DSA Feed
This is a feed aggregator that collects news and updates from DSA chapters, national working groups and committees, and our publications all in one convenient place. Updated every day at 8AM, 12PM, 4PM, and 8PM UTC.
Red Umbrellas: First Sex Worker Pride March Organized in Boston History
By: Andrew S
BOSTON COMMON – On September 14, sex workers and allies gathered at Brewer Fountain under a canopy of red umbrellas for Boston’s historic first March for Sex Worker Pride. Led by organizers Rita Romero from Red Light Disco, Amanda Rodriguez from FemMenThem, and Jessica Van Meir from Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective (BSWAC), the march both centered the public celebration of sex worker pride and the ongoing fight for decriminalization.
Several sex workers, community organizers, and local politicians spoke to a crowd about the importance of the event before participants marched from the Common to Jacques’ Cabaret, the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the city.
Speakers at the rally spoke on decriminalization, the importance of protecting bodily autonomy, and the contributions sex workers have made to the feminist and queer rights movements. The march was the first in Boston history, creating an opportunity to publicly recognize sex workers and their allies. Save Our Selves (SOS), Sex Worker Pride Boston, and Protect Trans Futures were all crucial supporters of the event.
For some participants like Savannah Sly, the march marked a huge milestone:
I have been a sex worker since 2003, and I am so ecstatic to see sex workers and allies visibly marching through Boston and demanding our rights be respected. I wish something like this existed when I was eighteen and was first getting started.
Members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) in attendance supported the same. Rat, co-chair of Southern New Hampshire CPUSA chapter, said:
This is another step toward destigmatization, decriminalization, and collective liberation, and to be recognized for who we are in public.
Decriminalization vs. The Nordic Model
The question of decriminalization has long been a battleground of policy for sex workers. One side favors the Nordic Model (also known as “end-demand”), where prostitution is a phenomenon manufactured from societal gender inequality, understanding buyers in the sex trade as the main culprit. Nordic Model organizations seek to illegalize commercial sex trade from the consumer side by targeting “Johns,” or customers of sex workers who are customarily presumed to be men. Nordic Model supporters believe that if the consumption of the commercial sex trade is made illegal, trafficking in the trade and the exploitation within the industry will effectively diminish.
But advocates for full sex work decriminalization actively see the Nordic Model as a dangerous misstep that leads to more restriction on sex workers. Case studies of legalization have typically resulted in more restrictions of sex workers than protections, as the government requires sex workers to register within rigid regulations. The Nordic Model has likewise proven to restrict health care access in places like Canada, greatly increasing the number of health issues that sex workers there suffered as a result.
Organizations such as the ACLU and Human Rights Watch have advocated for full decriminalization of sex work.
Protection of sex workers’ right to bodily autonomy was a center pillar for many in attendance at Boston’s first Sex Worker Pride March. Beyond keeping them safe from wrongful discrimination or safety in their profession, autonomy plays an inevitable role in sex worker earnings, too. Zachary Flynn, a sex worker in the area, spoke on his own experience:
In late-stage capitalism, autonomy is important. If you would rather judge someone for sex work than pay them a livable wage, then what else do you expect us to do? I work three to four jobs on top of sex work, and that is barely keeping me afloat.
Zachary continued, speaking on how sex work builds wealth through labor:
I think the fact that even with sex work being one of three to four jobs someone can have and even then not being able to support themselves financially says a lot on its own, but not everyone’s story with sex work is strictly about survival. It’s a chosen (and needed) profession for a fair amount of society. The point of the march is autonomy. All forms of work are selling your mind or body through means of labor, so why is it different in this context? If you have ever watched or rented porn, visited a strip club or advocated for women/queer rights, that means you support sex work, whether you realize it or not.
From Origins to Pride
Carol Leigh was the first to coin the term “sex work” in the 1980s to provide a term that described work different from prositution. According to Mary Carol of the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective (BSWAC), an important part of that was the emphasis on work and labor.
