would have to talk about by the time this issue of our newsletter came to press. Little did we know would be talking about the first (documented) case in the 518 of police abusing Flock surveillance for unlawful purposes. This past Wednesday, Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple announced that misdemeanor charges had been filed against sheriff’s investigator Laurie Moore, a 13-year veteran of the force, whom Apple described as a “quality investigator” whose alleged actions just “broke his heart.” Apple’s feelings of personal betrayal aside, what concerns us most about this incident is that Moore, who has had access to the Flock network since late 2024, was apparently able to have run more than 4,000 searches — including roughly 3,000 targeting her former paramour — without anyone in the Albany County Sheriff’s Office taking notice. As was noted by CBS6, the investigation of Moore’s conduct only came about after an “outside source” had tipped the Sheriff off, suggesting that her misconduct could have gone on indefinitely in the apparent absence of adequate safeguards in the Sheriff’s Office. To be sure, in the wake of the charges against Moore, Sheriff Apple announced that his Office would only now be restricting access to the Flock surveillance system and conducting 30-day audits. Better late than never, we suppose.
It’s not like Craig Apple — or any other local law enforcement official — could have predicted this, after all. The not-for-profit, public-interest law firm Institute of Justice has only documented more 225 incidences of ALPR abuse by police in the past five years, including romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct. And, we’ve documented many of those episodes in these humble pages; one story after another of cops misusing Flock surveillance for the own personal use. But yet, our own local officials seem to have their heads in the sand and don’t see that having access to a nationwide, AI-powered network of more than a 140,000 cameras is a veritable siren song to human beings with a badge and misguided intentions. We can imagine that it’s just easier for local officials to pretend that Flock-related police misconduct only happens elsewhere when so many of them seem fixated on making sure that their surveillance toys are here for good. Whether it’s Troy Mayor Carmella Mantello fighting tooth and nail to keep Flocks in the Collar City, or Apple hyperbolically referring to his 32 ALPRs throughout Albany County as a “great tool” that help to “combat evil,” a discomfiting number of Capital District leaders seem to have no appetite for a Flock-free world, even as pressure to get the Flock out continues to build both locally and across the Country. The anti-Flock movement grows bigger by the day; ruby-red Florida has banned the cameras from all state highways, Pennsylvania Governor (and likely 2028 Democratic Presidential aspirant) Josh Shapiro is open to a statewide ban via bipartisan legislation, a group of conservative House members have introduced the “Flock-Off Act” to eliminate federal funding for the mass surveillance state, a massive federal class action has been filed against Flock in Georgia and, every single week, more and more communities — from Grass Valley, California to Burlington, New Jersey — join the list of communities who have said get the Flock out. Hell, the anti-Flock zeitgeist is now so strong that gamers can destroy Flock cameras for cash while playing Grand Theft Auto V. But Albany County, and the City of Albany, those supposed bastions of progressive Democratic Party values, continue to move in the opposite direction. Just this week, WAMC reported that the City of Albany now has an oppressive 66 cameras on its streets, a flabbergasting number that seems to have given no elected official any pause whatsoever. Albany Mayor Dorcey Applyrs declined to give WAMC an interview on the subject and promised a statement that seemingly never came, and 15th Ward Common Councilor Tom Hoey, who chairs the Council’s Public Safety Committee, has shrugged off public concerns and blithely stated that he is “going to go with whatever [Albany’s police] chief says.” Way to read the room, Hoey.
And, it’s not as if Albany, and Troy, and Schenectady, don’t have local profiles in courage to try and emulate. The Town of East Greenbush has a chance to get the Flock out when renewal of their Flock contract is up for debate this Wednesday at 6pm. The night before, in Clifton Park, the Town Board will hold a public informational meeting about a proposed Flock ban in that Capital District bedroom community. And down in idyllic Columbia County, they’re frankly killing it. Not only is the “early retirement” of a Flock camera in Kinderhook being celebrated, the Town of Greenport is considering taking down the one Flock it has on public property, thereby looking to follow the lead of the Town of New Lebanon, and the grassroots DeFlock Columbia County has quickly materialized with an already robust social media presence and a plan to submit a petition demanding the removal of that County’s controversial cameras to public safety officials this Tuesday.
Want more Flock and ALPR news?
The American Prospect has reporting on how police agencies are buying ALPRs by pillaging opioid settlement funds and auto insurance fees.
Flock held a webinar for police to show them how to surveil No Kings protests.
Michael Soyfer, an attorney with the aforementioned Institute for Justice, makes the legal case against Flock surveillance.
