What the Flock? Knoxville mayor explains the dark truth about Flock cameras: ‘Not your grandma's license plate readers’



Flock cameras — the automated license plate readers that photograph passing vehicles to capture their license plates, make, model, color, and other details, turning them into searchable records — are popping up all over the country. Proponents argue that they help solve crime and keep Americans safe, but is that actually true?

According to Glenn Jacobs, mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, the answer is no. He argues that Flock cameras actually endanger Americans by putting them under constant surveillance, giving the government a complete record of every citizen’s movements.

On this episode of “Kibbe on Liberty,” Matt Kibbe sits down with Jacobs to discuss why he believes Flock cameras are a dire threat to privacy and the Fourth Amendment.

“The more I've researched [Flock cameras], the more I dislike them and consider them a very dire threat to our privacy and to the protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment,” says Jacobs.

Kibbe, calling Flock cameras “Orwellian,” is concerned that such surveillance will turn America into China 2.0.

“How is this any different than kind of a Chinese surveillance system?” he asks.

Jacobs indicates that it’s not all that different. Flock cameras, he explains, are marketed as license plate readers, but “they do a lot more than that.”

“With the Flock system, it is literally harvesting data. Every car that goes by, it pulls their license plate, but it also uses AI to develop a vehicle footprint,” he says.

“So it's your license plate, but also make, model, color, distinguishing features, roof racks, bumper stickers, all these different things that then go into a database and remain there for 30 days or more, depending on the policy of that particular agency. Then it can be searched through without a warrant for whatever,” he continues.

The lack of established parameters around Flock cameras also gives Jacobs serious pause.

“In Tennessee there's no state rules about how this can be used, and there's no federal guidelines either, so what's happened is this technology has gone out there and it's — until now, it's kind of flown under the radar,” he says.

Then there’s public opinion to consider. As Americans find out more and more about Flock cameras, the opposition has only grown.

“These things are not popular at all, and the more people learn about them, the more they literally hate them,” says Jacobs.

For example, it’s coming out that Flock cameras can gather enough data to form “a pattern of your movements.”

Jacobs illustrates the danger of such power with a hypothetical.

“They could say, you know, Glenn goes to the gun range at least once a week, twice on Sundays. If this happened during COVID, you know, he goes to anti-COVID meetings and rallies. All of a sudden they have a profile on me,” he says.

“No, we do not have an expectation of privacy when we're in public places and on public roads, but the Supreme Court has ruled that without a warrant, your movements can't be tracked like that. They ruled that in Carpenter v. United States in 2018,” he continues, predicting that it’s a matter of time before the Supreme Court will “squash” Flock cameras.

“But in the meantime, it's just important that people are aware that these are not your grandma's license plate readers. These are something much much different,” he warns.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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EXCLUSIVE: Congress Moves To Prohibit Foreign Adversaries From Accessing Sensitive US National Labs, Citing Counterintelligence Threat

Congress is taking up new legislation that would bar Chinese, Russian, Iranian, North Korean, and Cuban nationals from accessing all U.S. national laboratories in the latest attempt by lawmakers to stop adversarial nations from stealing sensitive U.S. technology and research, according to a copy of the bill exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The post EXCLUSIVE: Congress Moves To Prohibit Foreign Adversaries From Accessing Sensitive US National Labs, Citing Counterintelligence Threat appeared first on .

The Justice Department finally has a grown-up in charge



The Senate finally voted Saturday to confirm Todd Blanche as President Donald Trump’s new attorney general. Anyone who wants a Justice Department that enforces the law instead of bending it to politics can breathe a little easier.

Blanche is unusually well-suited for the job. He has seen the justice system from both sides — first as a federal prosecutor and assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, then as a defense attorney, including as one of Trump’s lead lawyers during the prosecutions he faced before returning to the White House. Few incoming attorneys general have had a more personal view of what prosecutorial power can become when politics infects the justice system.

Trump’s effort to reform the Justice Department is not complete, but the direction is a stark improvement over what came before.

