The vast majority of human history and technology can be viewed as simply the development of systems to manage this process. This doesn’t mean that every war, government, or economic system can be reduced entirely to energy, but underneath all of them is a basic material problem every society has to solve: how to capture enough energy to survive, store it, and move it where it needs to go. As societies develop larger and more reliable surpluses, they are able to support more people who don’t spend all of their time directly acquiring food, including soldiers, administrators, priests, craftspeople, scholars, artists, and musicians. This isn’t a particularly new concept, it has existed in anthropology for nearly a century now, but it’s a concept I find very interesting and wanted to write about.

Let’s jump forward a bit. It’s 2500 BC, humans now live in well-organized civilizations, and you’re living in Upper Egypt during the height of the Old Kingdom. Compared to your ancestors you’re doing quite well. You no longer have to hunt for food, you have a small farm along the Nile, and you have livestock for meat. There are wet seasons and dry seasons here, and the predictability of floods is important to ensuring that you can supply yourself with food. But here you have a new responsibility: taxes. Some of the food you make must be delivered to the government to help fund the infrastructure and organization required for a larger-scale society.

Food delivery means logistics, which means more energy management. Now you’re not just growing food for yourself. You must also load carts, pulled by oxen, with the food you’re paying in taxes and possibly sending to market for trade. But oxen don’t pull your goods for free, they need to eat too. The farther you move food over land, the more of your available energy has to be spent feeding the animals and people moving it. Thankfully, you live along the Nile River.

This is where one of our earliest sources of “free energy” comes from. Boats could travel downstream on the current, carrying your grain without consuming any of it. The kinetic energy of the water reduced the waste of caloric energy stored in the grain. The boat could then come back upstream using sails, taking advantage of the prevailing winds that generally blew from the north. So there’s still some use of caloric energy here, especially in loading, unloading, rowing, and handling the boats, but not nearly as much as relying entirely on oxen. Over time advancements are made to sailing technology, roads are built to improve travel times for oxen, ports are built to improve infrastructure and logistics, all to move the precious calories stored in grain more efficiently.

This is the process that helped create and destroy empires for thousands of years after this point. As Rome conquered the Mediterranean it built complex tax systems and logistics all designed, among other things, to move enormous quantities of food and supplies around the empire. Egypt became one of Rome’s major grain suppliers, along with North Africa and other regions, building one of the largest and most complex logistics networks in history to that point. One ancient estimate suggested Egypt supplied around a third of Rome’s grain, though the exact amount is debated. Later, Constantinople would also become heavily dependent on Egyptian grain, and when political control over those supplies changed, Roman and Byzantine governments had to reorganize where their food and tax revenue came from. Rome’s wars obviously weren’t all fought over energy or trade routes, but regardless of why an army went to war, that army still had to be fed, supplied, and moved. Political ambition could decide where an army marched, but the ability to actually get it there still depended on logistics and energy.

As the world advances into the medieval ages the pattern stays largely the same. In China, maritime technology begins advancing dramatically, they are now building increasingly large ships and utilizing celestial navigation. Chinese trade networks eventually stretch as far as Arabia and East Africa by sea. At this point most large societies have an excess of food and goods, and are trading excess supplies for exotic goods, works of art, and foreign foods and spices. Again, the specific political and economic systems are different, but improvements in the ability to move goods allow societies to operate over increasingly larger areas.

Let’s look back at Europe and talk about infrastructure again. In Europe, throughout the medieval ages a collection of systems we broadly call feudalism and manorialism developed, though there was never one single uniform “feudal system” covering all of Europe. We’re mostly familiar with kings, dukes, counts, etc. but in actuality these systems were much more complex and morphed significantly over time. One important factor shaping them was still the practical difficulty of moving food, people, and other goods over long distances.

