iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

why does the WaPo print headline on the botched TN execution read like The Onion

Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Florida cop hitting on a high school girl at a restaurant asked her if she wanted to see a dead body. He was subsequently arrested. floridadaily.com/two-pinellas...

During another encounter at the restaurant, Stanton reportedly asked the teenager whether she wanted to see a photograph of a dead body from an unrelated law enforcement call. She declined.

A sheriff’s office phone Stanton was carrying inadvertently recorded a 17-minute conversation between the two, Gualtieri said.

The girl filed a formal complaint with the sheriff’s office Aug. 26 and told investigators Stanton’s advances made her uncomfortable.

Coworkers reportedly described Stanton as “a little flirty” with the teenager. The sheriff said Stanton also referred to her as his “queen” when speaking with other deputies.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Congrats, can't wait to see what's next!

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

why is he shaped like a kidney bean

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Thousands of innocent drivers caught up in it.

“This is what mass surveillance looks like when it reaches the shoulder of the highway,” said IJ Attorney Senior Josh Windham. “An AI-powered camera flagged Alek’s plate. An anonymous law enforcement agent decided his completely ordinary trip looked suspicious. And a deputy went out and found a violation that never happened. This unit ran thousands of drivers through that routine—humiliating, invasive interrogations and searches of people who had done nothing wrong. It all rests on the idea that if you watch enough innocent people closely enough, criminals will fall out. That’s wrong, it’s unconstitutional, and now, a jury has said so.”

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Earlier this evening a federal jury struck down a brazenly unconstitutional traffic stop scheme "that turned mass surveillance of American drivers into a pipeline of pretextual traffic stops and unconstitutional searches." ij.org/press-releas...

The unconstitutional program ran in five steps: First, surveillance cameras across the state and country recorded license plates and logged when and where cars went. Second, analysts and anonymous tipsters flagged ordinary travel, like driving toward the border and back, as suspicious. Third, Bexar County sheriff’s deputies invented a traffic violation to justify pulling over the flagged driver. Fourth, deputies pulled drivers into their front seats, interrogated them and asked consent to search their car. Finally, fifth, if the driver refused to consent to a search, a K-9 alert from a manipulated dog supplied the probable cause to search anyway. This practice happened for four years to countless motorists.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Incredible Facebook slop ad I just got

Horse pin with an illustration of a horse and the following text:
"Give a man a horse he'll eat in a day, teach a man to horse. and make him drinks water."

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Flock and others love to say things like "We introduced cameras in City X and then crime fell by Y percent." But it's just as easy to point to examples where crime *rose* following ALPR deployment. Flock didn't cause that, any more than it caused decreases observed in other cities.

Property crime in Springville AL, which increased in the years following the introduction in Flock. Not causal, but illustrates the problems with "We did X and then Y happened" narratives in the world of crime policy.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

New at IJ: Flock Safety and other ALPR providers had the good fortune of expanding aggressively during the post-pandemic crime drop, and they've been trying to take credit for it. An entire industry is trying to justify itself by mistaking correlation for causality. ij.org/how-flock-is...

Chart of monthly property and violent crime in San Francisco, showing the introduction of Flock cameras occurring in the middle of a pre-existing drop.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Poll is 11 years old at this point, but in 2015 more than a quarter of parents of high school athletes hoped their kids would go pro.

Chart illustrating what said in the post. Low income, low education parents more likely to hope their kid goes pro.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Check out the very last item on the chart lol

64% of people would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supports building local data centers, only 11% say more likely. NBC news poll

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Jesus Christ, Byers' tweet is *still* up

2013 tweet from Byers: RT
@KallMeKG
: BPD scanner has identified the names : Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi. #Boston #MIT

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

New @ij.org report: SWAT teams damaged the homes, vehicles and other property of innocent people thousands of times over the past decade. But in more than half of those cases, agencies refused to pay. ij.org/report/publi...

Chart showing 54% of claims denied among claimants who were not the target of the investigation

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

But also, the topline finding of a reduction in car theft depends entirely on the study's decision to weight the data in favor of cities with higher amounts of car theft *before* deploying the cameras. Change the weighting and the effects go away.

Clearance rates for car theft were increasing and car thefts were decreasing before ALPR deployment

The working paper compares car theft and clearance rates in cities that deployed Flock ALPRs (the “treatment group”) with those that did not (the “control group”). It finds that ALPR deployment is associated with an 11% reduction in car theft and a 16% increase in car theft clearance rates.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The main problem: car thefts were *already* falling before the cameras were deployed. That makes it hard to attribute any effects to Flock cameras, for reasons that should be obvious.