A new era at the Justice Department has now officially begun, but the turnaround started before Blanche’s confirmation. Speed bumps aside, the direction under Trump’s team is unmistakable: order restored at the southern border, an end to lawfare, and a saner approach to antitrust enforcement. Blanche’s job is not to start that work. It is to finish it.

A timely reminder arrived last week, when the Department of Justice reached a settlement with Paul Vaughn days before Blanche was confirmed.

The Biden Justice Department charged Vaughn, a pro-life father of 11, under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act after he participated in a sit-in at a Tennessee abortion clinic in 2021.

FBI agents staged a predawn raid at his home and arrested him in front of his wife and children. Vaughn ultimately received three years of supervised release and no prison time, but other pro-life defendants were not so lucky.

Lauren Handy was sentenced to 57 months in prison. Jonathan Darnel received 34 months. Seventy-six-year-old Joan Andrews Bell got 27 months, and 75-year-old Paula Harlow received 24 months.

When Harlow’s husband pleaded for leniency because of her age and declining health, the judge replied that she should “make every effort to remain alive” in keeping with “the tenets of your religion.” All four were later pardoned by Trump.

The FACE Act protects access to abortion clinics, but it also protects pregnancy centers and houses of worship. Yet the Biden administration’s aggressive prosecution of pro-life demonstrators contrasted sharply with the much thinner record of prosecutions after extremists firebombed and vandalized pregnancy centers following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

Attorney General Merrick Garland once explained the difficulty by noting that many of the attacks happened at night. Apparently darkness is now a federal jurisdictional problem. Good to know. Garland was almost on the Supreme Court.

RELATED: The Biden tapes blow open the autopen scandal

Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images

The pro-life cases were among the most visible abuses of the Garland years, but hardly the only ones. His department drew justified outrage over its treatment of parents protesting school policies; House Republicans later accused the DOJ of having labeled parents as terrorist threats. The FBI also came under fire after an internal memo contemplated cultivating sources in traditionalist Catholic communities — what critics described as a plan to send spies into parishes. And special counsel Jack Smith pursued Trump through the heat of the 2024 campaign.

Even antitrust enforcement became an exercise in questionable priorities. The Justice Department blocked JetBlue from acquiring Spirit Airlines in 2024. Spirit later collapsed, removing a low-fare competitor from an already concentrated airline market. Regulators claimed to be protecting consumers; consumers ended up with one fewer discount carrier.

The Biden administration also moved to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s acquisition of Juniper Networks, a deal the intelligence community reportedly deemed vital to national security. The Trump team ultimately allowed the transaction to proceed, strengthening an American competitor in a market where China’s Huawei remains formidable.

RELATED: The right needs a public defender network for lawfare

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Anti-Christian, anti-conservative, anti-business, and heedless of national-security concerns: We have seen what happens when partisan priorities seep into the Justice Department. Trump’s effort to reform the Justice Department is not complete, but the direction is a stark improvement over what came before.

And the danger of backsliding is obvious. If a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, expect pressure for an attorney general even more aggressive than Garland. Biden himself reportedly regretted choosing Garland and wished he had listened to advisers who preferred the more partisan Doug Jones. That should tell you something.

Todd Blanche is infinitely preferable. He knows prosecutorial power from both sides of the courtroom, and he has every reason to understand how quickly discretion can become abuse.

The Justice Department does not need revenge. It needs restraint, consistency, and equal treatment under the law. Blanche has the experience — and now the authority — to deliver it.

Washington is finally trying to shut the door on Chinese cars. Europe shows why.



For years, Western automakers looked at China and saw the world's greatest growth opportunity.

China looked back and saw something else: teachers.

Semiconductor manufacturing offers the obvious lesson. The United States is now spending enormous sums trying to re-create domestic capacity that took decades to move overseas.

American, German, and Japanese automakers wanted access to more than a billion potential customers. China frequently required foreign companies to work with local partners, manufacture inside the country, and share the knowledge that comes with doing so.

The arrangement made enormous amounts of money for Western car companies.

It also helped China learn, very quickly, how to compete with them.

