u/SuperBry

Too... much... juice...

Text for those paywalled:

Automated license plate readers operating along Bangor Road in Unity could fall within a broader statewide challenge now being mounted against the technology by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine and lawmakers seeking a possible ban.

The ACLU has not publicly identified the Unity cameras as a specific target, and it has not announced a lawsuit in Maine. Its campaign is instead focused on obtaining local records, examining how police departments collect and share motorists’ information and supporting legislation that could prohibit most law enforcement use of automated plate readers.

That effort reaches beyond the Flock Safety cameras at the center of controversies in several Maine communities. The equipment in Unity was manufactured by Leonardo, but the proposed ban described by Rep. David Boyer, R-Poland, would apply to automated license plate readers generally, with an exception for toll collection. If enacted as described, the Unity cameras would be subject to the same prohibition. Detailed bill language has not yet been released, and the Legislature is not expected to consider the proposal until after it reconvenes in January.

The Unity devices, positioned to monitor north- and southbound traffic near 38 Bangor Road, automatically photograph license plates and convert them into searchable data. Depending on their configuration, such systems can record a plate number, vehicle image, location, direction, and precise date and time.

Police say the technology can help locate stolen vehicles, identify cars connected to crimes, and find missing or endangered people. A reader can compare plates against law enforcement hotlists and alert officers when a vehicle of interest passes. Stored observations also can help investigators determine whether a vehicle traveled through an area during a burglary, theft or other incident.

Civil liberties advocates focus on the far greater number of records created by motorists who are not suspected of wrongdoing. One observation may reveal little, but data from multiple cameras can create a detailed picture of a person’s movements. The ACLU warns that interconnected systems could expose visits to medical providers, houses of worship, political gatherings and other sensitive locations.

The organization initially requested contracts, policies and communications involving Flock systems in York, Lewiston, Auburn, South Portland, Portland, Falmouth, Brunswick and Sanford. It has said the inquiry will expand to other Maine communities using plate reader technology. Among its questions are who owns the information, how long it is retained, why companies offer discounted or free equipment, and whether local data can be searched by federal agencies or police outside Maine.

Those are also relevant questions in Waldo County. Sheriff Jason Trundy said the county commissioners approached then-Sheriff Jeff Trafton in 2021 or 2022 about purchasing and deploying Leonardo cameras. The commissioners asked the sheriff’s office to facilitate installation, and the cameras were placed at their present location before Trundy became sheriff.

Maine law currently allows county and municipal law enforcement agencies to use plate readers for public safety, criminal investigations and enforcement. It restricts access to legitimate official purposes, makes collected information confidential and generally limits ordinary data retention to 21 days. Information classified as intelligence or part of an investigation can be kept longer. Violating the statute is a Class E crime.

The law means the Unity system is not necessarily operating illegally. Compliance depends on how the cameras are configured, who can search their records, how data are classified and retained, and whether information is shared with other agencies.

Questions remain about whether both Unity cameras are active, who administers the system, whether searches require written justification, how access is audited and how often the equipment has assisted investigations. The county’s sharing arrangements and retention settings also have not been publicly established.

The ACLU’s campaign places those unanswered local questions within a larger statewide dispute. Police view plate readers as force multipliers, particularly in rural areas where officers cover long distances. Critics see a network capable of recording the movements of entire communities without individualized suspicion.

The cameras beside Bangor Road therefore are not separate from Maine’s emerging debate merely because they bear the Leonardo name rather than Flock’s. Although they have not been singled out by the ACLU, they use the same core technology under scrutiny and would fall within the statewide restrictions now being proposed.

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Details are light on where but per Augusta PD's FB Post:

The Augusta Police Department, in partnership with the District 4 Regional Impaired Driving Enforcement (RIDE) Team, will conduct a sobriety checkpoint in Augusta during Labor Day weekend as part of its continuing effort to deter impaired driving and improve roadway safety.

The joint enforcement detail will take place at a predetermined location within the city during the evening and early morning hours, when impaired-driving incidents are most likely to occur.