BSWAC organized around the community around this foundational concept in the run-up to the Pride March. On September 7, BSWAC hosted a screening and panel on Working Girls (1986), independent filmmaker Lizzie Borden’s movie about a day in the life of a woman working in a brothel in New York City. An overbearing manager forces her to stay beyond her hours, while displaying glimpses of interaction between workers and clients throughout the entire day. Working Girls is a representation of sex workers and their connection to labor in the view of Mary Carol.
The Pride March also took the time to remember what sex workers have contributed to and suffered historically. The red umbrellas ubiquitous across the march were not coincidence, but rather the universal symbol of solidarity that has called attention to poor working conditions faced by sex workers since 2001. Further, sex workers’ contributions far outdate the symbol. Sly stated:
Sex workers helped start Pride. Sex workers are in the canaries in the coal mine for how people are treated. They are at the forefront at the advancement of human rights and bringing home the bacon for their communities at the same time. Pride is sex workers claiming their own unique space and being the focus for collective liberation.
Many steps remain to make in order for sex worker pride to be fully enjoyed.
Rat claimed that more needs to be done legislatively and culturally: “we need to challenge elected officials on their decriminalization stance, and we need people to speak up for sex workers even when they’re not in the room.” BSWAC’s Legislative Priorities include legislation for full decriminalization, safe reporting, and mechanisms to protect workers from sexual assault by cops.
Andrew S is a member of Boston DSA and associate editor of Working Mass.
The post Red Umbrellas: First Sex Worker Pride March Organized in Boston History appeared first on Working Mass.
The Social Safety Net Fails Special-Needs Families
The cost of the long-term care of our child is a constant source of anxiety. A just society would not punish its vulnerable members for their inability to compete on the capitalist market.
The post The Social Safety Net Fails Special-Needs Families appeared first on Democratic Left.
JCTU Rent Strike
ETOC Cadre News:
Jersey City tenants declare a rent strike at 5 separate buildings on the city’s west side
FROM HUDSON COUNTY VIEW: Jersey City tenants declared a rent strike at five separate buildings on the city’s west side, alleging issues ranging from neglect, pests, and no on site building superintendent.
“They just don’t care to fix anything. The kitchen floor is in awful shape. They put some screws in the kitchen floor tile so that they don’t move around too much. It’s an awful thing. We just gotta go on strike to get what we want,” Charlie, a tenant at 154 Belmont Ave. where a rally was held last week who declined to give his last name, said.
“I’ve been living in this building 40 years. Nothing gets done, they want me to get out. Rats, mice, holes in the bottom, holes on top, and they still have the nerve to make me pay for water,” added fellow building tenant Luneste Alexender.
429 Bergen Ave., on rent strike since November, was joined this month by 150 and 154 Belmont Ave., also owned by Amir Ben-Yohanon. The Belmont buildings were previously without heat in the winter of 2024 along with 35 Kensington Ave., as HCV first reported.
Ben-Yohanon owns these buildings through a separate LLC from 429 Bergen Ave., a common practice among Jersey City landlords who may have dozens of LLCs obscuring their real estate portfolio in the city.
Tenants at 19 and 25 Kensington Ave. are also withholding rent from Optimum Properties.
“I learned about this building a while ago but just recently I just learned the severity of how people are living here. I’m talking rats biting peoples’ toes, what looks like cracks in drooping walls,” Bergen Grand Tenants Association President Liv Malone declared at the rally.
A tenant in the crowd interjected that the building at 429 Bergen Ave. has “water coming in everywhere.”
“So I’ve just really enjoyed getting to know everyone who lives here and thinking about how they can get to live in a home that’s safe and that’s clean. Because I can promise you that the landlord that we share, Amir Ben-Yohanon, does not live like this and the only way that that will change is by the people living here deciding it’s done and that’s what you guys are doing here,” Malone concluded.
Eli King, an organizer with Jersey City Tenants Union, echoed that sentiment without mentioning calling out any specific landlords.