Now Chinese automakers are producing increasingly sophisticated vehicles at prices Western manufacturers struggle to match, and Europe is discovering what happens when those cars arrive in large numbers.

Washington appears determined not to repeat the experiment.

Saving our spot

A bipartisan proposal called the Connected Vehicle Security Act of 2026 advanced unanimously through the Senate Commerce Committee last month. Sponsored in the Senate by Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, it would dramatically strengthen restrictions on Chinese vehicles and connected automotive technology entering the United States.

For once, Democrats and Republicans seem to have found something they agree on.

The obvious fear is economic. China can build some astonishingly inexpensive vehicles, particularly EVs, and Chinese manufacturers including BYD, Geely, and others are already putting tremendous pressure on established brands overseas.

But Congress isn't framing this purely as a trade dispute. Modern automobiles are packed with cameras, microphones, GPS equipment, cellular connections, driver-assistance systems, and software capable of receiving remote updates.

That means a connected car is also a data-collection device.

Fast and firewalled

The Commerce Department reached the same conclusion under the Biden administration. In January 2025, it finalized rules restricting connected-vehicle software and hardware with sufficient ties to China or Russia, citing the possibility of espionage, data collection, sabotage, and remote manipulation.

The new congressional proposal would go farther and put many of those protections into statute, making them much harder for a future administration simply to reverse.

The Senate version would restrict vehicles, software, and components associated with designated foreign adversaries. Supporters specifically argue that Chinese-connected vehicles could funnel sensitive information collected on American roads back to Beijing.

That's not a crazy concern.

A new car can know where you live, where you work, where your children go to school, which military installation you enter every morning, and exactly where the vehicle travels every day.

The debate over Chinese cars therefore isn't really just about whether Americans should be allowed to buy a cheap BYD.

It's about who controls the computers rolling around American streets.

Training our replacement?

There is an uncomfortable part of this story that Western manufacturers don't always like discussing.

China did not learn modern automobile production from scratch. Foreign automakers spent decades helping.

As auto industry commentator Michael Harley recently pointed out in a conversation with Karl Brauer and me, intellectual property is only part of what China acquired.

Manufacturing itself is knowledge.

How do you coordinate thousands of suppliers? How do parts arrive at exactly the right moment? How do you engineer a production line? How do you control tolerances, automate assembly, manage quality, and move from prototype to millions of vehicles?

American manufacturers accumulated that knowledge over more than a century.

Chinese companies were able to compress much of that learning curve into a few decades while working alongside some of the world's best automotive companies.

Western executives didn't do this because they were stupid. China was simply too attractive to ignore.

For a long time, the bargain worked.

GM sold enormous numbers of Buicks there. Volkswagen became deeply embedded in the Chinese market. Mercedes-Benz and BMW treated China as essential to future growth.

The problem is that China eventually became very good at building its own cars.

Learning the hard way

The result is now visible in Europe.

Chinese manufacturers have entered European markets aggressively, particularly with EVs. European governments have responded with tariffs and investigations, but domestic manufacturers are still confronting lower-cost competitors at the same time their Chinese sales are under pressure.

That combination is painful.

For decades, German manufacturers could use strong sales in China to support enormous operations back home.

Now they're fighting Chinese companies in China and increasingly fighting them in Europe too.

That's exactly the scenario American lawmakers want to prevent.

The United States already keeps most Chinese-made EVs out through tariffs and national-security restrictions. The new bill would make the wall substantially higher.

There are complications. Reuters reported that the legislation's ownership provisions could even affect Mercedes-Benz because Chinese investors hold nearly 20% of the German company, although lawmakers may revise the language before final passage.

That illustrates how deeply Chinese capital and technology are already woven into the global car business. Untangling it will not be simple.

RELATED: The Senate wants to lock the door on cheap Chinese cars — is 'security' the whole story?

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Expensive at any price

Consumers understandably care about price.

If somebody offers an attractive electric SUV for $25,000 while a comparable American vehicle costs $40,000, telling families to spend the extra $15,000 for geopolitical reasons is a difficult sales pitch.