This operation is being conducted in accordance with Maine state law and constitutional guidelines, and is focused on identifying drivers who may be impaired by alcohol or drugs while also promoting awareness of the dangers of impaired driving.

Motorists are encouraged to plan ahead: designate a sober driver, use a taxi or rideshare service, arrange an overnight stay, or call a trusted person for a safe ride. Anyone who sees a suspected impaired driver should avoid approaching the vehicle and contact 911 when it is safe to do so.

Impaired driving is preventable, and every safe decision helps protect our community, we ask everyone traveling in Augusta to drive sober, remain attentive, and help keep our roads safe.

Full Text for paywalled:

Republican gubernatorial nominee Bobby Charles told activists last week that he plans to ask President Donald Trump’s border czar to send U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Maine polling places this fall.

Charles, a lawyer who served in the administrations of former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, made the remark Aug. 20 with Maine Young Republicans in Arundel, calling border czar Tom Homan a longtime friend from their years appearing on Fox News together.

“I’m going to ask Tom — three or four weeks before the election, maybe three — I’m going to make an appeal for ICE and marshals to be at our voting booths,” Charles said, according to audio obtained exclusively by the Bangor Daily News. “Do you think the illegals who are being paid money are going to like that?”

There is no evidence of people being paid, and what Charles said he’d ask for is likely illegal. The Trump administration has said it is not planning to do it while raising the specter of rare noncitizen voting. Charles’ comments came as he has looked to distance himself somewhat from Trump during an underdog campaign in a Democratic-leaning state.

A 19th-century federal law makes it a crime to station armed federal agents at polling places on Election Day, unless they are needed to fend off an attack. The liberal Brennan Center for Justice has called the idea illegal amid often-stated worries from Democratic election officials.

“ICE and federal law enforcement are prohibited from being at the polls on Election Day,” Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said. “Bobby Charles can call whoever he wants, but he can’t change the Constitution or the law.”

In a statement, Charles’ campaign did not dispute his remark, framing it as an effort to guard against illegal voting. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. No states allow them to vote, although some cities allow them to vote in local elections.

A 2024 review by the libertarian Cato Institute has estimated the percentage of noncitizens voting as close to zero, though New Jersey offered a counterexample this summer. Gov. Mikie Sherrill acknowledged a software error had misclassified about 6,600 noncitizens as eligible voters since 2023, and that roughly 400 had cast ballots.

“The point is that Bobby will do everything legally possible to prevent illegal voting in Maine, to make sure that Maine elections are decided by legal Maine voters,” Dale Crafts Jr., Charles’ campaign manager, said.

The statement referred to a history of election-related disputes between Bellows and Republicans, including one that culminated in a federal judge’s May ruling that the secretary of state did not have to give voter rolls to the Justice Department and an allusion to her Bellows’ handling of a 2024 report by the conservative Maine Wire.

It cited leaked MaineCare records identified six noncitizens registered to vote in Maine, five of whom had cast ballots since 2016. Attorney General Aaron Frey and Bellows asked The Maine Wire to turn over the underlying records so the state could investigate. The outlet declined, citing the need to protect its source. It remains unclear whether the people registered themselves, were registered by someone else or whether records reflected data entry errors.

“Despite many allegations from multiple sources, no one has presented me with evidence that there is a specific non-citizen on Maine’s voting rolls that has voted illegally,” Bellows said Tuesday.

Homan was in Maine last week after promising more immigration enforcement here. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson referred a reporter to Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s comments at his March confirmation hearing, at which he said his agents would only go to polling places in response to specific threats and not for “intimidation.”

Trump has referenced noncitizen voting as a reason for Senate Republicans to roll back the 60-vote filibuster threshold to pass his “Save America Act,” which would require documented proof of U.S. citizenship in order to vote in federal elections. Maine Sen. Susan Collins has said she supports the bill but would not repeal the filibuster to approve it.

Charles rode Trump-aligned messaging on crime, voting and immigration to win the June primary easily over seven other candidates. He is now running against Democrat Hannah Pingree and independent state Sen. Rick Bennett. Pingree led Charles by double digits in a recent Fox News poll and is a heavy favorite in prediction markets to win in November.