The problem is that trends in the treatment group were already heading in the right direction for both thefts and clearance rates before Flock deployment, when compared to the control group. The study uses a design that can show causal effects, but only if trends are similar in both groups. In this case, the trends differed significantly. That makes it hard to tell if changes after deployment resulted from Flock or something else.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Unfortunately they stopped updating the squirrel attack map, doubtless to lull us into a false sense of security cybersquirrel1.com

Map of squirrel attacks on the electric grid, there are a shitload of them

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The last I looked deeply into it Gen X got the worst of the exposure -- Boomers were elevated but Gen X had it worse. Had to do with the timing of leaded gas, IIRC consumption peaked in 1970

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Upstate NY, these bumper stickers EVERYWHERE. I remember being like "this is the best we can do for a national tragedy? a laundry metaphor?"

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Police union in DC is speaking out against Flock cameras, but only because management was using them to investigate officer misconduct (possibly overtime fraud) 🙃 washingtonsun.com/metro-newsle...

The D.C. Police Union has joined the anti-Flock chat.

The group issued a press release Thursday sounding the alarm about the powerful cameras, which the Metropolitan Police Department uses to store license-plate information in a searchable database.

The union filed a grievance this summer, complaining that D.C. police managers had been misusing the tech. Union chair Gregg Pemberton tells The Sun’s Jenny Gathright that the department refused to investigate — so he decided to go public with the concerns.

“All I can tell you is that we discovered improper access or improper queries,” said Pemberton, who declined to share more details about what the managers were allegedly looking up in the Flock data.

A D.C. police spokesperson said the union’s grievance was over the use of Flock cameras in an internal affairs investigation regarding the misconduct of a union member.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Flock: Our audit tools ensure nobody is abusing the system! Reality: Police departments are doing literally nothing about abuse unless someone catches them in the act www.usatoday.com/story/news/i...

USA Today: At least three more police officers were arrested and a fourth was fired for alleged misuse of Flock license plate reader cameras after USA TODAY reporters asked their employers why they repeatedly tracked individual cars.

Those latest developments bring the total number of police and sheriff’s officials arrested, fired, put on leave or placed under investigation because of USA TODAY’s reporting on widespread Flock misuse to 22.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

ominous juxtaposition in my feed

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Like this instance of it is somehow worse than the map imo

Google search screen for "lake ontario," showing a page header of "Lake America"

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Group of inexperienced climbers had to be rescued from Mt. Shasta after planning their trip with AI www.facebook.com/ShastaTrinit...

Some key factors in this incident: The group reported using an AI platform, YouTube videos and AllTrails to plan their climb. Specifically, they relied on AI to determine what types of food to bring, and how much food and water they would need for the trip.
The group reflected that they carried enough food and water for an 8-hour climb, not a 16-hour ascent. They also reported that AI recommended simple carbohydrates for their climb, rather than fats because they "take too long to digest." In their words, “We relied too much on AI rather than our own critical thinking.” While they noted they were aware of the www.shastaavalanche.org website, they didn’t use it.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is an *incredibly* damning response. I have a similarly shitty memory of projects I worked on in 2002, but I can unequivocally tell you that there was no cheating or misconduct involved with any of them.

Going forward
When The Chronicle asked Ariely to respond to the allegations, he pointed to an Aug. 7 statement on his website.

“Recently, I was made aware that data underlying a 2002 paper about deadlines and procrastination that I co-authored contained serious anomalies,” Ariely wrote. “The documentary record I have at my disposal today about those experiments isn’t sufficient to answer the questions that have been raised, and more than two decades, and hundreds of experiments later, my memory is similarly insufficient.”

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Rhymes with this one -- apparently everyone gets a mulligan!

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Unfortunately in Georgia (and many other states), officers don't need a warrant to enter private property, such as pastures and fields, that is outside the immediate vicinity of a dwelling.

