The Harrisonburg City Council voted unanimously this week to end the city’s contract with Flock Safety. It will bag the company’s surveillance cameras with trash bags until they are removed and will consider an ordinance that prohibits other similar mass-surveillance entities from entering into contracts with any entities in the city. Earlier this year, the Charlottesville City Council discontinued its one-year pilot program with Flock Safety after concerns about data protection, potential misuse, and limits on local control. The city had 10 cameras installed in late 2024, including one near the University of Virginia grounds. In Staunton, some of the city’s Flock Safety ALPR cameras were removed, though not all were taken offline. The Virginia Department of Transportation operates speed-zone cameras in areas near roadwork and uses vehicle sensors to photograph or videotape vehicles at intersections during red-light violations. They are also used for unmanned speed monitoring in certain areas where speeding is a known problem. Norfolk’s ALPR network remains operational after a 2026 federal court ruling upheld its constitutionality. Given the campaign against Flock cameras, let’s examine that case, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk. Judge Mark S. Davis found that Norfolk’s Flock ALPR system does not constitute a “search” under the Fourth Amendment because the cameras take discrete, noncontinuous images at different locations, the system has gaps in coverage, and the data is limited to information visible on public roads. That’s the important part I want to delve into: privacy vs. “public-see.” Before we get into what has both sides of “the aisle” against such cameras, let’s start with the “source code” of American privacy. The Third and Fourth Amendments in the Bill of Rights do not say that you cannot be surveilled or have your home searched. They maintain a strict toolkit by which you may be. They lean heavily on the premise that the burden of proof is on law enforcement to make the case as to why. They also don’t say that law enforcement cannot watch you or even follow you in public. Probable cause is the cornerstone and, again, the burden of proof is supposed to be with the government. It’s supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, nothing more. But in this time where reputation is no longer abstract, but rather how you earn a living, the modern version is “innocent until alleged to be guilty by association or being nearby the guilty parties and failing to do anything about it!” This is how this has become an issue that unites both sides of the aisle. Conservatives want strong law enforcement but also privacy. Progressives are still (quietly) in the “defund the police” mode and see any law enforcement as increasingly “fascist.” There is also a strong anti-surveillance position in our cities among conservatives who reside there because the cities are “run by liberals,” and they are afraid of being targeted for their noncompliant political beliefs. While the no-borders crowd on the left believes the cameras are being used by ICE to round up their new servant underclass. As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, “They are coming after our abuela’s and bus boys.” John Whitehead, the founder of the Rutherford Institute and the man who took on Bill and Hillary Clinton as Paula Jones’ lawyer, said regarding Flock cameras: “A camera can photograph a car. Flock’s AI-powered platform can identify and categorize a vehicle, compare an observation with stored records, generate alerts, identify connections and help police reconstruct where that vehicle has been. AI is what transforms a photograph into the building blocks for a suspect society.” This is what happens when lawlessness is not only allowed but promoted. It’s an extrapolation of the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, which has long been a part of the canons of American justice. However, it’s been conveniently forgotten that its practice was individualized and based on exigent factors each time. That changed when President Barack Obama instructed U.S. attorneys not to enforce federal marijuana possession prohibitions in states with strong regulatory systems for legal marijuana in a document called the Cole Memorandum dated Aug. 29, 2013. Up until then, if a political leader didn’t like a law (see Jim Crow, for example), he or she would propose changes legislatively or battle to have it declared unconstitutional in court. Not anymore. Now it seems that law enforcement can make this stuff up as they go along, and that is how we arrive where we are societally today. Whether it’s “J6-ers” or “Black Lives Matter,” a significant portion of “We the People” think that if we are under the scrutiny of law enforcement, it’s because of who we are and not what law we may have broken. That’s the issue that must be resolved. Not whether cameras exist. Too late. Not whether AI exists. Too late. We must get back to being a society with clear laws that protect each other’s rights. What those are needs to be a whole other column. And we must ensure that they are enforced equally on the poorest and the wealthiest, the outsiders and those in positions of influence. Not just in a society that uses the law to “get its way.” The existential danger here is that the people who want this lawlessness to continue are the ones who will come to us and use this soft-core anarchy as the premise to take away most of our civil rights in exchange for “restoring order.” We know this because it’s how KGB boss Vladimir Putin won the presidency in Russia a quarter century ago. As they say in the game-designing community, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s appearance at a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday was the perfect encapsulation of what Tony Kinnett referred to later that day on “The Tony Kinnett Cast” as the “complete chaos” of COVID-19 policies. Victor Davis Hanson, senior contributor to the Daily Signal, joined Kinnett to