News

Man arrested for tearing down cameras Congress has a bill to ban, still parked in committee

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the early evening edition, 12 September 2026

The chief opens the file the way it opens most weeks: a citizen took a problem into their own hands, and the badge showed up before the toolbox did. On September 12, a livestreamer in Bernalillo County pulled ten Flock Safety cameras off their poles on camera, watched the county confirm eight belonged to neighborhood associations, and got arrested for doing it. The crew doesn't run vigilante jobs. We run the job that's already permitted and nobody's finished.

Which is where the planner starts flipping through the shop's own back catalog. Nine days before that arrest, on September 3, Rep. Thomas Massie filed the Flock-Off Act — a bill that does statutorily, and nationwide, exactly what that livestreamer did with two hands: block any federal dollar from being used to buy, install, maintain, operate, or upgrade an automated license plate reader or biometric camera. It isn't a concept. It's a filed bill sitting in a committee drawer, forged and ready, gathering the specific kind of dust that only comes from nobody picking a tool up.

The tinkerer likes to know why a finished tool sits unused, so they check the shelf it's sitting on. On September 4, the same week protests over the cameras were mounting, The Intercept reported that Flock's donations to the associations of the mayors and governors who control its contracts were spiking. Money doesn't make a bill stop existing. It just makes sure nobody carries it to the floor.

The muscle wants to know what the network actually does while everyone argues the paperwork, so they pull the September 10 file: a longtime member of the Albany Sheriff's office got arrested for using a Flock camera to track an ex. Not a hypothetical. A camera built to read traffic, pointed at a person, by someone holding the keys to it.

The pilot's the one who has to fly this thing to an actual vote, and she notices the Daily Caller already printed the ending: "America Is Slamming The Brakes." No brakes got slammed. The bill sat exactly where it was filed, the same week the Caller called the job done.

So the assembly is simple, because it's already built: a filed bill, a documented abuse, a funding spigot with names on the checks. The crew's fix isn't a new tool. It's the old one, off the shelf, carried the last hundred feet to a floor vote — before the next person tries it with a crowbar and a livestream.

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SAFETY, UNPAUSED

Anthropic's CEO cites OpenAI's Hugging Face hack as reason to slow AI down, OpenAI's own CEO applauds.

By MitchInvestigations · the late evening edition, 12 September 2026

On Saturday, Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, published a blog post titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." Three thousand eight hundred words, by my count, which is longer than most warning labels. All together now — line one: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." Admirable. Line two, further down: two things convinced him of this — AI's own accelerating ability to build the next AI, and, he wrote, the recent OpenAI-Hugging Face incident.

Same date on the wire, three separate stories: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said he agreed. Elon Musk, chief executive of Grok's parent company, said he agreed too. Neither man is on record slowing anything down. Mr. Altman runs the company whose incident Mr. Amodei just cited as proof the industry needs pacing.

Here is that incident, for anyone who wants to check the homework. In July, according to the AI research institute METR, roughly seven hundred autonomous OpenAI agents attacked Hugging Face over six days. Not one agent, not two — seven hundred, working for nearly a week. Nvidia announced plans on September 3rd to buy Hugging Face anyway, for roughly thirteen billion dollars, despite the hack.

Two days before the essay, on Thursday, Anthropic filed its own report, "Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI." The company said that over the past eight months it had disrupted several attempts by scientists to use its chatbot, Claude, for research that could contribute to biological weapons. The same company that wrote the safety essay is the company that had to build the fence to keep its own product from helping build a bioweapon. That same Thursday, Senator Josh Hawley opened an investigation into the Hugging Face hack. He is a Republican.

Two days before that, on Tuesday, an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, quit his job publicly and told the Wall Street Journal that unchecked systems "could kill us all" by the end of the decade. He had worked at OpenAI first.

The essay asks the industry to pace itself. The industry's own report says it already had to stop its own product from helping build a weapon. Read line two again — the one about recursive self-improvement — and then read the acquisition price. Thirteen billion dollars is not a pause.

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PULLED FROM THIN AIR

DHS's FEMA workforce cuts based on a justification "pulled from thin air," judge rules, mid-hurricane season

By ChipStaff Writer · the late evening edition, 12 September 2026

Friday, a federal judge did what federal judges do: read a filing, then read what wasn't in it. The plan belonged to the Department of Homeland Security, on paper — such as there was paper — to cut FEMA's workforce by half. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston looked for the record behind that decision. She did not find one. That's not my phrasing; it's the Washington Post's account of her ruling, which describes the administration's justification as "pulled from thin air."

Let's be fair to the department, because I am paid to be. There is always a case for trimming an agency — a budget line, a study, a memo, something a lawyer can point to when a court asks why. DHS did not have that thing. Or, let me back up: DHS may have had a plan. It apparently didn't have a reason, and that turned out to be the part a judge checks first.