Under the Open Fields Doctrine, law enforcement officers and government officials in Georgia may enter and search private land outside a home's immediate area (curtilage) without a warrant, even if the property is fenced or marked with "No Trespassing" signs.Key Legal PrinciplesDefinition of Open Fields: This applies to any unoccupied, undeveloped, or remote land outside the curtilage, and the area does not actually need to be open or a field.No Expectation of Privacy: Federal law dictates that citizens have no reasonable expectation of privacy in open fields, meaning a warrantless visual inspection or entry is not considered an illegal search under the Fourth Amendment.State Status: Unlike a few states that have rejected this rule under their own state constitutions, Georgia follows the federal interpretation allowing warrantless entry onto open private property by authorities (such as law enforcement or game wardens).

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Somewhere in America right now there's a cop claiming a "HIPPA" exemption to releasing disciplinary records related to his Flock searches for his wife's boyfriend

Tweet from Georgia journalist Brendan Keefe: A police department just denied us public internal affairs records of a lieutenant who used Flock to search his wife’s boyfriend by claiming his statements are entirely exempt under ‘HIPPA.’ (It’s HIPAA & does not apply here). That Lt. kept his job & later got promoted to Capt.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I saw that someone posted that CBC article about the boy who got rabies as an argument for getting vaccinated anyway. I feel like the key piece of info there is that the kid woke up *with the bat literally laying on his face*

The 11-year-old boy was at a cottage in northern Ontario in the summer of 2024 and was awoken by a bat lying on his nose and mouth, the case report said.

He swatted the bat away and his father caught it in a pot and released it outside.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

New from my colleagues at @ij.org: at least 92 communities have canceled their Flock contracts or decided not to renew them in response to widespread backlash over privacy, surveillance and abuse concerns ij.org/institute-fo...

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Alright whoever put this "Related Stories" module together was Making A Point www.wsbtv.com/news/local/a...

WSB-2 article about Flock misuse in GA:

Albers said the trend of misuse that has become more and more widely reported is a concern, but Georgia has a framework in place to help address it.

RELATED STORIES:

4 former Savannah officers, staff charged for misuse of Flock Safety system
Ex-911 director arrested for misusing Flock camera
3 more metro Atlanta police officers fired, accused of misusing Flock cameras
10+ officers arrested for misusing surveillance cameras. What tools are watching the watchers?
DA’s office investigator illegally accessed Flock camera system more than 60 times, GBI says
Crime center supervisor accused of misusing Flock data to track domestic partner, charged by GBI
DeKalb deputy fired, charged with misusing Flock cameras
5 ex-Georgia police officers charged in misuse of license plate reader data
Former Georgia sheriff’s office employee accused of stalking people using department Flock account
Sandy Springs police officer terminated after allegedly using city’s Flock cameras for personal gain
The senator also said the current framework wasn’t enough, and that when lawmakers return to the capital in January, he’d be working with law enforcement agencies and safety advocates to ensure the technology is used safely and appropriately for all Georgians.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

For some reason they're doing 9/11 on Mt. Washington this year

FB post from Mt. Washington Auto Road: From September 9–12, The Honor Summit will illuminate two powerful beams of light into the night sky from the summit of Mount Washington. The tribute marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, honoring those that passed, including veterans, firefighters, and first responders.
We’ll be offering guided tours to the summit each evening so guests can experience this special tribute from 6,288 feet.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Flock's CEO says they're building a new AI search tool that cops get addicted to

Flock has said little about the tool in public, but Garrett Langley, its chief executive, once likened it to a crime analyst who is, in his words, “always awake, always watching out for you.” At a demonstration for police chiefs in Denver last year, Langley described the ability to search every camera in a city for cars tailing an armored truck, pulling up the registered owners of those vehicles and checking their arrest records, in under a minute.

Investigators who try it, he said, get “addicted.”

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

👋 Media expert here! This isn't cute or funny actually? Comms teams only do this when they're in extreme distress www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...

Early this month, The Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing Flock cameras and other surveillance systems, including to stalk women.

In August alone, local officials in four states decided to pull the plug on Flock cameras in their cities, at least temporarily.

The Independent has reached out to Flock for comment, but its media team said it was currently “taking a break” from responding to requests.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

A Massachusetts woman fled an allegedly abusive relationship with a cop and changed her identity. He found a way to stalk her via Flock cameras anyway. She found out by typing her license plate into HaveIBeenFlocked. www.boston25news.com/news/local/s...

STOW, Mass. — A Stow police officer is facing possible disciplinary action after the department found he repeatedly used police databases to obtain information about a woman he previously dated.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said she ended the relationship with Officer Jason Rogers about five years ago. She said the relationship was abusive and that she changed her identity, phone number and social media habits after leaving.

