Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Are watching you

Flock cameras came up last night over dinner with nonpolitical friends, so one assumes it’s a thing. Americans are becoming spooked by the spread of surveillance of the sort seen in Minority Report (2002) and Enemy of the State (1998).

The New Republic subhead reads: “From New York to Alabama to Arizona, everyday people are mounting a local resistance to the company’s mass surveillance. And sometimes, they take matters into their own hands.” People are taking to destroying Flock cameras. Someone a few weeks a go handed me the laminated flyer above that they’d pulled off a pole in West Asheville.

TNR explains:

All told, Flock represents a staggeringly powerful—and profitable—mass surveillance system. Its ALPRs are used by over 1,000 businesses and roughly one-third of 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, according to Holly Beilin, Flock’s senior director of communications. While Beilin wouldn’t provide the number of active Flock cameras in the U.S., the ACLU estimates there to be 90,000. Flock used ALPRs, along with other products like drones and gunshot detectors, to generate $285 million in revenue in 2024. Venture capital titans Andreessen Horowitz recently valued the company at $7.5 billion.

But growing in concert with Flock is an organized resistance movement which has notched more than a few wins. Its nexus is DeFlock.me, which hosts a crowdsourced map of ALPRs and warns readers that the cameras are “a serious risk to your privacy and civil liberties.” The website lists 15 local anti-Flock groups around the country, though its creator, Will Freeman, estimates there to be 30 in total. While many of these groups use “DeFlock” in their name, Freeman stressed that all operate independently of his site.

Yeah, it’s a thing.

Even if Flock’s cameras and tracking network do help solve some crimes, critics say it’s not worth the cost to our privacy—not to mention people’s Fourth Amendment rights. Police have been caught illegally using Flock data to locate a woman seeking abortion services, stalk and harass people, monitor protests, and aid ICE. “At minimum, this dragnet surveillance means warrantless tracking of everyone on the road,” the ACLU warned last year. “At worst, it means a digital police state wherein law enforcement officials … can track protesters, political opponents, immigrants, patients, and others not suspected of any crime and use the information to hurt them.” (Dan Haley, chief legal officer at Flock, responded that “Flock is used … millions of times a year, and the incidences of abuse are few and far between.” He added that all evidence of misuse is recorded in Flock’s software.)

That’s comforting, right?

ICYMI, 404 Media had this take on the “find your puppy” ad Ring sponsored during the Super Bowl:

At Sunday’s Super Bowl, Ring advertised “Search Party,” a cute, horrifyingly dystopian feature nominally designed to turn all of the Ring cameras in a neighborhood into a dragnet that uses AI to look for a lost dog: “One post of a dog’s photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match,” Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said in the Super Bowl commercial. “Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.” Onscreen, an AI-powered box forms around a missing dog: “Milo Match,” it says. “Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now.”

It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its dystopian “Neighbors” app for years. Ring rose to prominence as a piece of package theft prevention tech owned by Amazon and by forming partnerships with local police around the country, asking them to shill their doorbell cameras to people in their neighborhoods in return for a system that allowed police to request footage from individual users without a warrant. 

Chris Gilliard, a privacy expert and author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, told 404 Media these features and its Super Bowl ad are “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies.”

Like Flock, maybe? Sleep tight.

We’re opening the doors! — to the racist, white South Africans.

It’s clear why Trump is doing this and he might as well be David Duke:

The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.

The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the U.S. State Department dated January 27, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.

It’s not like we don’t have enough homegrown racists already, I guess we have to bring in some more.

I think it’s the obviousness of it that’s so disheartening. This is really just trolling. And he knows that nothing will be done about it. He’s just telling over half the people in this country to go fuck themselves.

Three more years of this… oy vey.

🚨BREAKING: The first image of Hillary Clinton testifying under oath about Jeffery Epstein to the Republican Oversight Committee.

This is the first time Hillary has had to answer real questions about Epstein. Clinton does not look happy.

Photo provided by Rep. Lauren Boebert. pic.twitter.com/mPtUyA4u5i

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 26, 2026

Boebert broke the rules by doing this but apparently that’s ok with the GOP majority. Clinton’s people made the logical request that if they are going to leak pictures they should allow the press in to report on the whole deposition. Naturally, the wingnuts said no.