I mentioned earlier that, if you are moving food over land, there is a limit to how much you can move before the animals hauling it begin consuming a significant amount of energy themselves. This didn’t single-handedly create manorialism or feudalism, but it was one of the practical constraints that encouraged highly localized economies. A noble ruler might control a specific area of land worked by serfs, and collect taxes or agricultural production from that land, using some to feed his army and administration and others to trade with neighboring areas. If he was landlocked he was much more dependent on agreements with his neighbors and expensive overland transportation, while someone controlling a navigable river or harbor had much more reach. Those who controlled the mouths or confluences of major rivers were often in particularly advantageous positions. They could charge levies for trade and become extremely wealthy because of their geographic control over major trading checkpoints. If you look at a map today, you’ll find that locations like this in Europe tend to be places like London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Considerations like this even influenced the development of places like Richmond and Williamsburg in Virginia, where access to navigable water was one important consideration alongside things like central location, defensibility, and available land. While early medieval political relationships were often interconnected groups of alliances and obligations, they frequently became more rigid and hierarchical over time, and geography had a major influence over which places became centers of political and economic power.

As the Medieval Age comes to a close, Europe moves from being a relative backwater in the early medieval era to becoming a major global power as the Renaissance begins. Here we should really look at three major institutions that developed alongside the expanding management of trade, production, and labor: capitalism, colonialism, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

At this point, there is such an excess of wealth in Europe that it’s largely become impossible for monarchs to centralize all of that wealth themselves. A larger merchant and artisan class begins to develop, producing highly specialized luxury goods, focusing more and more of the economy on trade, cash crops, and end products, rather than just the movement of raw food and calories. At this point, most taxes are collected in actual currency rather than in raw food. Governments care about how much gold they have in their coffers rather than how much grain is in the granary. But at the end of the day the core material issues a government faces are still how to feed an army, how to feed a workforce, how to move goods, and now growing ever more important, how to produce those goods with the least possible expenditure of labor and resources.

As this growing “middle” class develops, so do new forms of capitalism, banking, investment, and property ownership. With investment comes risk diversification and capital, which enables funding of exploration and colonization, with people hoping to increase their wealth by taking a risk on investing in a possible very high return. Colonial companies are founded, new lands are conquered and settled, and native populations are pushed out to make way for development of large plantations over the most fertile lands. The owners of these plantations demand cheap and controllable labor, and European empires increasingly turn to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to provide it. Millions of people are kidnapped, purchased, transported across the Atlantic, and forced through violence to work in plantations and mines. Obviously this system can’t simply be explained as energy management. It required racism, law, organized violence, imperial power, and an economic system that rewarded the people controlling that labor. But from the perspective of the plantation owner, the economic goal was to extract the largest possible amount of production while spending as little as possible to obtain it.

At this point things start to seem less about energy management. After all, one of the largest sources of energy being used for international transportation at this point is wind. All of these goods are traded overseas, carried by large ships with massive sails harnessing a source of free energy. All of that is about to change when the Industrial Revolution hits.

Before going on to the Industrial Revolution I should mention that I’ve glossed over an important type of energy up to this point: thermal energy. Wood itself was very important. It was needed to cook food, heat forges, build ships and homes, and heat homes in the winter. England in particular put enormous pressure on its forests during this period, while Britain also depended heavily on imported timber and naval stores from places like Scandinavia, the Baltic, and eventually North America. But there’s another important connection here: food and wood are both stored chemical energy. Plants capture sunlight, animals and humans eat those plants, or we burn the plants directly. For almost all of human history, most of the energy available to us had been captured from the sun relatively recently.

Thermal energy was important to this point, but it becomes much more important with the development of steam power and large-scale coal use. Ships don’t immediately stop requiring wind, farms don’t immediately stop using animals, and human labor obviously doesn’t disappear. But now ships can increasingly move without favorable winds, factories no longer have to depend entirely on rivers and water wheels, and railroads can move enormous quantities of goods inland far faster and more efficiently than carts pulled by animals. Food can be moved in hours over distances that would previously have taken days. Suddenly, the world becomes a lot smaller, and burnable resources like coal become so much more important. By the height of the coal era it becomes a major strategic resource in wars. In WWI coal-producing regions were enormously important to the economies and militaries of the countries fighting, and when the war was over Germany was forced to pay large amounts of reparations in coal itself, while France was given control over the coal mines of the Saar Basin for a period of time.