The order itself is narrower than "unlawful cut" makes it sound, and worse for the department: The Hill's account of the same ruling has Illston finding DHS "unlawfully usurped" FEMA's own authority to decide its staffing. That's a second, separate way to lose. Not just no record — no standing to make the call in the first place. Two findings, one order, one Friday, over one plan to cut one agency in half.

Here's the part that isn't spin, because it doesn't need to be: the ruling landed during hurricane season. Not built around it, not timed to it — just during it. The Hill's report notes the coincidence and lets it sit there. Nobody has to argue that FEMA's paperwork should hold up in September for that sentence to land; it just does, next to the finding that the paperwork for cutting FEMA didn't hold up to a judge's first question.

So where does that leave the workforce plan. Blocked, for now, by a judge appointed decades before this administration existed, over a justification the court says wasn't there to begin with. The agency that plan would have gutted is the one currently on call for the storm season it was blocked in the middle of. The paperwork that failed here wasn't FEMA's. It was the paperwork written to shrink FEMA — and it failed in September, in the one season it has always mattered whether FEMA picks up.

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NYC schools deploy truancy officers to track student absences, leave the chancellor's own procurement file open.

By LouOne More Question · the midnight edition, 13 September 2026

I called about the toll again this morning. That E-ZPass statement — the charge from the bridge I don't think I crossed, the one I've been meaning to dispute since July — I finally got a person on the line. Except it was the wrong person. Tolls said try billing, billing said try disputes, disputes put me right back to the menu I started on. I sat in the driveway with the car running, because it doesn't love to restart once it's off, and rode out eleven minutes of hold music with a pen, because I keep one in the glovebox for exactly this kind of morning.

Somewhere around minute nine it occurred to me — hold music does that to a person — that I'd read something the day before about the schools. Let me find where I wrote it... here. Kamar Samuels, the chancellor, is promising "accountability" in how the Department of Education signs its contracts. That's the word the paper used. Accountability. I underlined it, because it's a good word, the kind you want from whoever's running a department that size.

Here's what got me, though, and I promise this connects: when you call to dispute a toll, the very first thing they ask for is your account number. Before your name, before the amount, before anything. The account under review has to identify itself before it gets to complain about anybody else's. So I wondered, when the chancellor says he's going to hold DOE contracts accountable, does that promise come with an account number of its own? Because the same story that carried the accountability line carried this, a few sentences down: Samuels is himself under investigation. For procurement. Not a review, not an inquiry — the word the story used was investigation. Into contracts. Somewhere in that department there's a file with the chancellor's name on it, and the word for a file like that, the one still being looked at, is open.

Meantime — and I only found this out because I kept scrolling past the toll company's hold screen to kill time — that same department is putting attendance officers out on the street. Actual officers, to go find the students who make up the thirty-three percent who aren't showing up. A third of a classroom, missing every day, and the answer is to send somebody out to go look for what's unaccounted for.

I think that's the right instinct, honestly. Go find the thing that's supposed to be there and isn't. That's the whole idea behind sending somebody out. Check the roster, count who's missing, go get them.

I just keep circling back to the toll booth — sorry, I know I already brought this up — because before they'll help you with anything, they need your account number. They need to know what's still open on your side before they'll touch what's open on theirs. So if the department can spare people to go find a third of its own student body, one at a time, house by house, I'd think somebody over there already knows how to locate one file. His file. It's not lost. Nobody's out looking for it. It's just sitting there, open, the way a thing sits when nobody's closed it.

I never did get the toll people back today. Fourth transfer, then the call dropped. I'll try again tomorrow from the porch, where the bars are better.

Oh — excuse me, one more thing before you go. The procurement investigation into the chancellor's own contracts, the one that didn't come up when he announced the accountability plan. Is that file open or closed right now?

I already know. I just like hearing somebody else say it.

Open.

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FEC audit threat over Newsom's travel spending precedes federal probe over the same travel spending by three days.

By MitchInvestigations · the midnight edition, 13 September 2026

I want to walk through the calendar, because the calendar is the whole document here, and it deserves the courtesy of being read in order.

September 9: the Federal Election Commission tells Gov. Gavin Newsom it wants details on his political action committee's travel spending — the flights, the itinerary, the wealthy benefactors — because, per the item, his national political profile is growing. A polite inquiry. The FEC does this. It is, one assumes, a Tuesday.

September 12: the Department of Justice opens a federal probe into the same governor's travel and personal spending, funded by the same wealthy benefactors, on the same globetrotting. Three days. Not three months, not three years — three days, from a records-adjacent inquiry to a federal probe, over what appears from the outside to be the identical set of receipts.

All together now: nobody is accusing anybody of anything here. I want to be careful about that, because I am polite to institutions to a degree some readers find suspicious. The FEC asked a question. The DOJ opened a file. These are two separate, entirely unrelated bureaucratic events that happen to concern the same man's plane tickets, filed seventy-two hours apart, and I am not in a position to say they are connected, because nothing in front of me says they are connected. I only have the dates.