Meanwhile, Flock’s political donations to local politicians and the interest groups that love them — like the Democratic Mayors of America — skyrocketed by 700% in 2025 as compared to the previous three years. If you can’t sway the general public to embrace living in a panopticon surveillance state, we guess you have no choice to pay off the people’s representatives to keep Flock on the streets.
San Francisco’s independent news outlet 48 Hills reminds us that it isn’t just Flock that’s the problem. Axon and Motorola are no better.
The Rise of the Machines
Something changed over the past couple of weeks in the debate over the expanding role that artificial intelligence is playing in our society, our culture and our politics. To be sure, the data center infrastructure which undergirds AI has already turned into a hot-button political issue with data center opposition now enjoying broad bipartisan agreement. But the development and expansion of AI seemed to be rolling along unbothered, with the baseline political and economic consensus suggesting that AI must be pushed forward at any cost, lest we lose the “race” with China. The race to what, no one really seems to know, but the powers that be seemed to agree that America desperately needed to “win” it.
But then came revelations that Open AI’s agents autonomously hacked into Hugging Face’s servers. Then Anthropic’s Claude model was found to have done the same type of thing. Repeatedly. And then an Anthropic AI researcher offered his view that AI is expanding so fast that he believes there is a 10% chance that it will kill all humans within a decade.
Senator Bernie Sanders has long been a proponent of expanded AI regulation, but all of the sudden, other legislators are waking up to the idea. Not Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, of course, but at least Hakeem Jeffries has come around — with a push from Barack Obama — and has indicated that the Democratic caucus will meet this coming week with AI regulation now suddenly a “high priority.” And, even more stunningly, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Open AI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk have now all come forward to declare that AI development must be slowed down. We highly doubt that the sudden concern from tech CEOs is borne of altruism or a concern for humanity but, no matter their billionaire motivations, it is clear that AI regulation has now become an area of immense focus. We think it is long overdue. The International AI Safety Report, authored this past February by more than 100 global experts, is an invaluable resource on the topic of AI development, and the Report warns of a host of systemic risks, including threats to human autonomy and the possibility that AI could evolve to operate outside of human control.
Odds & Ends
The myth of wealthy people fleeing New York to escape taxation and “socialism” has always been a lie. The number of millionaires in New York is rising, while the number declines in both Florida and Texas.
A lawsuit against the Albany County Airport Authority alleges that the Authority knew that the Albany County Airport renovations were way over budget.
The GOP is raising a financial white flag in Peter Oberacker’s race to unseat Democrat Josh Riley from Congress. Good for Riley, we suppose, but we still don’t like that Congressman Riley takes money from Palantir and AIPAC.
Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes asks a question that we’ve been wondering about too, “Voters Have Spoken. Why Aren’t Democrats Listening?”
Is Washington State’s Marie Gluesenkamp Perez the absolute worst Democrat in Congress?
Speaking of bad Democrats, the Albany County Young Democrats are being scolded by New York State Democratic Chair Jay Jacobs and Albany County Democratic Chair Jake Crawford for having the audacity to criticize the genocidal actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government. Somebody should probably tell Jacobs and Crawford that the majority of actual Democratic voters — whom Jacobs and Crawford purport to represent — would agree with ACYD on this point. What astounds us most is not just that Jacobs and Crawford are choosing to espouse tired and out-of-touch talking points about the Israeli government and Netanyahu — who apparently ignored advance warnings about the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, by the way — it’s that Crawford and Jacobs are choosing to publicly reprimand ACYD for daring to hold a contrary view. Maybe we’re crazy, but we think that party chairs should be building coalitions instead of enforcing outdated orthodoxies. We’ve watched ACYD be docile little foot soldiers for the Albany County Democratic machine time and again, and excommunication is the thanks that they get for their obedience? And people wonder why establishment Democrats are viewed so unfavorably. What’s next for the likes of Jacobs and Crawford? Maybe they can express concern over men playing women’s sports? Or maybe they can condemn the horrors of socialism?
The Times Union’s H.R. Schneider has reporting on rising measles cases in central New York, despite high vaccination rates in New York generally.
In the aftermath of Roe v Wade being overturned, more women are dying after an ectopic pregnancy, especially in states with outright abortion bans. Meanwhile, the State of Texas was due on September 1 to release a report on maternal mortality in the wake of abortion becoming illegal in the State, but now the report won’t be released until after the midterms. We wonder why…
On the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani opened a document portal revealing what New York City officials knew, when they knew it, and how they covered up information about air quality and related health issues following the destruction of the World Trade Center. More than 9,000 people have died of 9/11-related health conditions in the aftermath of the tragedy. Many of those that were exposed to and have since suffered the toxic air in NYC following the collapse of the Towers were undocumented migrants who worked in cleanup crews; now those same people are fearful of being abducted by ICE.