He did not attend Vice President JD Vance’s Monday event in Brewer, where Vance exhorted the crowd to vote for Charles and other Republicans. The Arundel remark came the same day Charles, at a separate stop in Gorham, sought to break from Trump.

“I do not know President Trump,” he said, according to the Portland Press Herald. “I have never met him.”

For those paywalled :

The Twin Cities Media investigative report was damning: Maine was shutting down 35 healthcare agencies after the federal government found $100 million in MaineCare fraud.

The breaking story, with brand-new “investigative findings,” was proof-of-concept for the one-month-old news site. Systemic issues in MaineCare had been “previously uncovered” by Twin Cities Media, the story boasted, and its reporters, who secured comments from Maine political leaders on both sides of the aisle, had succeeded in making change.

Except the Twin Cities Media post contained multiple errors, fabricated sources and came two days after most Maine news outlets published a scaled back, reality-based version of the same story.

So, too, was the attached cartoon image, which listed the vague credit: “By The Twin Cities Media Investigative Team – [Current Date].” And so were most other posts on the Facebook page. And so was every image on its fledgling website.

Its listed reporters, Carlos Mendez and Grace Whitfield and Maryam Hassan and Daniel Okonkwo, who supposedly report in four languages, are not real. The catchy headlines on its website are not clickable. But Twin Cities Media advertises an $8 per month — or $80 per year — subscription offer, anyway, all in support of an organization that lists accountability and transparency as its top two priorities.

Its Facebook posts, which appear to be the only way to read their “reporting,” sometimes get hundreds of likes and comments, especially on Lewiston-Auburn-area news.

Paywall-free, editorially derelict and tuned for social media engagement, AI local news is exploding online in Maine in the age of the attention-grabbing algorithm and declining trust in legacy media. While some avid news readers are skeptical of these sites, others engage unknowingly, with the sometimes misleading, often inaccurate content. Experts say AI news is straining an already-fraying information ecosystem across Maine and the U.S.

Beyond Twin Cities Media, there’s the Portland Post, which prints apparently AI-scraped versions of political stories with a conservative tilt. There’s also the AI-driven Maine Mirror, a purportedly investigative site run by a prominent social media conservative. There’s even hyperlocal investigative pages, like Small Town Accountability in Kennebec County, covering Vassalboro’s local government with ChatGPT as its chief editor. And there’s Laid Back Local, an AI-voiced weekly-ish podcast scraping Maine’s biggest stories.

“(Local AI news) is making it harder to navigate and find information that is real, or know what is real,” Lynn Walsh, the assistant director of the national journalism research group Trusting News, said. “That is the broader impact here.”

A request for an interview with Twin Cities Media’s was declined, but a reporter received an emailed statement that said the site uses “advanced automated technologies and artificial intelligence to assist in gathering, structuring, and formatting our content,” including both articles and images. (This email contained characteristics of an AI-written response.)

“Our processes are designed to filter and verify data points before publication, ensuring that our automated output serves as an informative, reliable community resource rather than a source of unsubstantiated claims,” the statement continued.

The outlet did not respond to follow-up questions about who works for Twin Cities Media, its editorial or fact-checking processes, the reporter names on its website and the lack of disclosure about the use of AI on its social media or website.

The author of the statement signed the email, “editorial moderator.”

HOW TO TELL

This is the thing — AI-driven news sites and social media pages rarely disclose their use of AI.

Like those published by Twin Cities Media on social media, stories by the Maine Mirror — a site with “Truth. Accountability. Transparency.” as its slogan — use only AI-generated images and all the well-studied hallmarks of AI writing.

There’s bullet points and three-item lists.

There’s unadventurous, surgical vocabulary, perfect grammar and a distinct lack of human humor.

There’s punchy, repetitive one-line paragraphs.

But while Ryan Michaels, the conservative commentator behind the site, often reposts the Maine Mirror’s articles and shares his own AI-written monologues, nowhere on the site or social media does he openly discuss or disclose his use of AI in publishing the Maine Mirror.