That's precisely what makes China such a formidable competitor.

The Chinese auto industry has enormous manufacturing scale, substantial state support, a massive domestic supply chain, and leadership in battery production.

Americans would benefit in the short term from having access to inexpensive vehicles. The question is what happens afterward.

We've seen this pattern with electronics, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, and industrial production. Once domestic capability disappears, rebuilding it is painfully slow and enormously expensive.

Semiconductor manufacturing offers the obvious lesson. The United States is now spending enormous sums trying to re-create domestic capacity that took decades to move overseas.

Automobile manufacturing is much harder to rebuild than it is to destroy.

Playing the same game

Free trade works best when everybody is playing something resembling the same game.

China never viewed its automobile industry purely as a collection of private companies competing for customers. It treated automotive manufacturing, batteries, raw materials, and increasingly vehicle software as strategic industries.

America is finally beginning to think strategically too.

There are legitimate questions about exactly how broad the Connected Vehicle Security Act should be, how it treats foreign companies with minority Chinese ownership, and whether some restrictions will increase prices for American consumers.

Congress should work through those problems carefully. But the larger principle is sound. The United States does not need to repeat Europe's mistake simply because a $20,000 Chinese EV looks irresistible today.

Sometimes the cheapest car is not the cheapest decision.

After CCP Spy Fiasco, US Should Reconsider Sharing Intel With Canada

Until Canada demonstrates it can protect shared allied secrets, partners — especially the United States — should reasonably limit what they share.

China's hottest start-up thinks it can beat the West with a new idea of freedom



There is a piano at the entrance of Moonshot AI, the Beijing start-up that released Kimi K3, the leading open-weights model, in July 2026. The conference rooms are named after bands. Employees wear slippers. The stated ethos is that no one tells you what to do, and when new employees arrive, no one does.

These details are meant to communicate a refusal of corporate life as it is usually practiced in China’s large technology firms, with their KPI rituals, their departmental territories, and their hierarchies of condescension. The symbols of institutional authority have been stripped away so thoroughly that what remains can look, to the uninitiated, like nothing at all.

A young employee cried after failing to produce a campaign that satisfied leadership.

In fact, Moonshot’s system is demanding, though the demands are of a mostly unspoken kind.

Moonshot has no departments in the ordinary sense, no managerial titles, no OKRs, no time clocks, no performance reviews. Roughly 300 employees organize themselves around problems rather than roles. More than half the employees have changed responsibilities multiple times; perhaps 80% are doing work significantly different from anything they have done before. The implicit unit of production is not the job but the bottleneck. When the company’s long-context research project, MoBA, stalled repeatedly, Moonshot did not assign blame or dissolve a team; instead, it temporarily routed expertise from across the organization toward the failure, rewrote the underlying logic, and returned to the project after multiple setbacks.

The company calls this way of working “generalization,” borrowing the term from machine learning, where it means the capacity to perform under conditions not represented in the training data. Applied to people, it means something like the readiness to become someone else.

The word Moonshot uses for the quality it most values in employees is “taste.” In context, taste is not merely aesthetic preference but the ability to detect which technical direction is fertile, which complexity is decorative, which benchmark improvement matters, which eccentric teenager is capable of important work. Taste selects architecture and colleagues. At least 100 recent hires arrived through employee referrals, a process jokingly called “person-to-person transmission,” and the network produced is unmistakable: roughly 80% introverts, roughly 80% graduates of China’s elite universities, average age below 30. The scent that enables frictionless coordination also makes everyone smell alike.

This concept is where the freedom, a term not often associated with China in the U.S., reveals its structure.

Escaping the Western model

Moonshot’s organization is formally flat, but five co-founders remain involved in frontline decisions, each reportedly interacting with 40 to 50 individual contributors. The distance between strategic intent and execution is short, as is the distance between a founder’s displeasure and an employee’s nervous system. At a late 2024 growth meeting, more than 30 young employees discussed advertising, user operations, and holiday campaigns in granular detail while co-founders participated, and the meeting ended shortly before four in the morning. A young employee cried after repeatedly failing to produce a campaign that satisfied leadership. This approach is founder micromanagement without the buffer of experienced middle managers, who have been removed on the theory that their authority was organizational overfitting.