“Landlords know their power and they’re not afraid to use it, to neglect basic living standards in buildings they own to maximize the profit from their investment. Tenants are coming together and using our power: there’s more of us than there are of them and every dollar of those profits is money that we work for,” he asserted.
“Both of these owners own massive portfolios in the city and we’re not going to stop with these buildings or with these landlords. Anyone who is ready to get organized and fight back against their landlord, come talk to us.”
Ben-Yohanon did not return an email seeking comment on Sunday, while Optimum Properties could not be reached for comment.
Flicking the Switch on Flock
By: Reid Jackson
BOSTON – On September 16, Boston announced the end of its contract with Flock Safety after uncovering the company sharing local data with outside law enforcement.
If this is shocking news to you, you may be a Boston City Councilmember: “Boston City Councilor Ben Weber said he was disappointed to see the agency was sharing data.”
Boston is now the latest – and largest – city in New England to find out the hard way that Flock cameras are more trouble than they’re worth. The cancellation is the latest but not the first. While City Hall can be given a crumb of credit for doing the bare minimum and shelving the contract once the threat to data security became evident, it’s strange that the eight separate cases of cops misusing Flock cameras primarily to stalk former partners did not incentivize City Council to act. It’s also hard to excuse Flock violating the data sharing policy despite being strictly forbidden by the city’s contract:
“When the Boston Police Department discovered that a Flock data-sharing function had been enabled despite a clear, contractual agreement prohibiting its use, BPD immediately directed the vendor to disable it,” the city and the Boston Police Department said in a joint statement on WCVB 5. “The city has since ended all use of Flock and will not use its services going forward.”
The public can watch city officials and police run headfirst into its own crisis, considering the reputation of Automated License Plate Readers across the country. The public perception of state-approved spy cameras is exactly what you think it is, and according to some organizers in the Metrowest region, exactly the weapon that many fear.
Bobbie, one Framingham resident and member of the Metrowest Neighborhood Group of the Boston chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has been present at every step of the process of the push to get Flock cameras not just removed, but outright banned in her town.
The Metrowest area of Framingham and Marlborough has the largest population of Brazilian immigrants in the state, which has opened the towns up to become the main targets of ICE in the region. The movement to target surveillance technology arose from organizers within the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of MA, after shifting from a focus on ICE verification training that characterized much of LUCE’s activity in 2025.
Immigrant justice organizers were aware of ICE’s use of data from cameras like Flock’s to coordinate kidnappings. According to Bobbie:
There was a lot of concern that ICE could have access to this technology to identify and kidnap our neighbors, and that the federal admin could use it to stalk activists. Plus, police forces from outside of Massachusetts could use it to track citizens looking for healthcare across state lines, which we had already seen proof of in 404 Media reporting.
Bobbie said the first and most crucial step of their crusade against Framingham’s Flock program was to gather information, especially of the actual number of cameras in the city’s limits. This was a task that was only possible with the coordination of Framingham residents who mapped out everywhere they could find a camera on a city street, in order to accurately measure the success of the campaign. Framingham residents report using the website deflock.me to identify the cameras, as well as driving to each spot to visually confirm their location in town.
Next was the ordinary avenues of public pressure on the local government. Despite the City Council’s sidestepping and shifting of responsibility between the police chief and the mayor, organizers successfully managed to land a date for a public hearing with a Flock official in Spring 2026 through a Framingham City Councilmember arranging a public forum to ask questions of a company representative. Coalition members held the representative’s feet to the fire as they attempted to dodge questions and explain away the infringements of residents’ civil liberties.
Depending on the city leadership, campaigns here have two choices: extra pressure or public protest. Power-mapping is the strategic tool most helpful here, to determine the power relations unique to the municipality. Longer fought battles have been the case in similar campaigns against the much better funded data center projects such as the Dungeon in Lowell, which recently had its expansion paused by a state judge.
Alternatively, in towns like Natick or Waltham, the town does not need an excuse to do away with a surveillance program. In Natick’s example, the project was not made known to the public or voted on by the Town Meeting or Select Board. Natick voted unanimously to end the program this February, and Waltham shut their cameras down just this month.