There are literally hundreds of other people who should have been called before her but we know they just can’t resist a little Clinton bash. This is just what they do.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is sitting in the White House declaring he was totally exonerated despite years and years of evidence that he is a misogynist, sexual abuser — and was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein for many years. (And it wasn’t because of their shared interest in investment strategies. He and Epstein were close solely because of their shared interest in sex with younger women. Epstein certainly didn’t seek him out for intellectual stimulation. )

The Democrats are demanding that the entire transcript be released within 24 hours and presumably the video will eventually be released as well. She released her opening statement this morning:

A blind refugee was left to die in the cold, abandoned by the border patrol:

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind refugee from Burma who Border Patrol agents dropped off at a doughnut shop Thursday and left to find his way home, 5 miles away, has been found dead. City Hall spokesperson Ian Ott said Shah Alam, 56, was found by B District officers after they responded to a call for a dead body on the first block of Perry Street shortly after 8:30 p.m. Tuesday….

Homicide detectives, Ott said, “are investigating the circumstances and timeframe of events leading up to his death, following his release from custody.”

Ott said the cause of death was determined by the medical examiner to be “health related in nature,” ruling out death by exposure and homicide.

[..]

Shah Alam, a Rohingya refugee, had been missing since February 19. He was released that afternoon from custody at the Erie County Holding Center after posting bail. In response to an immigration detainer that had been placed on him, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office contacted U.S. Border Patrol prior to his release, according to spokesperson Christopher Horvatits. Benjamin Macaluso, a Legal Aid Bureau attorney representing Shah Alam, said Border Patrol agents picked him up at the Holding Center at 4:39 p.m. Thursday.

Shah Alam was released on bail, Macaluso said, after he had agreed to a plea deal with the Erie County District Attorney’s office. Shah Alam’s guilty plea to charges of trespassing and possession of a weapon — a curtain rod he used as a walking stick — allowed him to “clear” the detainer and avoid detention by ICE or another immigration agency, Macaluso said.

After taking custody of Shah Alam, Border Patrol agents dropped him off at a Tim Hortons on Niagara Street in the Black Rock neighborhood, Macaluso said, shortly after 8 p.m. Shah Alam and his family live in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood on the East Side, according to Fazal.

A spokesperson for Border Patrol, in a statement Wednesday evening, said after agents determined Shah Alam was not supposed to be in their custody, they “offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop.” That Tim Hortons, the spokesperson said, was “determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station.”

“He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance,” the spokesperson said in the statement. Agents, however, did not notify Macaluso or Shah Alam’s family of his release to the coffee shop. Macaluso previously told Investigative Post he expected Shah Alam to be taken to the ICE detention center in Batavia and that his client would be released from there. Instead, Macaluso and Shah Alam’s family spent Friday through Sunday searching for him. Macaluso opened a missing persons case with Buffalo police on Sunday, he said. 

This is only part of the horror of this story:

Shah Alam had been in the Erie County Holding Center since February 2025 after being arrested by Buffalo police. On February 15 last year, he had been out for a walk in his neighborhood and had been using a curtain rod he purchased as a walking stick.

Nearly blind and with no ability to speak English, Shah Alam got lost and ended up on the porch of a woman’s home as she was letting her dog out, according to Macaluso. Shah Alam is completely blind in one eye and can only see with blurry vision for several feet in the other, according to Macaluso.

The woman called police, Macaluso said. When Shah Alam did not follow police commands to drop his curtain rod, they Tasered and beat him, then arrested him, Macaluso said. The officers suffered minor injuries in the scuffle, he said.

Shah Alam was charged with offenses including assault, trespassing and possession of a weapon. Macaluso said Shah Alam’s family opted to not bail him out of the Holding Center for fear he would end up detained by ICE out of state. The plea deal reached recently allowed Shah Alam to be released on bail without ICE detention, Macaluso said.

He was a disabled man who could not understand English. And they threw him in jail for a whole year on trumped up charges of assault with a weapon (a curtain rod) and the released him to the CPB which somehow determined that this man who cannot see or speak English wanted to be dropped off at a coffee shop. And he died.

It really is survival of the fittest in this country these days. If you’re at all vulnerable — a child, sick, old, a foreigner, forget it.

They’re going with “foreign interference in 2020” as the basis for Trump declaring an emergency and taking over the voting apparatus in 2026:

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.