Thermal energy isn’t the only important energy in this era, though. In the Russian Empire, food shortages, among many other political, military, and economic issues, were a major driver of the unrest that ultimately resulted in the October Revolution. Indeed, the government that followed focused much of its early planning on agriculture and ensuring food security throughout the state. This is a pattern often repeated in revolutions throughout the 1900s. Food shortages don’t automatically cause revolutions, but governments that can’t reliably feed their populations tend to find themselves in serious trouble. Famines in countries like Ukraine and China also left lasting economic, demographic, and workforce impacts.

At this point the world is moving away from coal as the main resource for moving goods. It still remains a major source of electrical power, but ships and trains are increasingly being powered by oil and diesel, and the gasoline-powered automobile is taking over overland transportation. Oil is extremely energy dense, relatively easy to move, and useful not only for transportation but for agriculture, chemicals, plastics, industry, and countless other products. Modern civilization becomes deeply dependent on it, and this leads us into much of the late 20th century and early 21st century conflicts. Energy obviously doesn’t explain every war, but it’s impossible to look at modern foreign policy without also looking at where oil is located, how it is transported, and who controls the routes between producers and consumers. The recent U.S. military intervention in Venezuela and capture of Nicolás Maduro happened in a country with some of the largest oil reserves on Earth, followed by major new oil arrangements with the United States. Oil also remains one of the major backdrop points of the current never-ending war in Iran, now in its seventh month after Trump originally suggested the operation could be completed in as little as a few days and the administration later described the major combat operation as lasting roughly four to six weeks. The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the most important oil shipping routes in the world, and disruption there affects energy prices far beyond the countries actually involved in the conflict.

Things aren’t so bleak though. We don’t have to be stuck in a future where there’s constant war and conflict over energy sources. Solar power is now one of the cheapest sources of new electricity available, and like the wind power of the pre-industrial era, it’s abundant, free once it is being collected, and can be generated in some form almost anywhere. Unlike oil, the sunlight falling on Virginia doesn’t have to travel through the Strait of Hormuz, across an ocean, through a pipeline, or through another country before we can use it. Nobody can blockade the sun.

In an era where one madman can raise the price of everything by starting a war that by the accounts of many experts was totally unnecessary, I don’t see why we wouldn’t be investing everything we can into one of the most abundant and cheapest sources of energy on the planet, one that cannot be blockaded, that cannot be sunk, that cannot be burned before it reaches us.

Solar isn’t 100% perfect yet. Energy storage technology still isn’t sufficient in all scenarios, and a grid that relies heavily on solar also requires major investments in transmission, interconnection, flexible generation, and other infrastructure. Solar farms require land, and obviously the sun doesn’t shine everywhere at the same time. But these are largely engineering and infrastructure problems rather than a fundamental shortage of fuel. I don’t see why solving those problems wouldn’t be one of the #1 priorities for our country. It’s frustrating to see so much pushback against it at the local level all throughout the country. Sure, solar panels aren’t pretty, sure they do require development on large areas of land, but the benefits outweigh the costs, especially when national diesel prices are around $5.90 a gallon.

I think they believe what they told us.

The problem is that they are law enforcement experts, not software engineers. They understand Flock from the perspective of an end user. They know what an officer sees when they log in, what fields an officer has to fill out, what their department policy says, and how Flock has been useful in criminal investigations. What they did not demonstrate is an understanding of the system as a large, interconnected software and data-security platform.

That distinction matters to me. I am a software engineer. I have worked on highly secure systems involving nuclear naval construction, personal financial information, and life insurance data. In those environments, we do not consider a system secure simply because it has a login page, multi-factor authentication, an audit log, and a policy telling employees not to abuse it. Those are useful controls, but they are only pieces of a much larger security model.

The presentation demonstrated over and over again that Suffolk is looking at Flock primarily through the lens Flock itself has given them, and some of the assurances they gave City Council simply do not hold up under scrutiny.

“No one can access our data except for us.”

Major Jesse Epperson made perhaps the most striking statement of the entire presentation while discussing Suffolk’s ownership of its ALPR data:

“No one can access that data except for us.”

He then repeated it. He also stated that, under Virginia law, the vendor cannot access Suffolk’s data. That is not correct.