For many of these towns, including Framingham’s removal of cameras this June, this marks only the first step. Since the state legislation is lagging behind this issue, municipalities are forced to set their own rules – and be pressured as organizing targets – for surveillance in their neighborhoods case-by-case.
[When we started this campaign]… a few of our organizers initially thought we would only get regulation and not a full ban,” Bobbie said. “Even though we all wanted a ban… we learned we had more support on the full council for a full ban… after a ton of public comment from our organizers.
Despite the reservations of more entrenched institutions, expanding the horizons of the politically possible is the organizers’ role. The fight against mass surveillance will be fought town-by-town, but with the help of a broad coalition like Mass 50501, Indivisible Mass Alliance, and DSA, the tools of one successful campaign can easily be repurposed for use in other towns, or in other fights against encroaching tyranny in the American empire.
With Flock and other ALPR’s only becoming less and less popular, the tide is on the side of those fighting against accountability-free data collection.
Reid Jackson is a member of the Metrowest Neighborhood Group of Boston DSA and contributing writer for Working Mass.
NOTE: A previous version of this article misattributed LUCE as the source of reporting, when 404 Media was the actual source mentioned in-quote. This has been corrected in this version of this article.
The post Flicking the Switch on Flock appeared first on Working Mass.
Buffalo DSA Leaders Meet With Rep. AOC
On Thursday, members of our Steering Committee and endorsed candidate Adam Bojak met privately with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We were proud to share how we are building a durable, sustainable socialist project here, as well as share our hope to see Rep. AOC coordinate more strongly with the growing socialist bloc forming at every level of elected office. Afterward, a range of our chapter organizers joined Team AOC for their Project Reactivation event.
Regardless of what her political career holds, one thing is clear: Rep. AOC and her team would not have visited Buffalo, or prioritized a private sit-down with Buffalo DSA leaders, without the diligent work of our members. The foundation we’ve laid in healthcare organizing, labor solidarity, tenant suport, and electoral politics have put Buffalo DSA on the map.
The working class is hungry for political change, and our chapter is ready to lead the charge.
We look forward to leading discussions on this meeting, how our chapter might relate to a future AOC candidacy, and more at our Oct. 17 General Body Meeting. We will also hold our first of many discussions on the 2028 Presidential Election, and DSA’s role within that.
Join DSA to shape our strategy in and out of electoral politics, to build real working class power.
An Immigrant Socialist-in-office Returns to a Country in Crisis
New York Assemblymember Diana Moreno discusses the collapse into violence of her native Ecuador with U.S. collusion.
The post An Immigrant Socialist-in-office Returns to a Country in Crisis appeared first on Democratic Left.
MoCo DSA September Newsletter
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The post MoCo DSA September Newsletter appeared first on .
Trump’s Favorite Communist Just Got A Lot More Charming
The Chamber of Commerce prepares for war, DoorDash gets dashed, and more.
"Red All Over," Democratic Left’s occasional round-up of media coverage of DSA.
The post Trump’s Favorite Communist Just Got A Lot More Charming appeared first on Democratic Left.
The San Jose Execution
This statement was written by members of the Silicon Valley DSA Liberation and Justice Working Group.
A Tragedy of Systemic Violence
The events that unfolded on January 21st, 2026, in San Jose, California, serve as a chilling, visceral testament to the enduring crisis of systemic violence against Black lives in America. Mohamed Husein was a son, a brother, and a father murdered in cold blood for fleeing from San Jose Police Department officers to avoid arrest for a crime spree. He was literally running for his life, attempting to escape a system that, for far too many, equates criminality with a death sentence.
The Lethal Pursuit
While running away, Mohamed Husein was struck by gunshots that erupted from multiple officers. These bullets found their mark, and Mohamed collapsed onto the street. What happened next was incomprehensible brutality that led to San Jose Police Department SUV, purportedly an instrument of public safety, barreled over his prone body, treating a human life as nothing more than an unseen speed bump.
