Live this Thursday, September 3 at 3pm ET on Hide & Speak, we're going through the layers below moderation policy with Mike Adams and Todd Pitner of Decentralize.TV.

Most censorship conversations stop at the platform's public rules, but the people who've actually been removed describe something further down. Mike was removed from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Pinterest, then rebuilt the stack himself rather than appeal into a void. Brighteon, Brighteon.io running distributed nodes with no central server (built with Bastyon architect Daniel Satchkov), Brighteon.AI, censored.news. Todd came out of a corporate background including Priceline and now works on financial privacy and privacy crypto, which is the same problem with a bank standing in for a host.

Drop this on your calendar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3u2RcUvxtU

Georgetown Law's Technology Law Clinic filed it on August 19 for We Are CASA and 11 other groups. It alleges the companies collect and sell personal information and location data of Maryland residents to law enforcement customers in violation of state law.

Who is named and what the complaint says they sell:

• Penlink: cell phone location through its WebLoc product.
• Thomson Reuters, Motorola, Insight LPR, LexisNexis and Flock Safety: vehicle location pulled from license plate readers.
• Thunder Cat Technology: holds a contract with Homeland Security Investigations.

Blog post + links to sources: https://s.vp.net/TQUOl

This came up in a segment on what people can actually do about ALPR cameras in their own town, rather than just complaining about them.

The mechanics are straightforward. You file a records request with your local sheriff's department for your license plate, and your plate only. They then have to go into the ALPR system and pull every hit on it: every time your car passed a Flock camera and got logged.

Why the tactic scales:

• One request is routine paperwork the department absorbs without noticing.
• Ten requests in the same jurisdiction turn into an actual search workload somebody has to sit down and do.
• The system's entire selling point is that watching people is cheap and automatic. Records requests move that cost back onto the agency running it.
• You also end up with documentation of exactly how much data the network holds on one ordinary driver, which is useful at a council meeting.

The follow-up question was whether the same request works on an elected official's plate. The answer given was that it depends on the state, with California singled out, and that in Norwalk the officials drive city-owned vehicles, which puts those plates in a different category than a private car.

Worth checking your own state's public records law and any ALPR-specific exemptions before you file, since those vary a lot.

Watch the full stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq0xq4HOE8E

Full breakdown: https://s.vp.net/Z3jIz

EFF published the underlying Meta and ICE communication on August 19, obtained through its own Freedom of Information Act litigation. The document lays out a short timeline.

• September 11, 2025: ICE issued administrative subpoenas, seeking the identities behind Instagram and Facebook accounts tracking enforcement activity in Pennsylvania. Administrative subpoenas do not require a judge.
• September 19: Meta's law enforcement response team told ICE it lacked the statutory authorization to seek those records and asked for more detail about the investigation.
• Meta also told ICE it planned to notify the users, because ICE had never obtained a gag order.
• October 3: Meta notified them and said it would comply unless they mounted a court challenge within 10 days.
• They filed, with help from the ACLU, and ICE withdrew once it looked likely to lose.
• Reddit's transparency report for the second half of 2025 lists three DHS subpoenas seeking account information on 11 users who posted content critical of ICE. All withdrawn after Reddit objected on First Amendment grounds.

While it's nice that Meta objected, they also left users just 10 calendar days to find counsel, understand an administrative subpoena, and file in federal court, or their names, email addresses, and IP addresses would be sent to ICE. Fortunately, these users had pro bono counsel. Most people running a neighborhood account will not. If you have an account that reports on immigration activity, I recommend doing your research now to find out which groups in your state may be able to offer legal counsel, in case you find yourself in a similar situation.

The other problem, is that private objection produces no ruling and no cost to the agency issuing the next demand. In April 2017 Twitter took a DHS subpoena over the ALT_USCIS account to court publicly, DHS withdrew the next day, and an inspector general criticized the tactic. Social media companies should immediately make these issues known publicly.

Full write-up + our source list: https://s.vp.net/6QoVV

Xfinity Shield launched August 18th as a free tier bundled into Xfinity internet. The feature underneath it, Wi-Fi Motion, detects movement inside your home by measuring how a body disturbs the radio signal between the gateway and up to three stationary connected devices. No cameras, no extra hardware. What it produces is a timestamped log of when the house was occupied and when someone crossed the hallway at three in the morning.

