Ted is running for Senate this Fall against Ken Paxton and James Talarico and he's joining the Hide & Speak livestream this week to discuss: age verification laws, digital ID, Flock Safety / ALPR, Fourth Amendment, VPN bans and more.
We will also host a Q&A session so you can ask Ted questions in our live chat.
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
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
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:
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
The pattern continues....
Full write-up + our source list: https://s.vp.net/MTc7j
The arrest happened in San Diego the day before Thanksgiving last year. Police had a description of a red Alfa Romeo, a witness who identified one man at a curbside lineup, and a hit from the city's Flock plate reader system that appeared to confirm the identification.
According to the men's attorney, the hit could not have been the right car. The man was five miles from the crime scene, and the plate reader capture was timestamped before any police pursuit had begun. The contradiction was in the system's own data.
He spent close to a month in custody on an armed carjacking charge.
Watch the full stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKgQTkTpFz4
Full write-up: https://s.vp.net/7kkVb
Next stream, Aug 15 at 4pm ET, opening the National Week of Action Against ALPRs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq0xq4HOE8E
Four more cities ended or moved to end their Flock Safety contract over a period of just 5 days:
Full write-up + our source list: https://s.vp.net/5h3oe
DeFlock Stars 2: Anti-ALPR Activist Livestream:
We're running a livestream on this Saturday 8/15 at 4pm ET, DeFlock Stars 2: Activists on How to Fight Flock in Your Town, with six DeFlock and anti-ALPR groups. It's the day before DeFlock's National Week of Action Against ALPRs starts, and the focus is legal ways to fight back against Flock and other ALPR companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq0xq4HOE8E
Flock's CEO used the word terroristic to describe DeFlock. DeFlock is a volunteer project that maps automated license plate readers, using cameras mounted on public poles in plain view.
This came up on a Hide & Speak panel with local anti-ALPR organizers. None of them used that word in their own description of what they do. One called it a grassroots effort to protect Fourth Amendment rights.
Apparently, the watchers don't like being watched either.
Watch the recorded livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKgQTkTpFz4
Read the breakdown here: https://s.vp.net/7kkVb
Next stream, Aug 15 at 4pm ET, opening the National Week of Action Against ALPRs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq0xq4HOE8E
I raised the hijacking scenario directly with Flock on a previous livestream, a camera network taken over and used to kill someone. It was dismissed as ridiculous.
The Financial Times later reported that Israel had been inside nearly all of Tehran's traffic cameras for years, with footage routed to servers in Israel, and used it to build a pattern of life on Khamenei's security detail. On the day of the strike it helped confirm his meeting was running on time.
Domestic surveillance built for one thing... can potentially be used for something much more sinister.
Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKgQTkTpFz4
Next stream, Aug 15 at 4pm ET, opening the National Week of Action Against ALPRs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq0xq4HOE8E
The Taos town council voted this week to reallocate the $54,000 that would have renewed the town's contract with Flock Safety. That funding covered 18 AI-powered license plate readers placed on the roads people commonly use to get into or out of town.
Most residents didn't know the cameras existed until local reporting this summer, followed by a grassroots DeFlock Taos group pulling public records and handing them to the newspaper.
Residents showed up to council meetings to and voice their opposition to Flock cameras and within just a few months, they voted not to renew their contract.
However, the fight isn't over in Taos. The council has already said they would consider a different camera system if it had "real data protections in place."
Full write-up + source links: https://s.vp.net/pmbL8
PortSwigger's Gareth Heyes presented "CSS: the bomb inside your inbox" at Black Hat USA 2026 on August 6. The short version is that the styling language responsible for fonts and colors is enough, by itself, to compromise a webmail session. No attachment, no JavaScript, no link to click.
The mechanism is that your inbox app and the message you're reading share the same page. Every provider sanitizes incoming HTML and CSS, and Heyes attacked both the features that survive sanitization and the gap between what the sanitizer approves and what the browser actually builds.
The specific chains he documented:
We ran the public proof-of-concept code against bmail and none of the techniques worked, which is covered in the write-up, along with the full source list: https://s.vp.net/ti2EU
Veronica Harper from the Utah Freedom Coalition explains why you should never hand your phone to a police officer as a form of ID.
Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jNnv2ygJ7g
Blog write-up of episode: https://s.vp.net/CX25H
Three cases came up on Hide & Speak recently when we spoke to Veronica from the Utah Freedom Coalition, and they line up in an uncomfortable way.
Watch the recorded livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jNnv2ygJ7g
Episode write-up: https://s.vp.net/CX25H