Hierarchy has been compressed into founder judgment, peer reputation, technical evidence, and the elusive criterion of taste, which appeals to tacit knowledge. In a field where reliable metrics arrive after decisions must be made, tacit knowledge can be indispensable but also unchallengeable. When the decisive quality is deliberately inarticulate, exclusion becomes invisible, and disagreement can be reframed as proof that the dissenter simply does not understand.

RELATED: Why selling your face is big bucks in China

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The company’s internal narrative attributes exceptional foresight to its founder, Yang Zhilin. One experienced hire described his existing intellectual framework “collapsing” before Yang’s vision of reinforcement learning. The organization’s unifying object, the model, gains force from founder credibility, and credibility is renewed with each frontier release: K2, K2.5, K2.6, and K3. Each model serves not only a commercial function but a legitimating one: It proves that the unusual organizational demands were justified. A prolonged period without results would make the costs of ambiguity, overwork, and intense selection much harder to bear.

K3 itself is a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model. Only about 104 billion parameters activate for any given token; the rest wait, specialized and dormant, until the router calls them. Moonshot’s human organization works on the same principle: Intelligence is routed. Small groups assemble around the present problem, do the work, and dissolve.

The company sees this as an advance beyond the West's modern industrial division of labor, Taylorism, and of its bureaucratic knowledge firm.

Can it compete?

DeepSeek’s breakthrough in January 2025 supplied the external shock that made Moonshot reorganize into its current form. Before DeepSeek R1, Moonshot had drifted toward consumer advertising, spending tens of millions of yuan on user acquisition while the model itself received less organizational energy. DeepSeek demonstrated that a Chinese start-up could earn global prestige through engineering and open releases rather than marketing. One Moonshot employee’s formulation was blunt: “DeepSeek saved us.” The competitor had supplied evidence strong enough to overturn Moonshot’s prior strategy.

The correction was swift. Moonshot retreated from paid acquisition, renewed its focus on the model, embraced open weights, and reoriented its products toward agents, coding, and professional work. K3 arrived as vindication. Within days of release, demand exceeded forecasts and approached the limits of existing compute clusters. In response, Moonshot had to suspend new consumer subscriptions. The episode was strategically encouraging and operationally sobering: a successful product had created an infrastructure crisis precisely because its intended use worked.

Moonshot has replaced visible bureaucracy with invisible constraints of system prompts, agent traces, tool permissions, context windows, routing logic, and the model’s own learned behavior. Employees who once navigated reporting chains now navigate a founder’s attention. The forms have changed, but the pressure has not. Accounts of tears, sleeplessness, severe self-doubt, and inverted schedules recur in descriptions of life inside the company. They are narrated as evidence of resilience.

K3 demonstrates that Moonshot can build frontier models. It remains to be seen how well a system that depends on founder bandwidth, cultural homogeneity, abundant trust, and the nervous energy of 300 people who have been told they are geniuses can make the transition to a durable institution.

We need more microchips to beat China. You won't believe where Apple has turned to get them.



When it comes to RAM shortages, no tech company is safe. The gaming industry was one of the first to feel the full effects of AI’s supply chain chokehold, but eventually, it extended outward to impact even the world’s most valuable brands, including Apple.

The Cupertino tech giant has been looking for ways to offset low RAM availability and keep the cost of its products down, but its latest solution has lawmakers worried.

RAM from these blacklisted manufacturers is untested for Apple’s needs.

The rest of us should be concerned too.

Apple's choice could put at risk not only the company and its products, but our national security.

America's memory failure

Apple may be a multi-trillion-dollar company, but it’s not immune to the RAM crisis. Especially now that so many Apple products are used alongside AI, ample RAM is crucial to delivering a reliable user experience.