share his own exclusive assessment of Fauci’s testimony. Or, more accurately, lack of it. Fauci “did a funny thing” with his “statement blasting his critics and then he gave them no chance to reply,” Hanson said, noting how Fauci called out Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., for subpoenaing him before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases then pled the Fifth Amendment 111 times, creating something of “a one-way hearing.” “Think of the precedent that that establishes. Congress wants to find out, wants to investigate, subpoena somebody. If you don’t go, you’re going to go to jail if you’re Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro,” Hanson said. “But if you’re Anthony Fauci, as in the case of left-wing Lois Lerner, you just blast everybody and then you shut up and hide behind the Fifth Amendment and make a mockery.” There were “1,100 pages that in his arrogance, he kept a diary. And in the diary, he admitted to things or he confessed things that were absolutely contrary to his public policies and his positions on everything from masks to shutdowns to quarantines to vaccinations to the role of Scott Atlas in the White House to Donald Trump to the origins of the Wuhan virus itself,” Hanson continued. “So we don’t know who to believe. Do we believe when he was confiding to the diary or do we believe when he was talking to the public?” Hanson then admitted part of him “felt sorry” for Fauci. “Some of his years were not too bad, but the way that he was so arrogant and the lives that he affected and the people who lost businesses and the people who missed cancer screenings and … surgical procedures because of the nationwide lockdown and the destruction of the economy and the psychological damage that ensued, and people who trusted him when he said that this experimental vaccination was both safe and it would prevent infectiousness and being infected and all of that was untrue.” “And so, here we see this poor old man was up there trying to plead the Fifth Amendment and he said basically, ‘I have nothing to apologize for. You, you, you are unfair and I resent this … and I’m done. I’m not going to answer one question. And you have no right to cross-examine me on anything in my diary, anything I’ve said.'” “So, it was really the complete career and personal destruction of Anthony Fauci,” Hanson said. Kinnett pondered the “downstream effects” of Fauci pleading the Fifth Amendment, even with a pardon from then-outgoing President Joe Biden. He noted it’s “chilling” and warned that if allowed to stand, “then congressional hearings don’t matter. You can just get up in front and plead the Fifth … and nothing ever happens,” Kinnett warned.

Ahead of the August recess, Senate Republicans remain divided over how to proceed with the SAVE America Act, legislation championed by President Donald Trump that aims to ban mail-in ballots and require identification and proof of citizenship for voters. In response to a Daily Signal questionnaire sent to all Republican Senate offices, staunch allies of the president, such as Sens. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, reaffirmed the president’s call for the chamber to remain in session until it passes the legislation, rather than adjourn for its scheduled August recess. Others stated their support for the SAVE America Act but did not specifically address the recess or Trump’s call for the chamber to abolish the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to end debate and pass legislation. With the filibuster, the legislation would need Democrat support to pass. “The Senate has done NOTHING to deserve a five-week break,” Tuberville told the Daily Signal. “Other than the ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill,’ all the Senate has done is pass bills rebuking Trump and giving Democrats handouts. Our job is to deliver RESULTS for the American people.” SAVE’s Current Status Pieces of the legislation were attached to several measures that passed the House last week but have yet to receive a vote in the Senate. Most notably, components are included in the budget resolution that is a framework for a Senate bill. That spending measure could pass the Senate through the special process of reconciliation, reserved for certain budget-related measures and requiring only majority support for passage. However, while the language in the resolution allows individual states to access billions in federal funding if they “opt in” to a voting integrity program, it would not mandate national voter ID and proof of citizenship to vote, as does the actual SAVE America Act. That process also might encounter obstacles from certain Republican senators. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told the Daily Signal that language Trump requested might create certain problems for some Republicans. “For some people it does,” Cassidy says. “For [Sen.] Mitch McConnell, it would.” “[Sen.] Lisa Murkowski has made it clear she doesn’t favor his [Trump’s] current iteration, as it would forbid mail-in ballots, which is very important in Alaska,” Cassidy continued. Other components of the voter integrity legislation have been included in larger packages, such as the National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump considered a “must-pass” bill. However, the act would require the customary 60 votes to pass. Conservatives Willing to Go to Great Lengths In a statement to the Daily Signal, Lee said he is “proud to lead the charge to stay in Washington and work for Americans until the SAVE America Act is passed,” while acknowledging that only “a handful” of senators have joined his effort to postpone the August recess. “We are working on multiple avenues to pass the SAVE America Act, and this is one of them,” the senator continued. “Stay tuned.” Lee said that portions of the legislation may need to be passed separately before being combined together. Regarding the threat of the filibuster, Lee said he supports forcing a procedure known as a talking filibuster to advance the SAVE America Act, but noted that reconciliation could provide a path to pass key provisions of the bill. Tuberville said he plans to join Lee in opposing any motion to adjourn for the August recess. He called on the majority leader to abolish the Senate’s “traditions,” referring to the filibuster. The American people “didn’t vote for a Republican party obsessed with preserving their own power through the manufactured filibuster,” he said. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., also voiced support for remaining in session. “I’m in support of the SAVE Act. We have to get it on the floor and we have to get it done, and if that means going into August I’m supportive of that,” Schmitt said. A Schmitt spokesman told the Daily Signal the senator is a co-sponsor of the SAVE America Act and has repeatedly voted for the legislation. Reagan McCarthy, communications director for Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, told the Daily Signal that the senator “is a Day One, unapologetic supporter of the SAVE America Act” and supports remaining in Washington “as long as it takes.” Similarly, the office of Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., pointed the Daily Signal to recent public statements in which he blamed Senate Democrats for delaying the legislation and urged Republicans to find a way to pass the law. Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., stated on X, “Hoosiers are asking me if I would support canceling the Senate’s August recess to pass the Save Act? My answer is yes.” A spokesperson for Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, told the Daily Signal that the senator “believes that the Senate needs to do what it takes to pass the Save America Act,” although he did not specifically address whether he supports abolishing the filibuster or canceling recess. While the Daily Signal could not reach Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., for comment, the senator announced that she supports staying in Washington as “long as necessary.” Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla.; Ashley Moody, R-Fla.; and Jim Banks, R-Ind. all made statements on X that the Senate should pass the legislation before leaving for recess. During an appearance on CBS over the weekend, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., called on the majority leader to delay the recess. Republicans Wary of Changes to Filibuster, Recess, Election Reform At a Wednesday press conference, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters he is “for anything that we can do to get the SAVE America Act passed.” However, he said he does not believe keeping senators in Washington through August would change the outcome of Democrats’ refusal to support the bill. Thune added that he does not believe he could secure the 50 Republican votes needed to abolish the filibuster. While Sens. McConnell, R-Ky.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; Thom Tillis, R-N.C.; and Murkowski, R-Alaska, did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment, the four previously voted against an effort by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham to attach the SAVE America Act to a budget reconciliation package that passed the Senate in June. At the time, Tillis explained that any effort to implement the election reform law before the 2026 midterms would create turmoil in states across the country as they changed voting rules so close to an election.In addition to Murkowski, Kennedy, Moody, Sullivan, Collins, Cassidy, Scott, McConnell, Thune, and Tillis, the following Senate offices did not respond to the Daily Signal’s requests for comment by the time of publication: Rand Paul, R-Ky.; Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.; John Cornyn, R-Texas; Mike Rounds, R-S.D.; Mike Crapo, R-Idaho; Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; Tim Scott, R-S.C.; Katie Britt, R-Ala.; Jim Justice, R-W.Va.; Pete Ricketts, R-Neb.; Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; Joni Ernst, R-Iowa; Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.; Josh Hawley, R-Mo.; John Hoeven, R-N.D.; Jon Husted, R-Ohio; Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss.; James Lankford, R-Okla.; Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo.; Roger Marshall, R-Kan.; Dave McCormick, R-Pa.; Jerry Moran, R-Kan.; James Risch, R-Idaho; Tim Sheehy, R-Mont.; and Roger Wicker, R-Miss.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has spent the week hounding Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. to do “the bare minimum” and go on camera to prove he is alive. McConnell’s unexplained absence undermines the work he’s done as senator, Beshear said in a SiriusXM podcast yesterday. “I don’t think it’s a positive legacy, but I know he thinks his legacy is being the longest-serving majority leader in the Senate’s history,” Beshear said. “Well, guess what? On his Wikipedia page five years from now, that’s going to be a paragraph. But what we’re going through right now is going to be a page.” In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on July 28, Beshear said, “Only putting out two statements, not doing any interviews, not calling in when supposedly you’re talking to people, those are the types of signs that people see and become increasingly concerned.” McConnell has now been absent from the Senate for 46 days due to a fall that left him unconscious, and a “mild case of pneumonia” that developed while he was in the hospital, according to the latest press release from his office. The release stated that the senator has moved to a rehabilitation center, where he is doing physical therapy, but it did not say when he would return to the Senate. It only said that he’s working to come back “as soon as possible.” Although McConnell’s office has released two photos of him with corresponding statements, McConnell’s silence has sparked speculation on social media that he is brain-dead and that his “proof of life” photos are AI-generated. Prank missing-person flyers depicting McConnell’s first hospital photo were placed around Washington, D.C., by the Save America Movement, a Democrat-aligned political advocacy group. The poster describes McConnell as “84 years old. 5’9 feet. Turtle-like.” Beshear said McConnell should appear on CNN to put “speculation to rest.” “We don’t have any timetable for when he might get back,” the Kentucky governor added. “Listen, if he supposedly had a 17-minute conversation with [CNN senior political contributor] Scott Jennings, he can call in and have a three-minute conversation with you,” Beshear said to Collins. “He can go to camera and just let us know he’s doing all right, which is what we all ultimately hope for.” Jennings posted on X several weeks ago that he spoke with McConnell for “just shy of 20 minutes” about the war with Iran and Senate history.  