On his personal Facebook page, he only mentions AI use in an advertisement for a mental health chatbot he set up in 2024, and in an apparently AI-written post about his adoption of the technology, which he said has changed “and even saved” his life.

The telltale sign of an AI publication, Walsh from Trusting News said, is its lack of transparency.

For starters, the Maine Mirror, Twin Cities Media and Portland Post seldom disclose on their websites or social media any use of AI.

News outlets will also usually list reporters, editors, photographers and advertising staff all on their website. She said AI-driven outlets often don’t — take Twin Cities Media’s unnamed “editorial moderator,” for example, or the Portland Post’s nondescript bylines — because there’s rarely more than one or two real people behind the scenes.

“The pushback at this basic level should be, ‘Well, no, but like, who are you?'” Walsh said. “There might be some good reasons why some people don’t want to share their identity, but then there should be some explanation shared about it. These AI accounts aren’t doing that. They’re just kind of giving you very bland, generic answers of titles, numbers, ethics codes, which they can scrape — nothing that’s personal or real.”

The lack of transparency goes deep. Real deep.

Walsh said she’s seeing more AI accounts, especially on social media, focusing on local news in San Diego, where she lives, without ever citing on-the-ground reporting. It’s a national phenomenon now, she said — AI accounts scraping traditionally reported news and repackaging it for social media engagement without named sources or documents.

It’s happening in Maine, too. Twin Cities Media’s Aug. 7 MaineCare “investigative report,” for example, cited sources who had been “blindsided” by the funding suspensions. The page said it found that “even workers successfully transitioning to new healthcare providers are facing immediate financial hardship.”

None of the workers were named. Nor were their agencies. Nor were their hardships specified. The sources and their stories appear to be fabricated — or, to use the proper AI term, hallucinated.

“There’s been an unfathomable amount of garbage on the internet for generations, and I think that the rise of AI just sort of supercharges that,” said Dan MacLeod, the president of the Maine Press Association Board of Directors and the executive editor of the Bangor Daily News. “That means that you can do it at a scale that was unheard of before.”

Often, the stories posted by AI outlets take from other news sources without credit.

On July 27, Twin Cities Media scraped a Sun Journal article about the potential for revival at the Auburn Mall. The post’s first paragraph included the same reference to the 1979 opening of the mall and almost exactly the same comparison to New York City that Sun Journal reporter Christopher Wheelock wrote.

The note at the bottom of the Twin Cities Media post, which continued to closely resemble Wheelock’s story, said: “WE COVER THE STORIES CORPORATE MEDIA MISSES.”

Occasionally, these outlets’ AI can hallucinate entire stories.

The Portland Post published a story in February recognizing Eventide Oyster Co.’s chef Andrew Taylor for his nomination for the 2026 James Beard Best Chef: Northeast award. While he and his co-owner Mike Wiley won the award in 2017, they were not nominated this spring — and nominations were not made public until about a month and a half after the Portland Post’s supposed announcement.

The apparently AI-written post even includes what appears to be an entirely fabricated quote from Taylor.

Walsh said she encourages readers to double-check when an article or social media post or image doesn’t feel quite right. Look at their website to see if there are people behind the post. Check bylines and photos for real names and faces. If you have the time, look up specific numbers or claims made.

“If you cannot verify who is behind the content, that should be a red flag to you to say, ‘OK, one, you know what, I’m not going to follow them regularly. Two, I’m going to verify what they’re saying or what they’re sharing elsewhere,'” Walsh said.

The Portland Post did not respond to questions about the identities of the people behind the publication or the publication’s reporting process. The Maine Mirror did not respond to a request for an interview.

AI AND TRUST

Avid news consumers are wary of the use of AI in journalism.

Trusting News has conducted several surveys with the audiences of news outlets nationwide that show this: about one-third of those news consumers said journalists shouldn’t use AI at all, and about 60% said journalists should only use AI under clear guidelines and policies.

First and foremost, those readers say they want transparency about the use of AI, she said. About 95% of surveyed readers said newsrooms should be open about their use of AI in reporting and writing, and that it was very important to them that newsrooms do so.