“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” said Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who is advocating for the draft executive order. Ticktin attended the New York Military Academy with Trump and was part of his legal team that filed an unsuccessful 2022 lawsuit accusing Democrats of conspiring to damage him with allegations that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

“But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” Ticktin went on. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

Shamelessness doesn’t even begin to describe these people.

Deadline: Donald Trump’s State of the Union address drew around 28 million viewers across eight major news networks, according to preliminary data from Nielsen

By comparison:
2019: 46.8 M
2018: 45.6 M
2020: 37.2 M
2025: 36.6 M
2017: 33.9 Mhttps://t.co/zKc6oTQFxx

— Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) February 26, 2026

They say a lot of people probably watched on streaming which is true. But they were also watching on streaming over the last five years at least. And hose numbers aren’t reflected in the Neilsens either.

It was a dud.

Here’s a rundown of the Navigator instant reaction dial of voters in Arizona:

In the longest-ever State of the Union address, Trump centered his speech on stories of individual Americans and highlighted what he characterized as major accomplishments of his administration. He devoted comparatively little time to cost of living concerns, which are top of mind for a majority of Americans, while avoiding his most unpopular issues such as aggressive actions by ICE and the Epstein Files. We saw the dials spike when Trump shared heroic stories and discussed plans for improving economic security with no tax on tips or overtime. The dials dipped, however, when Trump touted the “golden age of America” and his non-stop “winning,” indicating a disconnect between the president and Americans on the economic state of our union.

They did like the stories of heroic actions so that part of the show was well received. But most people know that’s not the purpose of this speech. And even when he said something they liked he often turned around an made it worse:

A few of Trump’s other popular moments were immediately followed or preceded by far less popular remarks. For instance, when Trump spoke about voter ID, the dials ticked up, particularly among Republicans and independents. However, when he called for the elimination of mail-in ballots, the dials dipped, especially among independents.

They hated the fatuous “winning” bullshit:

Throughout Trump’s speech, dials took a dip whenever Trump tried to sell Americans on a narrative of a “golden age” and non-stop “winning.” When Trump spent around 30 seconds on how Americans are tired of all the “winning,” dials fell below 30, with independents turning dials around 25.

Basically they didn’t like any of his usual schtick:

While Trump’s mention of specific policies – especially the ones widely known to be less popular – his first mention of tariffs saw dials take a sharp downturn. Overall, participants turned dials to around 40, with Republicans and independents just under 50, and Democrats turning more steeply around 20. Dials remained negative as he discussed alternative routes for incorporating his tariffs despite the Supreme Court’s recent ruling.

Though he largely remained on message, moments where he veered off into campaign-style rhetoric did not land well with soft-partisans. When talking about health care and prescription drug costs, Trump quickly remarked his second term should have been his “third term.” While the comment was short, participants took note and dials dropped across parties.

All in all it was a failure. Not that it matters. I’m not sure any SOTU matters anymore. Maybe its time to retire this ritual.

When Americans talk about “forever wars,” they usually mean the long conflicts in the Middle East: Iraq and Afghanistan. The 20 years the U.S. spent enmeshed in those countries were painful and expensive, and people are still wondering what they ultimately accomplished. George W. Bush’s administration did manage to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, and Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11, was killed on Barack Obama’s watch, but the underlying issues that propelled those wars were never fully resolved. It’s only a matter of time before they bubble up again. 

But half a century ago, another forever war was officially declared, and it continues unabated: the so-called War On Drugs. The name is not a figure of speech or a metaphor. It’s what the war-monger types like to call a “kinetic action,” meaning “physical force, violence, or destructive energy.” 

Since he first announced his candidacy for president in 2015, Donald Trump has been obsessed with Mexico. From the start of his campaign, he slurred Mexicans as “killers and rapists,” scapegoating immigrants from that country and others throughout Latin America and around the world. He decided to build his vaunted border wall in part due to accusations of drug-trafficking, and he even told then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that he wanted to use Patriot missiles to destroy fentanyl labs in Mexico. (Trump even said they could just deny any U.S. involvement, apparently thinking that there are other countries in the area that have a ready supply of Patriot missiles.) While he was talked out of taking any action, the issue of drug-trafficking became a cornerstone of his 2024 presidential bid. 

In August 2025, following his return to office, Rolling Stone reported that Trump was considering sending troops into Mexico but leaned toward a “soft invasion in which American special operations would be sent covertly to assassinate cartel leaders.” The Mexican government was not amused by these revelations, and reacted to these threats by reminding the U.S. that Mexico is a sovereign country. But behind the scenes, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has apparently realized that the only way to stop Trump from doing this would be to take such action themselves. 