Historically, Apple has relied on several partners to supply the RAM for its first-party Apple silicon chips. You may even know some of these companies — Samsung (yes, the prolific Android phone manufacturer), SK Hynix out of South Korea, and Micron (that recently closed its consumer RAM business after 29 years to service Big Tech AI brands). Unfortunately, the growing need for AI data centers has completely devoured available supplies, forcing Apple to look toward other unlikely partners.

Apple is getting desperate for more RAM

So who's the memory supplier of last resort?

The very source America is ostensibly gobbling up all that memory to beat.

That's right. China.

Reports say Apple is in talks with Chinese-owned manufacturers to increase RAM availability for its product ecosystem. This alone is enough to raise some red flags, considering that China has a reputation for spying on Americans and stealing from Big Tech.

To make matters even worse, the two China-based brands that Apple is eyeing for RAM — ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) — both have sordid pasts. The Pentagon previously declared both brands as companies linked directly to the Chinese military, while YMTC is on the U.S. Entity List, meaning the company is a direct threat to national security.

In other words, Apple is attempting to partner with adversaries of the United States simply to gain access to more RAM, and lawmakers aren’t happy.

Lawmakers don’t want Apple to make a huge mistake

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have taken notice of Apple’s RAM expansion strategy. Sens. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Apple to withdraw its attempts to lobby the Trump administration to agree to the purchase of RAM from CXMT and YMTC, citing connections with the Beijing military. They also noted that Apple's increasing reliance on Chinese manufacturers could harm attempts to bring more manufacturing jobs back to the States. Finally, national security concerns around Chinese RAM could prevent the U.S. government from using Apple products in any official capacity moving forward. Lawmakers have implored Apple to end its pursuit of Chinese RAM by August 21, but no final moves have been made yet.

RELATED: Trump bans Chinese robots — but your robot vacuum may be spying on you already

salihkilic/Getty Images

It goes without saying that Apple is on the cusp of opening its products to unforeseen vulnerabilities or reliability issues. On a basic level, RAM from these blacklisted manufacturers is untested for Apple’s needs, and they may or may not hold up to the same quality as Apple’s current providers. On a national security level, Chinese RAM could make Apple’s products perfect targets for tampering or unforeseen security flaws. Chinese RAM integration could also make Apple susceptible to a U.S. device ban, similar to what we’ve seen with gadgets from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE, though this would only happen in extreme cases, given Apple’s value to the U.S. economy, reputation among consumers, and prowess as one of the most innovative technology companies on the planet.

Apple technically doesn’t need the government’s approval to purchase RAM from blacklisted companies, especially if this RAM is only used in products sold outside of the USA, but moving forward with a deal could have serious consequences for the tech giant, its products, and consumers. That said, while Chinese manufacturers may have the RAM that Apple desperately needs, it may not save the company money in the long run as suppliers are poised to charge top dollar to bail Apple out of a jam.

'The Odyssey' and the Clash of Civilizations

Much as Helen's face is said to have launched a thousand ships, Christopher Nolan's new movie depicting Odysseus' return from the Trojan War has launched a thousand takes. Keyboard warriors have raged about everything from the director's choice of translation to his alleged transgressions against historical accuracy. This is in a movie that depicts a witch turning people into pigs, of which the archaeological record provides scant evidence.

The post 'The Odyssey' and the Clash of Civilizations appeared first on .

‘Raw Materials of American Strength’: Trump Announces Flurry of Mining Deals at State Department To ‘Dominate the Future’

WASHINGTON, D.C.—President Donald Trump unveiled deals worth more than $2 billion and funding announcements worth millions of dollars more aimed at bolstering America’s mineral supply chain during a roundtable at the State Department on Friday, alongside a group of prominent mining executives. The moves are designed, according to Trump and senior administration officials, to claw […]

The post ‘Raw Materials of American Strength’: Trump Announces Flurry of Mining Deals at State Department To ‘Dominate the Future’ appeared first on .

Trump Moves To Shut Down Birth Tourism Industry After SCOTUS Affirmed Squatter Citizenship

'Citizenship is not a commodity to be acquired through calculated exploitation and evasion of the immigration laws, such as by entering the United States on a nonimmigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth within the Nation’s borders.'