The scene did not end there as it devolved into a firing squad. Gunfire filled the air as the officers discharged their weapons into Mohamed’s already lifeless body that lay in the street. Other than involuntary final jerks of his limbs, the bullets still traveled through his motionless body. This incident is a prime example of a public execution that is a systemic pattern of violence against Black and Brown communities nationwide.
State Sanctioned Lynchings: A Grim American Tradition
The ruthless slaying of Black people in public view is a grim tradition as old as the United States itself. Historically, the suffering and exploitation of Black and Brown people laid the foundation for America, a parasitic relationship that continues to stunt the growth and potential of these communities. These continued acts of violence against Black and Brown folk must be recognized for what they are: lynchings. Calling them anything else is doing a disservice to those who have fallen at the hands of this broken system, and minimizes the true extent of harm caused to these communities.
These highly visible public lynchings have become so common that American society has grown desensitized to the spectacle of Black and Brown lives being extinguished in plain sight. This normalization of violence mirrors the acceptance of historical lynchings in earlier eras, where the public display of Black death served as a tool of terror, social control, and grotesque entertainment.
Historically, lynchings served as social control, a threat to all Brown and Black folks who dared to defy the system. The ruling class knew that, without socially normalized lynching, their continued exploitation of Brown and Brown bodies would come to an end. Likewise, we today are inundated with reports of fatal encounters with the police, placing all blame on the victims. Society has become numb to this senseless violence and has begun to accept it as something that “just happens”.
Modern-day Lynchings in the Courtroom and the Street
Modern-day lynchings have occurred covertly within courtrooms across the nation, carried out under the pretexts of “law and order” and “crime and punishment.” These lynchings have inured the public to the violence the police inflict. Members of the justice system have long used this regime of criminalization as an excuse to manipulate, amend, and blatantly violate the very laws they swore to uphold. Society has widely accepted that law enforcement can, and will, operate outside the boundaries of the law they ostensibly uphold. History is full of examples where minor infractions have been systematically and lethally escalated into death sentences.
In the pre-Civil Rights Jim Crow era, social rules demanded subservience from Black folks, like stepping off sidewalks for white people, avoiding eye contact, or speaking informally. The punishment for violations was often brutal lynching rather than due process. The horrific 1943 murder of 15-year-old Willie James Howard in Florida, killed for the “crime” of giving a white girl an innocent Christmas card, illustrates how minor interactions were seen as deadly threats against the structure of white supremacy.
Despite being officially abolished, the spirit and consequence of these Jim Crow laws persist today. Recent victims include Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and George Floyd, who were murdered by the police for such minor alleged crimes as selling loose cigarettes, forgetting to use a turn signal, or using a fake $20 bill. Tragically, this list of victims continues to grow.
“Breaking the Law” as a Death Penalty Pretext
Today, “breaking the law” may as well lead to the death penalty. By claiming a law has been broken, law enforcement justify circumventing constitutionally guaranteed due process, allowing officers to act as judge, jury, and executioner in the streets.
Mohamed Husein was murdered because he was Black, and because the system has made it acceptable to extinguish Black lives, especially when they are alleged to have broken the law. In this country, Black folks are a target of systemic aggression, which is only amplified by a criminal allegation. Once law enforcement labels a victim a criminal, a deeply ingrained societal justification, “if they would not have committed the crime, they would not have been killed”, tacitly sanctions state-sponsored murder.
Demanding Accountability in Santa Clara County
This county, like others throughout the country, has historically been complacent during public lynchings and has shown a profound lack of regard for the victims of police violence. Excessive force is normalized, especially once a crime is attached to the life taken. In these cases, the Constitutional right of “innocent until proven guilty” becomes a hollow phrase.
Jeff Rosen, District Attorney in Santa Clara County, meant to be the community’s advocate for accountability, clearly has misplaced priorities. Instead of pursuing justice for Mohamed, his office sought the only felony charges against pro-Palestine college campus protests in the nation, targeting the Stanford 11;outrageously, he attempted to charge a student reporter, a clear first amendment violation. Rosen was so clearly compromised that his office was barred from re-trying the case since he used it as fundraising for his campaign and tried to paint the protestors as anti-semitic. Months later, there has not been any resolution or justice for the killing of Mohamed, as any elected DA should have achieved by now.