Virginia Code § 2.2-5517 specifically allows other law enforcement agencies to query an agency’s ALPR data when the statutory requirements are met. It also specifically allows the vendor to access system data and audit data, at the agency’s request, for maintenance and quality-assurance purposes. (law.lis.virginia.gov)

And Suffolk absolutely does allow other agencies to access its data.

Suffolk’s own Flock transparency portal lists a massive network of outside organizations with access. Depending on when the portal is checked, that number has been around 160 or more agencies. Suffolk’s own quarterly report to Virginia State Police likewise answers “YES” when asked whether other agencies are allowed to access its data and then spends pages identifying those agencies. (suffolkva.us)

Perhaps Major Epperson simply misspoke and meant that only Suffolk employees have Suffolk user accounts. That would be a very different claim, but it leads directly to a much more serious accountability problem.

Suffolk’s accountability ends at Suffolk’s borders. Its data does not.

Mayor Mike Duman correctly raised the concern that an officer could misuse this system to look for a girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse, or someone else they have no legitimate reason to track. He also emphasized that officers who misuse the system should face significant consequences.I agree completely. But Suffolk Police can only discipline Suffolk Police employees.

If an officer in another Virginia jurisdiction improperly searches Suffolk’s cameras, Suffolk cannot suspend that officer. Suffolk cannot fire them. Suffolk cannot conduct their employee discipline. Suffolk cannot take away their badge. At most, Suffolk can revoke access, notify that officer’s employer, and potentially refer criminal misuse for prosecution.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The Washington Post has documented dozens of officers accused of abusing ALPR systems, including officers accused of searching wives, girlfriends, ex-partners and other personal acquaintances. In Haines City, Florida, investigators found that an officer repeatedly searched his wife’s plate while entering reasons that made the searches appear connected to unrelated cases involving drugs, assault, theft and a wanted fugitive. (washingtonpost.com)

A security system is only as trustworthy as everyone inside its trust boundary. Suffolk has extended that boundary far beyond Suffolk.

Saying “we audit everything” does not tell us what an audit actually proves.

A huge part of SPD’s argument was auditing.

Major Epperson explained that he personally conducts an audit every month and that the process generally consumes much of a working day. He described checking search records against CAD and incident numbers to ensure that officers entered real cases.

That is good. Suffolk should be auditing this system.

But the presentation never answered the most important question:

What actually constitutes an audit failure?

Checking that case number 12345 really exists does not tell us whether the plate an officer searched had anything whatsoever to do with case 12345.

That is exactly how an officer could hide intentional abuse. The Florida case above is important precisely because the officer allegedly entered legitimate-looking criminal reasons while repeatedly searching his wife’s vehicle. The existence of an audit log did not magically make the searches legitimate. (washingtonpost.com)

So what does Suffolk do?

Does the auditor simply verify that the case number exists? Does he open the underlying investigative file and establish that the searched vehicle actually has a nexus to the case? Does he review every search? A random sample? Only searches flagged by software? What happens when something looks questionable? Is the officer interviewed? Is Internal Affairs notified? Has anyone ever failed one of these audits? The presentation never tells us.

Yet those are the questions that determine whether an audit is a meaningful safeguard or simply a paperwork check.

The sheer volume makes the audit process even harder to understand.

Suffolk’s Q1 report to Virginia State Police says its ALPR systems were queried 8,849 times in one quarter. (suffolkva.us)

That works out to roughly 2,950 queries per month.

Major Epperson said his monthly audit that day took approximately five and a half hours. If monthly query volume were similar to Q1, reviewing every individual query in that period would allow an average of about seven seconds per query.

Seven seconds.

And that assumes he does nothing else during those five and a half hours. No interruptions, no phone calls, no breaks, no reviewing user permissions, no examining manual hotlists, no looking at sharing settings, and none of the other tasks he indicated are part of the audit. There may be a completely reasonable explanation. Perhaps most of the audit is automated and only exceptions are manually reviewed. But if that is the case, then tell us that.

Because there is a very big difference between “every action is recorded in an audit log” and “every action receives meaningful human review.”

The first is only the technical capability of the system. The second is actual accountability.

The strongest automated safeguard has existed for only a few weeks.

This part of the presentation deserves far more attention than it received.