But those surveys may have a bias, she said. Mostly, it’s the avid news consumers who engage with surveys about AI disclosure and its use in reporting and writing.

The average news consumer — someone who might only click on a news story once a week, or usually scrolls on social media to stay informed about the world — may not be able to tell if writing looks AI-generated in the first place.

“Most people, scrolling through your feed or your timeline, and you see something that pops up — looks like news to me,” MacLeod, the Maine Press Association board president, said. “A lot of people engage with news that way. There’s a concern about the devaluing of of real journalism and the commodification of it.”

MacLeod said the Maine Press Association, an organization representing Maine’s newsrooms, has yet to receive specific complaints about the proliferation of these AI scraping sites, but that there’s no doubt they will continue to grow.

In just a month, Twin Cities Media has posted hundreds of times and gained 1,500 followers on Facebook. The Portland Post’s Instagram account has almost 3,700 people following it, with short-form videos sometimes reaching tens of thousands of viewers.

More attention on aggregated, scraped AI content presents an opportunity for news organizations to step up, MacLeod said. Real, deeply reported, human journalism, he said, is even more valuable now, in an age where information is instant.

“We’re humans,” he said. “We’re reporters. We know to ask questions. We know what the audience cares about. You can see our faces.”

Full text for those paywalled I:

Frequent flyers in newspaper comment sections often muse about the identities of their opponents, be they local cranks or thin-skinned politicians, during spirited verbal jousts.

Wading into the online fray under Bangor Daily News articles back in 2012 was future Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Troy Jackson, the man behind the no-longer anonymous handle “Canadians for LePage,” according to CNN.

CNN linked Jackson, who has replaced Graham Platner on this November’s ballot, to the account via the email jacksonforsenate@hotmail.com. That email address was used in campaign materials, internal Democratic Party documents and financial disclosure records, CNN reported.

The email was among the user credentials leaked after a 2012 data breach at Disqus, which didn’t acknowledge the breach occurred until 2017. Disqus hosted comments for the BDN. About 24 of his comments remain archived online, according to CNN, but since the BDN stopped using Disqus back in 2019, the context for those comments has been lost.

Under that handle, Jackson adopted the persona of a Canadian logger supportive of then-Gov. Paul LePage, who in 2011 vetoed a Jackson-sponsored bill to ban foreign loggers from cutting wood on public lands. LePage cited concerns about the bill’s constitutionality, and the Legislature upheld that veto.

It’s a sensitive issue for Jackson, a former logger who emerged into the public eye back in 1998 when he helped organize a blockade to protest the hiring of cheaper Canadian labor on this side of the border.

Responding to news that LePage was withholding voter approved bonds, “Canadians for LePage” dismissed concerns about the governor’s action so long as “he approves my H-2 bond so I can come to Maine and cut wood,” an allusion back to the 2011 veto.

But the purported Canadian LePage supporter also dished out criticism of the governor. When LePage’s administration proposed sweeping changes to the unemployment system to address fraudulent claims, Jackson’s alias accused LePage of exaggerating the problem, according to CNN.

“This is another red herring by my countryman, Paul LePage,” Jackson wrote in an apparent reference to the Republican’s time living in Canada in the 1970s.

Jackson’s anonymous online postings may give Democrats deja vu after Platner was dogged by criticism of his posting habit on the website Reddit, including inflammatory statements about rural white people, lobstermen, police and Black people and comments dismissive of women’s fears of rape. But CNN noted that most of Jackson’s surviving posts under the “Canadians for LePage” handle fall under the category of “political trash talk.”

Under one BDN article about LePage’s line-item vetoes for the 2012 supplemental budget, “Canadians for LePage” trolled another commenter, writing: “Could you stop making pipe bombs in your basement, and send me your Communist manifesto. I have to see if you are making this up or reading from something insane.”

While he let loose volleys behind the keyboard, Jackson also feuded publicly with LePage.

The most infamous episode in the LePage-Jackson feud came in 2013 when LePage said Jackson had a “black heart” and that the Democratic state senator gives it to Mainers “without providing Vaseline.”