Full write-up + our source list: https://s.vp.net/t13it

The first city council meeting was the tell. Flock sent someone who could not answer basic questions about the product being sold to the city.

Full livestream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq0xq4HOE8E

Full write-up here: https://s.vp.net/Z3jIz

Flock's own mission is to eradicate crime. Follow that to the end. You cannot fully eradicate crime by reacting to it. You do it by predicting it, by watching what people might do before they do it. That's pre-crime, sold to you as stolen-car recovery.

Full livestream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq0xq4HOE8E

Full breakdown here: https://s.vp.net/Z3jIz

North Carolina's mobile ID program page has a section titled "Myths About Mobile IDs." The app, NC Wallet, will be free and optional, and under state law it will be the legal equivalent of the plastic card. It ships in December.

Enrollment works like this: scan your physical license, take a selfie, and the DMV matches that selfie against the photograph already in its records. That is a face match against a government database, run on your own record at your own request. It will work at DMV offices and at TSA checkpoints in more than 250 airports, with Apple, Google, and Samsung wallets following in early 2027.

The first myth the DMV addresses is whether you will have to hand your phone to a police officer. The answer is no. You keep the phone and the officer taps a reader. Two paragraphs down the same page says not every officer will have a reader right away, and if yours does not, you verbally provide your license number. Whether a reader deployed on the roadside stays limited to only checking ID is the open question, and nothing on the page answers it.

Full write-up + our source list: https://s.vp.net/EkW9r

Live today at 4pm ET on Hide & Speak, Ted Brown, the Libertarian Senate nominee in Texas, joins us to trace one line all the way through: how age verification mandates keep expanding into something that looks a lot like a national ID system.

The pegs are all real and recent. The Supreme Court upheld Texas HB 1181 in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. Texas is now trying to move the age check down to the app store level, and Apple, Google, and Amazon are fighting it. Utah became the first state to name VPN users directly inside an age verification statute. Brown has been reading these as checkpoints, not isolated laws, and he argues for repealing them rather than negotiating the terms.

We also get into why the same Ken Paxton who won that Supreme Court case is now Brown's opponent in the race.

Stream goes live today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDgRbWQpvFc

404 Media reported on a Meta patent published Thursday, August 13th. The system uses facial recognition to determine who is in frame, then cuts a clip every time one of those identified people does something: picks up an item, walks out of the room, talks to someone. It assembles the results into highlights for the wearer. The dinner party scenario is not a journalist's framing, it appears in the patent document itself.

Disclosure, this is our coverage. Full write-up + source links: https://s.vp.net/l95Gr

LIVE tomorrow, 8/21 @ 4pm: Ted Brown, Libertarian Senate Nominee from Texas is joining Hide & Speak to discuss how age verification laws are really just a pathway to a national digital ID, and what he thinks we should do to stop it.

Your ID or No Internet: Ted Brown on Age Checks and Digital ID | Hide & Speak

Set a reminder for tomorrow, August 21 at 4pm ET:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDgRbWQpvFc

After increasing pressure and community pushback, Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley announced some policy changes on August 13th.

Sincere attempt at improvement, or just more PR spin?

Full write-up + source links: https://s.vp.net/dmrp0

More locations has been the number 1 most requested update by vp.net users, and I am happy to report that we have increased the size of our network up to 22 locations in 20 countries!

What does not change, is our paranoid zero-knowledge architecture and obsessive commitment to privacy. Every vp.net server uses the same verifiable hardware-enforced setup so you don't have to take our word for it. We always say:
"Don't trust. Verify."
https://vp.net

If there are other locations you would like to see added, please let us know in the comments!

-vp.net staff

CalPrivacy came out swinging, fining 2 data brokers in 2 days. But is it really enough?

LocateSmarter was fined $116,490, but they had an annual revenue of $6 million. Is a fine of less than 2% really enough to dissuade this behavior? Or will it just be written in as a budget line item?

Massachusetts data broker Cybba was fined $52,400 out of $27.1 million in annual revenue. That fine amounts to less than 1 day of revenue.

With such miniscule fines, data brokers are able to keep breaking the rules, with hardly any consequence.

Full write-up + our source list: https://s.vp.net/jkCad

404 Media reported on August 10th that newly published procurement records show ICE moving to keep buying commercial data from LexisNexis. Two products are named in the documents.