When Council Member Ebony Wright specifically asked what safeguards exist to prevent misuse, Major Epperson described a system that can detect atypical behavior, automatically lock an officer out, and require an administrator to manually restore access. Then he added that this feature had been rolled out “in the last couple of weeks.”

That means this safeguard did not exist for nearly all of Suffolk’s four-year history with Flock.

This is especially important because WIRED recently reported on Flock’s new “Audit Assistance” feature. According to WIRED, after one South Carolina sheriff’s office enabled it, an internal-affairs officer identified more than 2,700 allegedly unauthorized searches the following day. The tool can flag things like repeated searches of the same plate, searches limited to another agency’s cameras, and the same plate being searched under multiple case numbers. (wired.com)

This does not mean Suffolk has thousands of improper searches, but it does raise an obvious question.

SPD specifically told Council about its newly deployed automated safeguard. What did it find when they turned it on?

If it found nothing suspicious, that would be excellent evidence for SPD’s argument. Instead, we were told that the feature exists but nothing about its findings For a presentation built around accountability, that is a strange omission.

Mayor Duman said officers need probable cause. They do not.

Mayor Duman also stated during his comments that officers need probable cause to use the system. Virginia law does not say that.

Under § 2.2-5517, an ALPR system may be used as part of a criminal investigation where there is reasonable suspicion that a crime was committed, along with several other specified purposes such as missing-person and warrant investigations. Probable cause is a higher constitutional standard. (law.lis.virginia.gov)

More importantly, no individualized suspicion is required before Suffolk collects the original location record. The overwhelming majority of the vehicles photographed by Suffolk’s cameras are not suspected of anything at all. The tracking is done first. Suspicion and investigation comes later.

That is the fundamental privacy problem with Flock.

“No facial recognition” is true. It is also an incomplete description of what Flock can do.

SPD repeatedly emphasized that its license plate readers do not use facial recognition. On the narrow question of the ALPR cameras themselves, that appears to be true. But Flock’s technology has moved far beyond simply reading license plates.

Flock now sells a product called FreeForm that uses artificial intelligence to search enabled video feeds using plain-language descriptions of people. Flock itself gives examples such as “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat.” Its documentation says officers can search based on clothing and visible accessories, combine video results with LPR evidence, search shared cameras, and configure alerts when a person matching the description appears. Flock is careful to emphasize that this is not facial recognition. (flocksafety.com)

WIRED independently reconstructed Flock’s interface and found an AI-powered watch-list system capable of continuously searching cameras within a defined area for someone matching a written description. (wired.com)

To be clear, I have not seen evidence that Suffolk has enabled FreeForm’s people-search functionality. That is exactly the question City Council should be asking.

Because Suffolk is not merely operating isolated license plate cameras. Major Epperson told Council that the department uses FlockOS, where its various systems are managed together.

Suffolk’s own Real Time Crime Center page says that system integrates city cameras, privately shared cameras, LPRs, CAD records, records-management data, gunshot detection, body and in-car camera locations and streams, mapping and analytics, with drones listed as future development. (suffolkva.us)

Flock itself advertises FlockOS as a platform that unifies LPRs, video, drones, gunshot detection, CAD and other data, with features including cross-agency sharing, FreeForm search and alerts, event linking and the ability to “highlight movement.” (flocksafety.com)

When people talk about Flock, they often do so in the context of license plate readers, but FlockOS is purpose built to be a citywide data-fusion and surveillance platform.

Flock’s claim that it does not “track individuals” is mostly semantics.

Flock’s transparency messaging says it cannot track individuals. Technically, the roadside ALPR knows that plate ABC-123 was at location X at 9:14 a.m. It does not necessarily know the name of the driver. But in software and cybersecurity, removing someone’s name does not magically make data non-identifying.

Virginia law itself defines ALPR system data to include vehicle information together with the date, time and location at which the image was captured. The statute permits queries based on plates, vehicle characteristics, dates, times and locations. (law.lis.virginia.gov)

If I already know your license plate and can retrieve the places that vehicle has appeared, I can reconstruct part of that vehicle’s movement history.

