Tech companies pour trillions of dollars into new data centers, the backbone of the AI boom. But many communities across the U.S. are rejecting them. A recent Gallup poll found that more than 70% of Americans don't want data centers in…
Page A7From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
Over 70% of Americans oppose data centers; Florida responds by banning license plate readers instead.
As it ran on the front
Here's a tell you can set your watch by: when a majority of the public turns against something with real teeth — energy costs, water tables, the eyesore next to the school — the fix that actually clears committee is never the thing they voted against. It's the thing next to it that photographs better.
This stretch the number was seventy percent. That's not a fringe complaint, that's most of the room, saying no to the data centers stacking up in their backyards, chewing through the power grid and the water table to keep somebody else's cloud storage cool. Seventy percent is the kind of number that used to move legislatures. And it did move one — just not toward the data centers. Florida banned license plate readers off its state highways instead, citing the same backlash, the same public mood, the same word: overreach, enough.…
…(cont) Now, banning Flock cameras is not nothing. Say that plainly: it's a real limit on a real surveillance tool, and somebody in Tallahassee actually voted for it. But watch where the energy of that seventy percent actually got spent. It got spent on the visible camera on the highway shoulder, the thing a driver can point a phone at and post online. It did not get spent on the windowless building drawing enough power to run a small city, sitting behind a fence, employing a security guard instead of a workforce, and showing up on nobody's commute.
That's the bait-and-switch, and it isn't a conspiracy, it's just how the incentive runs: the visible irritant gets legislated, the invisible one gets permitted. The data center still gets built. The camera just doesn't watch you drive past it anymore. Check your utility bill for the real number nobody banned — that's where seventy percent of the country's actual objection is still sitting, unresolved, drawing power twenty-four hours a day.
“Seventy percent of the country says no to the data centers eating their electricity bills and their water tables, and the political system delivers a ban on license plate cameras instead. Different backlash, same shelf — they'll regulate the camera you can see before they touch the server farm you can't. Check your utility bill this month, that's where the real receipt for 'no' actually landed.”
“Look, banning Flock cameras is about privacy, full stop, it has nothing to do with the data center fight — well, they're both tech-backlash stories, sure, but that's a coincidence of the news cycle, not a substitute. Did I say substitute? The data center permitting process is moving forward on its own separate, entirely unrelated track, I want to be clear about that.”
The receipts
Florida’s state transportation office revoked the ability of local police to put license plate readers on state highways.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.