The force used in SJPD’s public execution of Mohamed Husein was undeniably excessive. District Attorney Jeff Rosen and his investigative team must bring criminal charges against all deputies involved: the officers shot into his back as he was running, the deputy who ran him over with the SUV, and all the officers who fired into his lifeless body afterwards. They must be prosecuted for taking the law into their own hands instead of following due process and for attempting to rationalize their racist, discriminatory, abhorrent behavior.
The Violation of Oath and Law
The San Jose Police Department failed to uphold their oath to protect and serve. They ignored their training and did not properly follow the escalation of force process. SJPD possesses several K9 units, which are specifically equipped and trained to apprehend someone fleeing a crime scene without resorting to lethal force, which they could have used to avoid needless death.
The punishment of death was not commensurate with the crime committed and would not have been the sentence in any court in California. SJPD broke the law when they executed Mohamed in the street, despite the death penalty moratorium imposed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2019.
Mohamed Husein was denied the dignity of a fair legal process and his constitutionally guaranteed day in court. Instead, he was subjected to the death penalty, a punishment not administered in California, carried out by the very agents sworn to protect him.
Addressing the Mental Health Crisis
At the root of many instances of brutality by SJPD (and the justice system at large) is society’s failure to adequately support folks experiencing mental health crises, like Mohamed Husein, and many others suffering under this system. Mohahmed’s family informed the police that he was mentally unstable and would require additional assistance or, at least, a modicum of understanding, but even those preemptive warnings were not enough to guarantee safe, non-lethal interactions with law enforcement.
Husein’s story, along with those of many others before him, have fomented a deep mistrust in the justice system. Despite that, there seems to be little support for its victims. Many can afford neither the time nor the resources to seek help. Law enforcement often becomes involved when mental illness pushes people past their breaking point.
Police are often the first public resource utilized during a crisis. The SJPD has Mobile Crisis Response teams that can respond to mental health crises, but those teams lack crucial resources. Most officers are not adequately trained or equipped to deal with a mental health crisis in a safe manner. We must direct vital funding towards community care programs like the Mobile Crisis Response teams.
There are resources available for those seeking help, although visibility and funding for their work is often less than ideal. Within Santa Clara County, there are several organizations that offer accessible mental health support. 988 is the Santa Clara County Crisis and Suicide Hotline, available 24 hours, 7 days a week.
Asian Americans for Community Involvement (AACI) is another organization that provides low-to-no cost service available for those seeking help. Trust Mental Health is another organization that offers low-to-no cost services.
If you want to organize for a better world, join the Liberation and Justice Working Group of Silicon Valley DSA.
The post The San Jose Execution appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.
What The Flock: Prison Populists and Palantyranny
There is a peculiar American humiliation in having to explain why you would like to buy groceries without helping populate a police database.
You needed eggs. Apparently, you also owed somebody a record of the trip.
Flock Safety’s roadside cameras collect license plates, vehicle characteristics, locations, and timestamps. Pass one and your car can become a searchable observation, available to an investigator with access. The company describes these as snapshots of public vehicle information. Such a modest word, snapshot. A birthday. A beach. Your car passing an intersection while you are trying to get through a Tuesday.
A collection of those observations has a different character. It lets an institution ask questions about where you have been. The public road supplies the material. You supply the life.
I resent the assumption that either is theirs for the taking. I resent being expected to prove that a trip deserves privacy, as though the default condition of citizenship were a standing invitation to inspect me. And I am tired of the little ceremony in which an industry takes something intimate, calls it data, and waits for the objection to become polite enough to ignore.
A road is not a confession.
On May 9, 2025, a Texas sheriff’s office searched a month of available records across 83,345 Flock cameras. The reason entered in the log was “had an abortion, search for female.” A woman’s partner had reported her. Investigators collected evidence and asked prosecutors whether they could charge her for taking the medication. They were told they could not.
