National Nurses United issued the following statement on August 27, 2026. On Thursday, Aug. 27, hundreds of registered nurses — joined by patients and community allies — mobilized to demand hospitals and elected officials immediately cut…
Page A4From§Eachthe milkman edition — 1 September 2026
Florida bans license-plate readers from state highways the same week nurses nationwide demand 'Palantir Out!'
As it ran on the front
You want to know when you know something's actually wrong, not just annoying-wrong but wrong-wrong? When the nurses and a red-state legislature end up on the same side of an issue without either one calling the other. Florida — Florida — just banned license plate readers off its state highways. Same week, nurses across the country are doing sit-ins demanding Palantir get thrown out of the hospitals. Nobody organized that. Nobody had to. That's what it looks like when the surveillance got so obviously out of hand that it stopped being a left-right thing and just became a 'people noticed' thing.
Think about what has to be true for a Florida statehouse to ban a piece of law-enforcement tech. Somebody in that room decided the plate readers had become more useful to whoever's watching the data than to the cops supposedly running it. That's not me reading tea leaves — that's the vote. And on the other coast, nurses aren't picketing about pay this time. They're picketing about a defense contractor's software sitting inside patient records. That's two completely different professions, two completely different politics, arriving at the exact same word: out.…
…(cont) Here's the part that should bother you more than it probably does. Both of these systems — the plate readers, the hospital software — got installed under the label of efficiency. Safety. Better outcomes. Nobody voted on either one specifically; they got procured. And it took actual public backlash, from nurses walking off shift and from a legislature that usually loves this stuff, to even start rolling it back. That tells you the review process that was supposed to catch this before it got installed in your hospital or clocked your car on I-95 — that process didn't work. It never got asked the question until the thing was already running.
So when they tell you it's about safety, ask safety for who, and ask who's got the contract. Because the two groups doing the asking this week are nurses and Florida Republicans, and if that's the coalition it takes to get a camera turned off, that ought to tell you something about how far past normal we already were.
“When Florida Republicans and nationwide nurses end up screaming the same word — out — you know the surveillance got so blatant it stopped being a partisan issue. Somebody's making money watching you drive and watching your chart, and both sides finally noticed.”
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.