The governor, who made his remarks to reporters at the State House, went on to say that Jackson should go back into the woods and “let someone with a brain come down here and do some good work.”

Jackson largely brushed off those comments, telling a BDN reporter that: “I don’t have any problem with anyone saying anything about what I stand for. He can say whatever he wants; I just think it’s inappropriate the way he said it. We can be disagreeable without making nasty comments like that.”

On Saturday, Jackson was officially nominated to be his party’s champion in its bid to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins. That came after Jackson effectively clinched the nomination following his sweep of county delegate election meetings the weekend before, securing pledges from more than 450 delegates.

Since then, Democrats have been flooding Jackson with cash to bolster his campaign, which has just over three months to make his case to voters. A recent University of New Hampshire poll gave Jackson a slight edge over Collins in a theoretical matchup, with 2% of voters still undecided.

It will be an uphill battle for Democrats to unseat Collins, who officially announced her historic bid for a sixth term in February. The Republican has handily beaten back challengers, including in 2020 when she defied polls and expectations to secure a fifth term in the Senate. But Collins, who has been ranked the country’s most bipartisan senator, has seen her popularity slump since Trump’s first term in the White House.

If Collins is successful in winning a sixth term, she would be Maine’s longest-serving U.S. senator.

Troy Jackson has long pushed for the rights of the working class, but will now face heightened scrutiny from the national press and the Republican Party on his record and conduct in the Maine Legislature

After last month's primary and well before the most recent allegations surfaced that forced Platner to drop out, I was actively calling for him to step down and had put forth Jackson multiple times as one of our best alternatives. But while I had suggested Jackson may be the right person to carry the platform previously, I have deep concerns about his campaign, and others, pushing so hard right now to lock down rigid slates of delegates. Watching these campaigns scramble to secure closed alignments makes it clear we are losing sight of the bigger picture.

Going into today's meetings with predetermined, rigid slates of delegates is exactly how we throw away our shot at beating Susan Collins. We already let out-of-state money and misleading push polls saddle us with a primary winner who had more red flags than Stalingrad in the '40s, turning what should have been an easy victory into a massive uphill battle. If we do not change course immediately, we are going to repeat the same mistakes that put us on the defensive in the first place.

Instead of learning our lesson, candidates are now organizing homogeneous slates that threaten to let someone with a tiny fraction of support control entire delegations. This bad idea combines a flawed plurality system with a winner-take-all nominating process, allowing a candidate with 30 percent of the vote or less to leverage that minor edge into choosing all of a county's delegates. That approach mimics the exact unfair tactics that mainstream Maine voters have soundly rejected time and again. It completely distorts the real will of the grassroots base and shuts out the collaborative decision-making we desperately need.

We cannot go into the snap caucus assuming we already have our nominee locked down based on a broken primary timeline. The political landscape has shifted dramatically, and the candidate people liked in the past might be entirely wrong for the reality we face today. To give ourselves the best chance next week, we must find a consensus candidate with the absolute broadest appeal. Locking in delegates who are blindly loyal to one specific faction prevents that search from happening, ensuring we stay divided and weak.

The delegates selected today must be independent and entirely willing to deliberate in real time. They need to go into the convention next week with the freedom to listen to every single hopeful while making an informed decision based entirely on the current moment. We can only defeat Susan Collins if we use today's meetings to listen to each other, remain flexible, and deliberately select folks who can carry this strategic mindset into next Saturday.

In the end, it may be Jackson, whose supporters have been some of the most vocal the last few days, it could be Bellows, who while she lost this very race in 2014 is positioned much better in 2026, or hell, it could be Dickerson, who is currently just running a space weather and astronomy forecasting Facebook page. However, we do not need to make a snap decision today to pick them. We have today's meetings where we can get together and talk with our fellow members of the Democratic party and others who choose to attend, watch one more debate (that will hopefully have better audio), and have the delegates come together next Saturday to put forth our best candidate.

The timeline to choose a replacement is already compressed; there is no need to make it even more so.