More and more license plate readers are going up around the country, and speed cameras are the newest rage! These speed cameras can bring in millions in fines. However, we are now seeing ICE abusing these cameras and circumventing state laws. Furthermore, states are using these cameras to track trans children when they travel north to receive medical treatment.
And I have to wonder if this is our future here...
A Chinese cybersecurity expert has revealed to DW details of China's new high-tech policing. From ski resort facial recognition to seats on a train, the system can track anyone and compile a "holistic profile."DW NewsDe ZhengMay 21, 2026When a cybersecurity researcher known by the pseudonym NetAskari recently clicked on a tab labeled "Inquiry for journalist files" on an unsecured Chinese web dashboard, he expected to see a jumble of auto-generated mock data.Instead, familiar faces popped up on the screen. It was a comprehensive database of almost every foreign journalist based in the Chinese capital Beijing around 2021, including official passport photos taken at the entry/exit bureau, private cell phone numbers, visa details, and dates of birth. He also found his own exact personal information lying dormant on this Chinese police watchlist.
Is this what ICE and CBP are creating?
"It was more interesting than shocking," NetAskari told DW. "When you work as a journalist in China, you basically assume you are always on their radar. But what surprised me was simply how easy it was to access this highly sensitive system."
Are US citizens who are trans activists being tracked here in the US?
Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”In a bizarre but familiar turn, the document also blames transgender people for the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”
DW News goes on to report on how invasive the Chinese system relay is!
This system no longer relies solely on police cameras on street corners. It accurately records the specific train carriage and seat number a target occupies when arriving from Beijing or Shanghai.It even synchronizes photos taken by facial-recognition ticket gates at local ski resorts directly into its tracking mechanism. The movements of the researcher's acquaintances who recently skied in Zhangjiakou were precisely flagged and mapped out with detailed trajectories in the system."The idea is simply to process as much data as possible from as many sensors as possible in real time," the researcher noted.The system logs daily behaviors like gasoline consumption, regular shopping locations, and whether an individual frequently visits "petition areas."This massive data-fusion effort attempts to stitch together a person's physical whereabouts, consumption habits and digital footprints into a flawless "holistic personnel archive."
The website for the Coram company reports that there are a number of surveillance companies beside Flock...
Why Organizations Are Moving Away from Flock SafetyMost teams don't leave Flock over a single issue. The reasons tend to cluster around three structural limitations that become harder to work around as security requirements grow.Privacy and Data ControlFlock operates on a shared network, which means vehicle data collected at one deployment can be accessible beyond a single jurisdiction. For many organizations, that's acceptable. For municipalities, schools, and regulated industries, it's increasingly not.The pressure isn't theoretical. In Norfolk, Virginia, a court ruling questioned the use of automated license plate readers under the Fourth Amendment. The ACLU has challenged the broader implications of large-scale license plate data collection at the national level. Richmond and Saratoga in California have already moved to replace Flock deployments through new RFPs. For organizations that need clear boundaries around data access and sharing, the shared network model is a structural limitation.
We are finding that businesses are using Flock to track customers who drive into their store parking lots. DW goes on to report:
China's granular system of social controlWhat NetAskari had stumbled upon is part modern China's emerging system of "holographic profiles."He had unwittingly accessed a demonstration version of a remote tracking system designed for the Public Security Bureau in Zhangjiakou, the Hebei province city that hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics.Though it was only a test panel, it was populated with real datasets, clearly outlining the trajectory of China's state surveillance machine, which is rapidly evolving from a network of simple street cameras into a data-fused, 24/7, predictive social control behemoth.For years, China has operated the world's most extensive CCTV network. A massive initiative known as the "Xueliang" (Bright Eyes) project aims to merge these isolated islands of surveillance spread across the country.But the data on the Zhangjiakou police dashboard shows the granular detail with which authorities can track an individual.
Here in the US, with our gun laws, is gun violence going to be the vector used to implement a state surveillance machine? Is this Trump's ultimate goal... to establish a state surveillance network?
The White House will prioritize the “neutralization” of groups it considers “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”Mother JonesSophie HurwitzMay 6, 2026On Wednesday, the White House released a new “United States Counterterrorism Strategy,” the first such directive since a 2021 Biden-era memo emphasizing the need to combat white supremacist violence, which has now been scrubbed from the White House website.Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”In a bizarre but familiar turn, the document also blames transgender people for the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”Gorka told reporters at a press conference Wednesday that the administration would “crush” any threat, “whether it is the cartels, the jihadists or violent left-wing extremists like antifa—and like the transgender killers, the nonbinary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend, Charlie Kirk*, we will take them on, head on.”
Funny how the right-wing terrorist are not mentioned!
The feds already won a case to get the medical records of trans from a Rhode Island hospital, the hospital has to give all their trans children patient's anonymized records.
So here is a scenario:
In Texas, authorities use LPRs (License Plate Readers) to track a trans child's family as they drive to the airport. Through airport surveillance, authorities track the family as they board a plane, follow them as they land at Bradley Field, and monitor them as they pick up their rental car. From there, they are tracked through the network of LPRs here in Connecticut all the way to Yale New Haven Hospital!
Far-fetched? No, it is already being done! In late 2023, the Texas Attorney General's office sent a subpoena to Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington and a nearly identical demand for patient records to QueerMed, a telehealth clinic based in Georgia that had previously served youth in Texas before the state's ban took effect.
Here is another scenario:
An LGBTQ center holds a weekly trans youth night. Texas authorities obtain traffic camera video of the road outside the peer support group meeting. Because the LGBTQ center is not a healthcare provider, surveillance of the peer support group is entirely legal.
Is China leading the way for a US national surveillance system?
*While the individual responsible for Kirk's death was cisgender, early right-wing reports falsely claimed the shooter used bullets engraved with pro-transgender messages. The Trump administration seized on this narrative—along with an August 2025 mass shooting in Minneapolis committed by a transgender individual—to frame the broader transgender movement as a domestic terror threat, culminating in the official counterterrorism policies enacted this year
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