Responding to this pressure, on Sunday the Mexican government, reportedly with the assistance of U.S. intelligence, assassinated the leader of one of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels. Nemesio Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, better known as “El Mencho,” led the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. According to PBS, more than 70 people were killed in the operation, including 25 members of the Mexican National Guard and more than 30 criminal suspects. 

Reactions across the state of Jalisco — home to Guadalajara, Mexico’s third largest city, and the tourist mecca of Puerto Vallarta — were swift. Cartel members set fire to vehicles to block federal police from accessing the cities. They took over airports, resulting in planes being re-routed and the U.S. and Canadian governments issuing shelter-in-place advisories for their citizens who were in the country. According to Mexican authorities, the cartel took action in 20 of Mexico’s 32 states, from Jalisco all the way to the Guatemalan border. 

Things have calmed for the moment. In Puerto Vallarta, LGTBQ tourists have returned to going out at night. Restaurants, bars and shops have reopened. But people remain on edge, worried about what might come next. The killing of El Mencho, the last of the old-school drug lords, will likely create a power vacuum, and there’s no telling what kind of violence that might spark. More troubling is the fact that the Mexican military is already involved in a year-long operation against the Sinaloa cartel, and there’s concern that they will not have the capacity to fight a two-front war. 

Most analysts see this operation as a big risk for Sheinbaum, but she didn’t have much choice. The drug problem for her country is real, and Mexico has had little success with programs under previous administrations to try to alleviate root causes. And Trump continues to put tremendous pressure on her to do his bidding. 

But Trump is apparently unimpressed with the operation that resulted in the killing of the country’s most powerful drug kingpin.

But Trump is apparently unimpressed with the operation that resulted in the killing of the country’s most powerful drug kingpin. On Sunday, he posted on Truth Social that “Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs!” Messages like these make it pretty clear that he’s itching to send in the American military for another Venezuela-style triumph. 

There are currently 1.6 million Americans living in Mexico, and it’s estimated that over 40 million Americans visit the country each year. All it will take is one incident involving any of them and he will almost certainly pull the trigger. It’s a very dangerous situation. 

Michael Burgoyne, an expert on the region, told PBS that Sheinbaum’s action may appease Trump for the moment, but “just taking down one more kingpin is not going to fix drug use in the United States, nor the rule of law in Mexico. These are difficult, complex problems that require a comprehensive solution.”

That, of course, is not in this administration’s wheelhouse. They prefer instant gratification that extends beyond Mexico.

According to the U.S. military, within the last week there have been two more strikes on small boats off the coast of South America that have resulted in the killing of six crew members. Since the government’s air strikes began in September, at least 150 people have been killed in 44 strikes on 45 vessels. That’s just the latest tally in the decades-long war being waged by the U.S. government in its quixotic crusade to stop Americans from being able to access the illegal drugs many crave. 

There is no apparent proof that any of the people the administration is killing in the Caribbean and Pacific are actually trafficking drugs. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Trump has taken to joking, as he did in his State of the Union address, that he’s ended the fishing business in the region because people are afraid of being blown out of the water. The crude line gets big laughs from the MAGA faithful. 

The drug war excuse has come in handy for the president. It allowed him a measure of legal cover to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in early January, and to put him and his wife on trial in America. As it turns out, Trump’s foray into Venezuela was actually about a couple of different drugs that Americans crave: oil and money.

There are 50 years worth of laws on the books giving presidents more and more power to wage this type of war with minimal congressional and legal oversight. Trump has also taken to labeling nearly any action taken by a foreign country “terrorism,” a magic word that allows them to do almost anything. 

After his Venezuela incursion, Trump intimidated various countries in and beyond Latin America by promising similar actions if they didn’t follow his orders. He threatened the president of Colombia, but they seem to have come to terms following a meeting at the White House during which Trump got his ring kissed. The administration also telegraphed that Mexico was in its sights.

Donald Trump likes a show, and with the killing of El Mencho, the Mexican government gave him one. The question now is whether it will be enough. Judging from Trump’s initial reactions, it doesn’t look like it.

We once had allies

This post from Anne Applebaum won’t sober up MAGA or their MAGA king.