This summer, she said she discovered Rogers had used the Flock camera system to search for her location while he was working for the Stow Police Department.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Is there a cronyism angle to this? According to the crack investigative team at r/trombones, you better believe it

Comment from redditor TromboneIsNeat: John Paulson, whose equity firm owns Conn-Selmer, and who is a friend and advisor to Trump, and who has written op-eds in favor of tariffs, and who is in Epstein’s little black book has nothing to do with these. Conn-Selmer is totally not getting their ass handed to them by Eastman/Shires, Yamaha, and host of crappy Chinese instruments (high quality German and French instruments are statistically irrelevant). These tariffs are not designed to help Trump’s buddy sell more Bach and Conn instruments.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Flock's CEO says he's spending 80% of his time doing national media and is encouraging police departments to share "sob stories" with local media to generate favorable coverage. signalakron.org/akron-flock-...

Signal Akron story: The message from Flock executives to the local police officials on the call — including chiefs from Medina, Strongsville, Euclid, South Euclid, and other area officials — was clear.

Flock Safety executives, Langley explained, are working to counter the growing criticism of the camera surveillance system.

Their solution, discussed on the call, is a public relations campaign to sway local and national media, online critics and the “skeptical” government officials whose opposition could put the contracts, and the technology lauded by police departments, at risk.

As part of that, Langley said 80 percent of his time now is spent doing national media interviews.

“It’s the most impactful thing we’re trying to do, guys. I’m averaging three to four national interviews per day,” he said.

But he encouraged the local Flock clients to leave the national interviews to him. “Let me handle the New York Times. You handle your local media,” Langley said. “They want to hear from you, you know your reporters, they’ll pick up a sob story.”

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

NEW: Today the Institute for Justice released an expanded database of Flock and other license plate camera abuse, cataloging 140 incidents including: -- 39 cases of stalking -- 55 other incidents of individual officer misconduct -- 31 errors -- 15 miscellaneous abuses ij.org/the-ij-datab...

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Utica 🙃 nypost.com/2026/08/10/r...

Most affordable city in New York has homes for $87K — but no one wants to live there

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

My favorite Royce White anecdote is when he got tricked into thinking that a map of public water fountain locations was a map of crime minnesotareformer.com/2024/06/12/g...

Royce white ranting on Twitter about Minneapolis crime, the map shows water fountain locations

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

It’s the latest in a long string of embarrassments for an unrepentant drug warrior who is running his sixth straight election unopposed this year

Widseth has previously made headlines for obtaining nearly the entirety of the state’s convictions under an archaic “drug tax stamp law,” a drug war relic that prompted ridicule from the lawmakers who eventually repealed it. In 2024, a Reformer investigation revealed Widseth was exploiting a different legal loophole to charge a woman for possession of bong water, again prompting swift action from the Legislature.

A subsequent Reformer investigation found that Widseth was going to unusual lengths to obtain enhanced penalties under a “drug-free zone” law, including requests to the East Grand Forks City Council to designate more public lands as “park” areas where the enhancements apply. It’s “virtually impossible for any person to traverse the city without finding themselves within a school or park zone,” as a county public defender put it several years ago.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

NEW: The Minnesota Supreme Court ordered a new trial for an alleged fentanyl dealer after the Polk County Attorney’s office misstated the law in their instructions to the jury minnesotareformer.com/2026/08/04/m...

An alleged fentanyl dealer in East Grand Forks is getting a new trial after prosecutors botched their instructions to the jury that convicted him.

Polk County Attorney Greg Widseth “plainly erred by misstating the law” governing drug conspiracies, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled last month. To obtain the first-degree conspiracy conviction he sought, he needed to demonstrate that the alleged dealer knew that the amount of drugs sold by the dealer’s co-conspirators crossed a statutory weight threshold.

Instead, Widseth’s team told jurors that the defendant’s knowledge of the quantity of drugs didn’t matter at all, a factual error severe enough that it prompted the Supreme Court to vacate the most serious convictions and order a new trial.

It’s the latest embarrassment for a county attorney who has spent decades pushing the law to its limits in pursuit of severe penalties for drug users.

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Chris Ingraham @cingraham.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

www.steamboatpilot.com/news/video-b...

Steamboat Pilot & Today headline: VIDEO: Bear eats another bear in Steamboat Springs

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