I spoke to my old friend Mitch McConnell this morning, the senior Senator from Kentucky. He’s still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about IRAN, UKRAINE, the unfolding situation in MAINE, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a…— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) July 7, 2026 “To be fair, Scott Jennings works for CNN. He can go on air, dial him up, put him on speakerphone, and we can put all the speculation to rest,” he said. Collins stated that Jennings has declined to call McConnell.  Daily Signal contacted Jennings for comment but did not receive a response. Beshear: Show You’re Still Competent or Leave Office Beshear also released a letter on July 27 calling on McConnell to speak to his constituents and prove that he is still capable of serving. If he isn’t, Beshear said that it’s time for McConnell to resign. “I understand anyone’s desire for privacy, but when you run for office and serve as one of a state’s two U.S. senators, you willingly abdicate much of your personal privacy,” Beshear wrote. “That’s the deal, and we all know it when we run. Daily Signal contacted McConnell’s office for comment but did not receive a response. Beshear said he will ask Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., to investigate the situation if McConnell gives no proof of his capacity to serve. “And if the majority leader of the Senate saying he’s not even going to check on one of his Republican senators to make sure he can do his job, that is shameful,” Beshear said. “And while a lot of folks want to talk about what this person or that person should do, the wrong here is directly on Congressional Republicans.” Thune told reporters in the hallway this week that it’s up to Beshear to speak with McConnell. “I think that’s an issue, really, that’s between Sen. McConnell and the people of Kentucky,” Thune said. “And if the governor wants to—I’m not sure what his prerogatives are in that case, but that’s where the issue should be resolved.”

An Afghan woman living in Texas, whose son and son-in-law were convicted of plotting an Election Day mass killing in 2024, had a public removal hearing Thursday, the first case before the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. The Justice Department says Nazira Haji Zada, 47, of Fort Worth, Texas, is being removed for her role in a plot involving her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi. The pair were arrested in October 2024 after buying guns and ammunition from an undercover FBI employee that to be used in an Election Day attack. The Justice Department asserts the planned shooting was inspired by the terrorist group ISIS. Zada, a legal permanent resident, is challenging the constitutionality of her deportation order. The case marks the first public session of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a specialized federal court that Congress established in 1996. The court has jurisdiction to remove foreign terrorists from the United States when the government establishes by a preponderance of the evidence that an alien is a terrorist. The secretive court allows the government to produce classified information to use in prosecution. Judge Joan Ericksen, the chief judge of the court, denied a request that Haji Zada be immediately released after a 45-minute hearing, CNN reported. But the issue of the constitutionality of the court could likely drag on. Matthew Farley, a federal public defender representing Zada, said, “This entire scheme is in violation of due process and is unconstitutional.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a public statement ahead of the hearing, “Congress created the Alien Terrorist Removal Court three decades ago to remove from the United States alien terrorists who never should have been here in the first place.” “The allegations in this case show the matriarch of an ISIS-sympathizing family aiding in a plot to launch a mass-casualty attack on American voters on Election Day,” Blanche continued. “The Department’s application in this court makes clear that terrorists have no place in the United States of America.” Zada’s son Abdullah was 17 at the time of his arrest. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. As part of the plea agreement, Abdullah agreed to a judicial order of removal from the United States to Afghanistan after his incarceration. He acknowledged that the order of removal would terminate his lawful permanent resident status and waived his right to appeal. Her son-in-law Tawhedi, 28, pleaded guilty on June 13, 2025, to two terrorism-related offenses: conspiring and attempting to provide material support and resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. Tawhedi admitted that between June 2024 and October 2024, he conspired with at least one other individual to purchase two AK-47 rifles, 500 rounds of ammunition, and 10 magazines, with the intent to carry out a mass-casualty attack on or around Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, on behalf of ISIS, according to the Justice Department. The criminal complaint said Tawhedi communicated with an ISIS facilitator about his plan.