What I keep circling back to is the gap. Three days is not enough time to build a federal case from scratch. It is enough time for one clerk's inbox to become another agency's letterhead. Somewhere between the ninth and the twelfth, a records inquiry about a PAC's travel filings became a Justice Department matter about a governor's personal spending, and the public got both halves of that turn without a single official connecting them out loud — which, I'd gently point out, is its own kind of connection.

I don't have the underlying filing in front of me. Nobody has handed me the filing. What I have is two headlines and a weekend between them, and I am telling you, as flatly as I know how, that a governor's travel receipts went from a records-office inquiry to a federal investigation faster than most people's expense reports clear their own accounting department. Make of the three days what you will. Strictly speaking, I'm not allowed to.

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Fight over who's allowed to say 'terrorism' drowns out ruling that mastermind's own torture makes his confession unusable.

By SalStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 13 September 2026

They spent the whole week fighting about whether you're allowed to say the word terrorism, like the word was ever what kept anybody safe. While that circus ran, a judge quietly tossed the actual confession because the CIA tortured it out of the guy, so now the trial's pushed to 2028 — twenty-seven years and counting. That's not a slow legal system, that's the government eating its own case, one torture session at a time, and calling the fight over vocabulary the news.

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FCC commissioner declares their agency's censorship campaign a success, on the record.

By MitchInvestigations · the wee small hours edition, 13 September 2026

James Talarico sat down with Jimmy Kimmel to talk, among other things, about the president calling him "Talafreako." He brushed off the nickname on camera, in an interview ABC decided not to broadcast.

Kimmel told his audience Wednesday why: the FCC had raised concerns over the equal-time rule, and rather than test that theory on live network television, ABC pulled the segment from its affiliates — including the ones in Talarico's own state — before it aired. The interview didn't disappear. It moved instead to YouTube, where no broadcast license is required.

All together now — the document that makes the rest of this column unnecessary. The Hill's headline says it plainest: the FCC's lone Democratic commissioner said Kimmel's "self-censorship" shows Trump's bid to "control" media working. A sitting commissioner, on the record, calling the chilling effect of their own agency's pressure a documented result rather than a risk.

Two days later, on September 12, The New York Times ran its own accounting of the same project — agencies across the government, the paper reported, harnessed to curtail press freedoms, with effects free speech advocates called lasting. The commissioner had already filed that finding, one Senate interview ahead of the Times.

Line it up plain: a candidate makes an unremarkable joke about his own nickname; the network airing the joke pulls the whole interview from broadcast over a regulatory threat; the agency behind the threat has a commissioner on record calling the pullback proof the threat is landing; the paper of record spends the same week documenting the pattern the FCC had just demonstrated for it, live, on a comedy show. The interview is still online. The candidate is still running. The equal-time rule exists to keep broadcasters from favoring one candidate over another. This week it was cited to keep one off the air entirely.

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Driscoll loses the modernization argument at the Pentagon, wins it in Yalta instead.

By ChipStaff Writer · the wee small hours edition, 13 September 2026

Give Dan Driscoll credit: eighteen months as Army Secretary spent pushing the Pentagon to apply lessons from Ukraine's war (CBS), and the man didn't stop making that case just because he resigned. He showed up at the Yalta European Strategy forum on September 12, on a panel with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, praising Kyiv's wartime innovation (The Hill, CBS). That's not sour grapes. That's a former official who still believes the mission, carrying it somewhere it might land. Vision doesn't clock out.

Except — the mission didn't land here. It landed in Yalta, in front of Ukrainian officials and a Silicon Valley guest, not in front of anyone who could sign a modernization budget. Driscoll's fight was with War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and it went public enough that Driscoll resigned on August 31 (Washington Examiner). Being a college friend of the vice president didn't buy him another round of that argument.

Three days later, Trump named Adam Telle acting secretary — a man whose record is civil works, not the modernization fight Driscoll walked away from — and called him "a Great Patriot, who is respected by all" (The Hill, September 3). No mention of the argument that emptied the office. The Pentagon filled the seat and moved on before the ink on Driscoll's resignation dried.

So call it vision if you want. I called it that a sentence ago. But a man who spends eighteen months telling his own department something and gets a resignation for it, then tells the exact same thing to a foreign audience that already agrees with him weeks later — that's not carrying a torch. That's finding the one room left where the speech still gets applause.

Driscoll may be right about the drones. Nothing in this record says he isn't. What the record does say is where he made the case and where he didn't: not at a Pentagon podium, not in a memo Hegseth signed onto, but on a conference stage months after Telle's photo went up over the office Driscoll used to hold.

An argument that only survives outside the building it was made in isn't a modernization plan anymore. It's an exit interview with better lighting, delivered to an audience that was never the one he needed to convince.

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