The U.S. once had allies. Now we get side-eye.

It only took the Allies about a year

Mass deportations are becoming the country’s next “forever war” warns Greg Sargent. Vast sums are pouring into contracts for supplying weapons and gear as well as for building and running concentration camps. (Conservatives who condemn political correctness will give them a politically correct name, and don’t you dare call the deportation effort “ethnic cleansing.”) Sargent warns the momentum behind this effort may be difficult to stop because war profiteers gonna profiteer.

Senator Adam Schiff’s office has got a little list of the handful of private companies making fistfuls of cash helping the Department of Homeland Security stockpile weapons for Donald Trump’s “heavily armed” praetorian guard and “an ever-expanding immigrant carceral state.” In short:

• Tens of millions of dollars to buy lethal weapons, including thousands of AR-style rifles, pistols, and large quantities of accessories, such as optical sights for firearms and suppressors;
• More than $30 million for ammunition; and
• More than $25 million to purchase significant quantities of so-called “less-lethal” weapons and crowd control devices, such as TASERs, pepper sprays, tear gas canisters, and canister launchers.

Sargent warns:

Meanwhile, just like the forever wars, this fiasco is also birthing its own captive constituencies and internal political momentum. This includes everyone from the private contractors supplying it to the large population of MAGA-adjacent young (and not so young) men signing up for ICE, which writer John Ganz describes as “an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob.”

Any entity this hypermaterialized—especially one simultaneously aimed at immigrants—will inevitably attract white nationalists and evolve into a political paramilitary force in thrall to ideologically aligned leaders, as Substacker Brian Beutler explains. This is borne out in ICE recruitment messaging, which explicitly seeks to get recruits invested in the mission of achieving national rejuvenation by employing cleansing ethno-nationalist violence.

Trump’s forever war — accomplishing the eradication of unwanted, “filthy, dirty, disgusting” (nonwhite) immigrants from American soil — will take three presidential terms at its current pace, Sargent projects. Longer than the Iraq War.

During that period I was consulting for a client in Charleston, S.C. On my way home each week, I monitored the progress of the Iraq War by counting the number of low boys heading east down I-26 carrying trios of Humvees to the 437th Airlift Wing at Joint Base Charleston on their way to Iraq and Afghanistan. Later it was up-armored humvees and, later still, MRAPs.

Rule 1033

Even when forever wars end, all that equipment does not go to scrap yards. We found that out the hard way with the 1033 program. Polygraph reviewed it last March:

Since then, the 1033 program regularly comes up whenever police respond to protests with a militarized show of force. And for good reason — according to the Pentagon’s Law Enforcement Support Office (which manages the program), more than 8,800 state and local law enforcement agencies have received equipment through the program.

What does any of this have to do with the Iraq War? The troop withdrawal created a ton of surplus armament, which the US military doesn’t like having (otherwise, it’s harder to justify the obscene budget requests it sends to Congress every year). The 1033 program allows it to quickly shed surplus gear.

The Pentagon’s procedure for disposing of “excess” property gives preferential treatment to state and local law enforcement agencies — outside of the military branches, police get first dibs on surplus weapons and equipment. As the chart below shows, as US military forces returned home, massive quantities of combat gear started going to state and local police.

If Congress ever defunds and demobilizes Trump’s domestic ethnic cleansing effort, the U.S. will have to dismantle its “archipelago of enormous new prison camps” and do something with the weapons stockpiles. Expect DHS to have its own 1033 program. Meaning for decades afterwards the country’s police forces will be using up all kinds of cop equipment they have hanging around their police officer stations. Including so-called “less-lethal” weapons and crowd control devices we’ve seen used against citizens with abandon in city after city. Any excuse to play with their big-boy toys.

I assembled a slide show about that 15 years ago during the Occupy movement.

Perhaps I was too optimistic to suggest that it only took the Allies only about a year to liberate the Nazis’ concentration camps.

When the U.S. had allies.

In the USA in 1943 they produced a film 'Don't be a Sucker' about fascism.

It perfectly explains Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the entire Right.pic.twitter.com/Qggn0W0enh

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) February 24, 2026

During that era America was flagrantly (and legally) racist and sexist and many people were denied access to the American dream. It was not a perfect place by any means. But I do think their experience fighting fascism gave them a much clearer sense of the stakes. It would be weird if it didn’t.

This message is more needed today than it was then.