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If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots will roam the perimeters of US World Cup venues this summer and they arrive dressed as entertainment. The four-legged machines tilt their heads, perform little dances for the cameras, and pose for selfies with a crowd expected to pass half a million. Under the choreography sits a mobile sensor package that records far more than any fan walking past will realize. Every Spot carries 360-degree cameras, thermal sensors, acoustic pickups, and AI anomaly detection, and it streams what it captures back to human teams in real time. That payload turns a stadium walkway into a continuously recorded zone, where your face, your body heat, your voice and your movement all become data the moment you cross the cordon. The robots are rolling out at AT&T Stadium in Dallas and other FIFA sites ahead of the 2026 tournament. More: The Olympics Is a Testing Ground for Pre-Crime-Style Mass Surveillance Boston Dynamics describes the work in soothing terms. The machines “will be used to assist security personnel with investigating things like suspicious packages or other potentially hazardous materials,” the company said. Hyundai, the South Korean automaker that owns Boston Dynamics and sponsors FIFA, said the bots “will support on-site security operations, helping contribute to a safer tournament environment.” Neither statement says what happens to the footage after the package gets checked, how long the feeds live in storage, or who beyond the security team can pull them up later. After a viral TikTok video claimed the dogs could identify faces, a Boston Dynamics spokesperson told WFAA that “the robots do not have facial recognition capabilities,” saying they flag unauthorized people in restricted zones without facial scans for now. A robot that already sees in every direction, senses heat, and runs anomaly detection is a face-recognition system waiting on a software update. Off-the-shelf AI can add that capability through a settings change rather than a hardware rebuild, so the denial describes today’s configuration and nothing past it. These robots are not autonomous. Human operators sit at consoles, watching the live feeds and deciding when to sound an alarm or call police. The same platform already works outside the stadium. Security dogs patrol apartment complexes and parking lots in Atlanta, issuing spoken commands to residents and calling in officers even after people comply. Reporting around those deployments suggests some operators sit far from the people they watch, possibly overseas, though no company has confirmed where the eyes behind the feed are based. The privacy problem holds either way. You cannot see who is watching you and you have no way to know what they keep. The stadium presents this as a one-off for a big event. The hardware says otherwise. The same quadruped that dances for World Cup selfies has been militarized abroad, with footage from China showing armed robot units built to coordinate through a shared control system. The cute version and the lethal version run on the same mobility and sensing platform. What separates them is software and intent, both of which change fast. Securing a 500,000-person tournament is a real logistical problem, and cameras at a venue are nothing new. Persistent, mobile, multi-sensor recording of every attendee, streamed to unknown operators and stored for an undisclosed period, goes well past checking for suspicious packages. A bag inspection does not require thermal imaging of the crowd or acoustic capture of conversations near the cordon. The robots gather that data because they can, not because the task demands it. When the tournament ends, the machines do not retire. Once a dancing robot recording your biometrics reads as normal at a soccer match, the same platform reads as normal patrolling a mall, a transit station, or a city street, with the recording running the whole time. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Dancing Spot Robots Will Surveil the 2026 World Cup appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A civilian volunteer can lose his position for opinions he typed into LinkedIn and a federal appeals court has decided the government did nothing wrong by removing him for it. The Seventh Circuit ruled on June 1 that the Coast Guard Auxiliary acted within its rights when it expelled James Wenzler over what he posted online. We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here. Judge Michael Scudder wrote the decision, joined by Judges Amy St. Eve and Joshua Kolar. The court handed the Auxiliary wide room, which it called deference, to police the speech of the people who serve in it. Wenzler joined the Auxiliary in 2007 and worked his way up to Vice Flotilla Commander. The Auxiliary is the unpaid, civilian wing of the Coast Guard. His LinkedIn profile showed him in uniform and listed him as the organization’s Branch Chief for Human Resources. That pairing, his uniform alongside his views, is what the government decided it could not allow. The trouble started with a complaint when a member of the public flagged two of his posts in May 2022. One of them answered a message