The sheriff and Flock later presented the search as an effort to protect her welfare. But when the woman came to the sheriff’s office a week later, officers questioned her about the abortion and examined her messages. She had come to report a violent assault by the partner who had reported her. He was subsequently charged. The records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation document that sequence.
Her need for protection had to get past the state’s interest in her pregnancy.
Nobody has to invent a dystopia around this. The investigator typed the reason into a box. The archive was there to be searched. That is what should stick in the throat: how little had to happen before so much became available.
The usual reassurances arrive with the weary regularity of an automated email. Your plate is already visible. The records are only kept for a while. The system has rules.
Yes, a plate is visible. So is a person sitting in a café. Being seen by another human being does not make your afternoon the rightful property of an investigative system. We used to understand the difference between passing someone on the street and following them home. The distinction does not evaporate because the follower has learned to invoice the city.
Flock defaults to thirty days of retention, adjustable by its customers. That is a rolling month of observations, refreshed as people keep driving. Deletion at one end does not stop collection at the other. The archive gets younger. The appetite does not.
And rules governing access begin after the first trespass: the decision to make ordinary movement available for inspection. A lock on the filing cabinet cannot supply permission to fill it. An audit can help expose a search that should never have happened; it cannot make the person unsearched.
We have been through enough tracking scandals, data-broker revelations, and solemn announcements of revised privacy policies to recognize this transaction. First the intrusion becomes possible. Then it becomes profitable. Eventually, we are invited to a discussion about transparency. By the time the public gets a seat, somebody else is collecting rent on the furniture.
Flock has given that familiar entitlement a place beside the road. It is a physical reminder, on the route to work or the way out of town, that somebody has decided your passing should leave a record. You can object at the meeting. Your car can be recorded on the way home.
The intimacy of a life often resides in its errands. The pharmacy visited twice. The address you have stopped going to. The place across town where you are trying, quietly, to become someone else. A location does not explain any of these things. It can nevertheless furnish an official with a question you never owed him an answer to.
Now consider the protest. In September 2026, 404 Media reported on a Flock webinar that used Denver’s No Kings demonstrations to illustrate event-monitoring tools, including live video. People gathering to contest power became an example of how to equip power to watch them.
Even the objection gets a product demo.
A demonstration is public because people want to be heard. That does not mean they have volunteered for an institution’s future questions about their associations. A crowd contains the newly persuaded, the unsure, the person attending for the first time, the person whose employer would disapprove. Democracy needs room for people to arrive before they have worked out what arrival might cost. Surveillance sends the bill ahead of time.
The prison populist has a solution to this discomfort: imagine that the machinery will always be aimed at somebody worse than you. Give the state more power over them, and it will give you peace. The bargain offers a little borrowed sovereignty, the pleasure of picturing yourself beside the officer rather than inside the search results.
Donald Trump put that bargain in the title of his January 2025 order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” The order directed expanded state and local participation in immigration enforcement. The language does its work before any search begins. A population is cast as a threat; restraint becomes something to apologize for. All that remains is to equip the people promising to remove it.
The target changes. The equipment stays.
This is the prison’s political inheritance: divide people into those entitled to feel safe and those whose submission is supposed to supply the feeling. Then keep expanding the means of submission. A frightened public gets a spectacle of control. The people selling control get a recurring customer. The person who needs housing, treatment, or somewhere to escape a violent partner gets told the budget is complicated.
There is an actual corporate bridge between the cage and the cloud. GEO Group operates correctional and detention facilities; its subsidiary BI Incorporated provides electronic monitoring, supervision, and case management under ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. GEO reported a renewed award for that work in September 2025. Confinement and monitoring are two lines of business under one roof.
An ankle monitor can be preferable to a cell. That comparison cannot tell us why a person should be monitored at all. When surveillance is imposed on someone who could otherwise remain free, the prison has expanded its reach while congratulating itself on opening the door.