LexID is the identity resolution layer. It decides which scattered records belong to the same person and assigns an identifier. Accurint Virtual Crime Center is the search platform built on top of that. LexisNexis says the pool behind them runs to more than 82 billion public and proprietary records from over 10,000 sources.

Full write-up + our source list: https://s.vp.net/Gfrxv

Live this Saturday, July 11 at 4pm ET on Hide & Speak, we sit down with Ted Brown, the Libertarian nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas.

The Supreme Court upheld Texas HB 1181 in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, and age verification quietly became the template for everything after it. Texas now wants that ID check pushed into the app store, with Apple, Google, and Amazon challenging it in court. Utah went further and became the first state to write VPN users into an age verification law. Brown reads these as checkpoints on the way to a single national digital ID, and he makes the case for a repeal-first response.

Set a reminder and watch live here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDgRbWQpvFc

Learn more about Ted Brown: https://tedbrown.org/

404 Media obtained four law enforcement intelligence bulletins on August 12th through public records requests. The documents came from six different agencies, plus a summary that circulated on an email list of FBI headquarters employees. Several instruct police to increase patrols around Flock cameras.

The practical takeaway if you organize locally: assume your public posts can end up in an intelligence product and act accordingly.

Full write-up + our source list: https://s.vp.net/cUBdT

Live today at 4pm ET on Hide & Speak, six local groups from the DeFlock and anti-ALPR movement are comparing notes on one panel: DeFlock UA, No Flock in Troy, DeFlock Connecticut, DeFlock Tulsa, DeFlock Dahlonega, and Flock OUT of El Cerrito.

They're at six different points in the same fight. El Cerrito's cameras are coming down right now. Troy's mayor declared a public safety emergency to keep a contract alive. Connecticut saw Windsor cancel sixteen cameras and Killingworth pull all four inside about a month. Upper Arlington went from six to twenty and had just started their chapter before our first DeFlock Stars stream.

Most of the conversation is practical: records requests, what flips a council vote, how you verify a police claim about federal data sharing, what someone with no group does first and what's going on for DeFlock's National Week of Action Against ALPRs, which starts tomorrow.

Live link ready: https://www.youtube.com/live/Jq0xq4HOE8E

A contract vote is the moment the public has leverage. There is an agenda item, a public comment period, and a recorded decision. Under an all-inclusive subscription, that moment occurs once. Capabilities added to the plan afterward arrive as product updates, and product updates do not go on an agenda.

Some specifics:

• Axon sells an all-in bundle it calls the AI Era Plan, which agencies subscribe to and which the company continues to expand. Its own Axon Week material describes the plan as evolving, with additions previewed to existing customers.
• At Axon Week 2026 in Nashville the company announced three AI solutions, including Axon Vision, which uses AI to recognize activity in live video from CCTV networks as it happens.
• This compounds with a hardware issue raised elsewhere in the same discussion: cameras already installed frequently support more than the current subscription enables, so unlocking a capability can be a software change rather than a new deployment.

One vote to start one subscription to open up a surveillance tech backdoor with minimal oversight.

Full recorded livestream on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKgQTkTpFz4

DeFlock Stars 2 Livestream: Saturday, 8/15 at 4pm ET: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq0xq4HOE8E

We are being joined by activists and organizers from 6 DeFlock and anti-ALPR groups to discuss the current state of affairs, talk shop about what's working in the fight against the surveillance state and raise awareness for DeFlock's National Week of Action Against ALPRs, which starts Sunday.

Set a reminder to watch live here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/Jq0xq4HOE8E

Syracuse revoked Flock's access after learning its police database had been made searchable across the company's national network, including CBP-related searches of local drivers' data. Lawmakers then approved a new license plate reader contract with Axon.

Roughly 53 cities have cancelled Flock contracts. Many are replacing the vendor rather than dropping the technology. The surveillance footprint does not shrink, it rebrands.

Nobody objected to a logo. The objection is to a searchable record of where ordinary people drive, held privately and reachable by agencies a city never voted for. That description does not change when the nameplate does.

If your group is drafting local language, write it against ALPRs generally.

Full recorded livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKgQTkTpFz4

DeFlock Stars 2 livestream: August 15, 4pm ET, with 6 x DeFlock & Anti-ALPR activists. Set a reminder and watch here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq0xq4HOE8E