congratulating Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Wenzler wrote, “Another racist makes the court to join racist Sotom[a]yor and Kag[a]n. Great job America!” The second replied to a post praising a Girl Scout who had written a letter to the editor calling an announcement about boy and girl scouts sexist. Wenzler wrote, “Well if you are proving you are just having fun, then you are. To find something sexist is to show you are the sexist. Perhaps the Girl Scouts should actually accomplish something, but alas they just sell cookies.” Some considered the comments mean. They are also the sort of thing people scroll past on the platform every hour. The Auxiliary treated them as a disciplinary problem. District Commodore Harvey Randall sent Wenzler a letter of caution. It ordered him to take down any photo of himself in uniform, delete any mention of his Auxiliary positions, and confirm that he had done so. He could keep his opinions or keep his uniform showing online, but not both. By August the Auxiliary found his profile unchanged and dug up more posts. One took a shot at the incoming president of Northwestern University, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. He said she had done a “horrible job” at her former employer, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and “end[ed] up with the physical results of what she was” there. When the Auxiliary asked one more time, he confirmed he would not comply. They suspended him, ran a disciplinary process and the Coast Guard struck him from its rolls. Then came the legal question. The First Amendment normally shields a government worker who speaks as a citizen on matters of public concern. Courts apply a two-part test drawn from the Supreme Court’s Connick and Pickering rulings. The first step asks whether the speech touched a matter of public concern. The second weighs the speaker’s interest in talking against the government’s interest in running an efficient operation. The court accepted that Wenzler’s posts touched on public concern and moved straight to the balancing, which is where speech usually loses. The Auxiliary’s interest in “discipline or harmony among co-workers” and continued “public confidence,” the court held, outweighed his interest in saying what he thought. The court never found that the Auxiliary’s worries were true. It found only that they were reasonable to hold. The Auxiliary, the opinion says, “could have reasonably determined that Wenzler’s speech and actions would be detrimental to the Auxiliary and its reputation.” The government needed no proof of actual harm, only a plausible guess that harm might follow. The court leaned on its own precedent, that “a public employer may act based on potential disruption so long as its predictions are reasonable.” Reputation is an elastic standard and that is the trap. Almost any opinion that someone, somewhere, dislikes can be recast as a threat to an organization’s image. Two members of the public complained and the court offered that as evidence the Auxiliary’s fears about recruiting and retention were sound. Offense reported by a stranger becomes a reason the speaker can be silenced. Wenzler argued the Auxiliary was really a “government-sponsored fraternity,” an unpaid club where members elect their own leaders and carry no weapons, and so it had no business governing what they say off duty. The court rejected that. Congress folded the Auxiliary into the Coast Guard, gave it a military-style hierarchy and can call on it for genuine missions. That structure, the court reasoned, earns it deference. Deference means a judge declines to second-guess the government’s own judgment about which speech is too damaging to permit. Wrap an organization in enough statutory language and the court steps back, letting that body decide for itself where the line sits. A volunteer who signed up to help with boating safety now finds his weekend opinions answerable to the same chain of command. None of this depends on whether Wenzler’s posts were worth defending on their merits. The speech that needs protection is rarely the agreeable kind. A rule that lets a government body remove someone because his words “could have” bruised its image is a rule with no fixed edge, ready for the next person whose opinions are quieter and more inconvenient. Attach your name to the uniform, say something sharp, and you can be gone, with a court prepared to defer to whoever decides you crossed a boundary that no one can point to in advance. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Court Backs Coast Guard Auxiliary Firing Over LinkedIn Posts appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A new UK national center launches within days, promising to find suspects in minutes, except it costs £115 million ($155M) and occasionally arrests the wrong person. Police.AI, the body charged with pushing dystopian artificial intelligence across all 43 forces in England and Wales, comes with a seductive sales pitch from its frontman. Catch your suspect in minutes. Turn a weeks-long manhunt into a coffee break. Alex Murray, National Crime Agency director and the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s first AI lead, wants facial recognition to do exactly that. The catch, and it is a fairly significant one, is