Flock offers a more diffuse version of the presumption that people should be made continuously available to authority. No ankle bracelet required. The roadside does the collecting, and a reason to look backward can arrive later. Everyone captured in the archive helps stock the shelf, whether or not an investigator ever takes an interest.
There is serious money in stocking it. Flock’s March 2025 funding announcement named Founders Fund among the participants in a $275 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Peter Thiel, associated with Founders Fund and a co-founder of Palantir, wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Whose freedom? The freedom to build the apparatus, certainly. The freedom to refuse it appears to be causing considerably more trouble. Small-government enthusiasm becomes exquisitely selective when the government has a purchase order. The state must keep its filthy hands off the entrepreneur and its eyes on everybody else.
Palantir makes software for turning institutional knowledge into action. ICE’s April 2025 award of $30 million for ImmigrationOS specified work on identifying and prioritizing people for apprehension, tracking departures, and managing removals. In January 2026, 404 Media published a user guide for ELITE, another Palantir tool used by ICE, describing maps, dossiers, and confidence scores estimating the reliability of people’s addresses.
Confidence scores on where you sleep.
An address can be correct and the purpose of finding it abhorrent. AI’s most useful contribution to an authoritarian project may be immaculate obedience: find the person, sort the records, save the official some time. The machine need never develop a taste for cruelty. There is a customer for that.
Palantyranny is the rule of the unaccountable over the searchable. It joins the corporation’s power to classify with the state’s power to compel, making a person’s life increasingly visible to authorities whose decisions remain difficult to examine or resist. Your movements become their evidence. Their assumptions become your problem. The machinery may know where you sleep without knowing why you are afraid—and still help decide who comes to your door. Its defining achievement is this unequal exchange: power acquires a detailed account of your life while owing you scarcely an account of itself.
Flock and Palantir occupy different parts of this business. What joins the camera to the dossier politically is the claim on your availability: your movements held ready, your circumstances made useful, your life kept within reach. More capable software makes that reach cheaper to exercise. It does nothing to make it deserved.
You do not owe Flock a useful Tuesday. You do not owe a sheriff an interesting past.
“I have nothing to hide” accepts the wrong obligation. It offers to earn privacy through good behavior. But freedom is not a prize awarded after an inspection, and innocence is no promise that the inspector will leave you alone. The ability to go about your life must survive an official’s curiosity, a contractor’s sales target, and the next election.
Nor does the injury wait for an arrest. Sociologist Sarah Brayne’s 2014 research found an association between criminal-justice contact and reduced attachment to record-keeping institutions such as medical care, banks, formal employment, and education. The same pattern did not appear for civic and religious participation. Her account of “system avoidance” identifies a frightening possibility: people can retreat from the institutions they need because those institutions make them visible.
Her study concerned criminal-justice contact. The question it leaves beside a roadside camera is what people will give up to avoid the attention they fear. The appointment postponed. The meeting missed. The journey reconsidered until staying home feels like a decision freely made.
That last trick is especially foul. Power sets the conditions; you do the shrinking. There may never be an order to disobey or a charge to contest. Just a smaller radius in which to be yourself.
So no, the answer is not to design a more considerate dragnet. The answer is to stop collecting ordinary lives against the possibility that somebody powerful will want them later. End the contracts for indiscriminate movement surveillance. Require deletion of the accumulated records and verification that it happened. Close the routes through which another agency or a commercial broker can supply what a community has refused to collect. A particular investigation needs a particular justification. The rest of us are not its raw material.
Locally, that means finding the renewal date, demanding the contract, and making the council defend the decision in public. It means asking for removal without allowing the conversation to collapse into a tutorial on settings. A surveillance company is a business. It can lose a customer. We do not have to preserve its revenue stream as a constitutional courtesy.
And when the presentation returns to how much the system could know, bring the argument back to what it has no right to know. The errands, the friendships, the private repair work of a human life. The destination that matters desperately to you. The destination that does not matter at all.
You went somewhere.
None of their business.
***
This essay was first published on the author’s Substack, The Armory, on September 10, 2026. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.
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