that the technology keeps flagging innocent people. Murray’s whole pitch is speed. “What took days, weeks, sometimes months can potentially take hours,” he said, describing AI tools that span CCTV analysis, searches of seized phones and the flagging of fake images. He likes to point to a Bedfordshire fraud case where the software chewed through Romanian-language phone data from four suspects and produced guilty pleas. Notice the shape of the pattern, though. It is always a list of what the police get to do. The part where the rest of us get scanned, sorted and occasionally pulled off the street tends to fall off the slide. More: Innocent People Are Already Getting Caught Up in UK Police’s Dystopian Facial Recognition Scans The £115m, funded by the Home Office, buys a central body that decides which AI products the 43 forces are allowed to buy, replacing a free-for-all where every force shopped on its own. The NPCC says the technology should do more than six million hours of work a year, supposedly the equivalent of freeing up 3,000 officers. Murray said the launch “marks a decisive step” against rising demand and digital crime, that “the world is changing fast and the police must change fast too,” and that the public asked for it: “The public have told us they would expect the police to use AI, businesses use AI and we know criminals are adopting it as we speak, making the launch of Police.AI both timely and necessary.” The star of the show is retrospective facial recognition. Police take a face off a CCTV still, a doorbell camera or a phone, then run it against roughly 19 million custody photos, around 25,000 times a month. The official line is that a match is only a lead, never proof, and that a human officer always makes the final call. That’s meant to be a comforting thought. But meet Alvi Choudhury, a 26-year-old software engineer who in January was at his family home in Southampton when Thames Valley Police arrived, handcuffed him and held him for nearly ten hours before releasing him at 2am. The machine had matched his face to a £3,000 burglary in Milton Keynes, a city he had never visited, a hundred miles away. The actual suspect, Choudhury said, looked about ten years younger, with lighter skin, a bigger nose, smaller lips and no facial hair. A different person in every respect except the broad category of having a face. “I just assumed that the investigative officer saw that I was a brown person with curly hair and decided to arrest me,” he said. Choudhury, already in the system after a separate wrongful arrest in 2021, is now suing. He has company. Colin McMahon, a 59-year-old roofer, was handcuffed on Harlesden High Street by the Metropolitan Police after a camera linked him to a £300 furniture theft from Ikea. There was a small problem with that allegation though. He was running an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting ten miles away at the time, and a magistrate later acquitted him. The evidence that justified hauling him to court? Court documents show officers noted he had “the same glasses, similar facial features, a skinny body structure and similar white shoes” as the suspect. Similar white shoes. The fallout was no joke to McMahon. “This could tip somebody over the edge with mental health problems. It’s thrown me off mentally and left me with my head all over the shop,” he said. “I’m in therapy once a week, I don’t really want to go out.” So the much-vaunted human-in-the-loop turns out, in both cases, to be a human nodding along to whatever the box says. The police, naturally, arrive draped in the language of responsibility. The NPCC promises “consistent, responsible and transparent AI adoption,” pointing to an AI Covenant, a Responsible AI Checklist and a public-facing registry of how each force uses the technology. Chief Constable Jeremy Vaughan, the science and innovation lead, says the center “strengthens transparency, safeguards public confidence and ensures the tools we build are lawful, ethical and trustworthy.” The trust being requested here is the kind you extend to a database of 19 million faces, a documented system that has detained people for resembling a stranger. A calmer, less invasive option has been available the whole time. The government’s own admits traditional policing might take weeks where the machine takes minutes, while forces already employ trained human “super-recognizers” who, unlike the algorithm, are better at reading a blurry or half-obscured face. The choice on offer was never robocops or anarchy but a slower method that builds a case versus a faster one that scans the whole crowd against a watchlist and occasionally pulls an innocent man off the pavement. What Police.AI really does is take that faster method, with its growing tally of wrongful arrests and bolt it to a national pipeline so all 43 forces can use it. Murray sells it as protection, which is what every surveillance system has been called since the first castle wall. But the machine cannot distinguish between a wanted offender and a software engineer with curly hair. To it, you are not a person but a candidate, a possible match awaiting confirmation from a tired officer who would quite like to go home. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post “Dystopian” Police.AI Launches in UK Amid False Arrests appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Three Seattle parents went looking for answers about their children’s health and Meta was listening. When they typed symptoms and conditions into Seattle Children’s Hospital’s public website, a piece of tracking code recorded what they searched and handed it to Facebook’s parent company, according to a lawsuit now before the Washington Supreme Court. Some of those parents later saw Facebook ads tied to the exact symptoms they had researched. The lawsuit is all about the Meta Pixel, a snippet of code the hospital embedded on seattlechildrens.org. Pixel sits silently behind ordinary browsing and reports user activity back to Meta, which can link that activity to a person’s Facebook account through first- and third-party cookies. A parent logged into Facebook on the same device effectively attaches a name to the medical questions they thought they were asking a hospital in private. Carly Baker, Janssen Ramos Savoie, and Amber Shavies filed suit in October 2023, accusing the hospital of deploying Meta’s software to intercept and record sensitive health information without telling anyone. They argue the conduct breaks Washington’s Privacy Act, a 1967 wiretapping law that bars intercepting private communications without consent. On Thursday, their attorney took that argument to the state’s highest court, which heard the case at Peninsula College in Port Angeles as part of its traveling docket. “In the last decade or so, the corporate surveillance of our online activities has become increasingly invasive — this case is an example of that,” said Ryan Ellersick of Zimmerman Reed, who represents the parents. Seattle Children’s has won at every stage so far. A King County trial judge dismissed the complaint with prejudice and the Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that the “click-and-search navigation” of a public website does not amount to the kind of private communication the wiretapping law was written to protect. The hospital’s lawyer, James Sigel, told the justices the statute targets eavesdropping between people and that searching a hospital website is no different from looking something up in an encyclopedia. Several justices pressed on how far the parents’ theory would reach. “In your view, does the privacy act protect all of my communications with Wikipedia if I searched gambling addiction or miscarriage or anything like that?” asked Justice Colleen Melody. The stakes reach well beyond three families. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and a coalition led by the US Chamber of Commerce have lined up behind the hospital, warning that treating routine web requests as wiretapping would expose the entire business of online ad measurement to legal risk. There’s a strong argument that the wiretapping law was never built for this. When Washington’s legislature wrote it in 1967, lawmakers were thinking about hidden microphones and tapped phone lines, not a script that logs which page a parent clicked. Stretching the idea of intercepting a private communication to cover a browser sending a request to a server asks a great deal of statutory language that predates the web by decades. Even sympathetic judges have struggled with where that theory stops, which is part of why Justice Melody reached for the Wikipedia comparison during argument. The parents are reaching for that law because almost nothing else is available to them. The United States still has no comprehensive privacy statute at the federal level. Two serious attempts, the American Data Privacy and Protection Act in 2022 and the American Privacy Rights Act in 2024, died before reaching a floor vote, and the SECURE Data Act introduced in April would preempt stronger state rules rather than build on them. What people are left with is a patchwork of older laws written for older problems. Washington has done more than most states. Its My Health My Data Act, passed in 2023, was written for exactly this category of health information and limits how companies can collect and share it. The protection came too late for these parents, whose searches were allegedly reaching Meta before the newer rules took hold and questions remain about how readily individuals can enforce it themselves. The wiretapping statute, for all its awkward fit, carries an explicit private right of action, which is part of why a 1967 law about eavesdropping ended up as the vehicle for a 2026 fight over ad trackers. The deeper problem is the one this predicament exposes. A company can build a tool that records what you search on a children’s hospital website and ships the result to an advertising giant. Whether that is even illegal turns on whether a court will agree to stretch a wiretapping law written before the personal computer existed. That uncertainty works in favor of whoever is doing the collecting. As long as the law stays this thin, the burden sits with individuals to dig up some old statute that might fit, while the tracking keeps running on the bet that no clear rule forbids it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Seattle Children’s Hospital Spied on Searches, Parents Tell WA Court appeared first on Reclaim The Net.