Flock’s own marketing for FlockOS talks about highlighting movement, and one customer testimonial on its product page describes watching vehicles enter through LPR and then tracking them across the city. (flocksafety.com)

This isn’t GPS, meaning it’s not continuous, meter-by-meter tracking. But calling repeated timestamped location observations of the same vehicle “not tracking” is a semantic distinction that would sound very strange outside of a marketing department. With the number Flock cameras in Suffolk, it is nearly impossible to travel via car without having your location continuously recorded and updated. The police system knows when you’re near home, knows when you’re near work, near the grocery store, or near your church, even if it can’t narrow down the location of your vehicle to the exact inch.

Suffolk is collecting location information indiscriminately.

On September 3, Suffolk’s transparency portal reported more than 718,000 vehicle detections over the preceding 21 days, along with 515 search sessions and nearly 15,000 hotlist hits.

Those are vehicle detections, not 718,000 unique people. A single commuter may pass multiple cameras repeatedly, and visitors are included as well. But that actually illustrates the architecture of the system.

Flock may be targeted at the search stage. It is not targeted at the collection stage.

Hundreds of thousands of location observations are collected first so that a few hundred investigative search sessions can happen later.

There is no suspicion associated with nearly all of those detections. Someone drives to work. Someone visits a friend. Someone goes to a church, a political meeting, a doctor’s office, an addiction-treatment center or simply buys groceries.

The camera records the vehicle because the vehicle passed the camera. That is the system working exactly as designed.

SPD never really addressed the constitutional question.

I would not claim that the Supreme Court has already ruled Suffolk’s ALPR network unconstitutional. It has not.

But the constitutional question is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss.

In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court held that attaching and using a GPS tracker on a vehicle constituted a Fourth Amendment search. That case relied heavily on the government’s physical intrusion onto the vehicle, so an ALPR network is not legally identical. (law.cornell.edu)

But this June, the Supreme Court decided Chatrie v. United States, a Virginia case involving historical cellphone location data. The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained a person’s location history from Google, and specifically rejected the argument that the data was unprotected simply because it covered only two hours or was held by a third party. (law.cornell.edu)

ALPR data is different from cellphone location data. It is less precise, usually observes a vehicle rather than a phone, and only records locations where cameras exist. But the underlying constitutional question should be obvious:

At what point does the government’s automated collection and reconstruction of a person’s public movements become a search?

SPD’s presentation never meaningfully engaged with that question.

The success stories show that Flock is useful. They do not show that it is effective enough to justify its scale.

SPD presented several real cases where these systems helped investigators, including stolen vehicles, an abducted child and homicide investigations.

I have no reason to doubt those stories. Flock is useful. That is not the same question as whether the current system is effective, whether it prevents crime, or whether its benefits justify its costs and privacy consequences.

Research funded by the National Institute of Justice has found real benefits in some areas, particularly stolen-vehicle recovery. But the broader evidence is much less dramatic. A 2021 study found that LPR-equipped patrols increased stolen-vehicle recoveries but did not increase arrests or produce a measurable deterrent effect on crime. (nij.ojp.gov) Another randomized study found no general or offense-specific deterrence from the tested LPR deployment. (nij.ojp.gov)

A study of a large fixed network found apparent improvements in auto-theft and robbery clearances, but those effects were not statistically significant after other factors were accounted for. The researchers specifically called for more work evaluating the full costs and benefits of large-scale deployment. (nij.ojp.gov)

That is a much more complicated picture than a slideshow of success stories. The city should tell us how many investigations Flock materially changed, how many vehicles were recovered, how many arrests resulted, how many cases would likely have been solved through other evidence anyway, how many officer hours were saved, and what the system costs taxpayers per year.

The presentation provided no serious cost-benefit analysis at all.

Calling the “280 cameras” claim misinformation is particularly frustrating.

The Mayor said he had heard claims that Suffolk had “280 some Flock cameras,” initially believed that meant 280 cameras mounted around the city, and then characterized that claim as misinformation because SPD has only about 90 fixed roadside LPR cameras.

If someone said Suffolk has 280 fixed roadside Flock cameras, then yes, that would be incorrect. But saying Suffolk operates hundreds of ALPR cameras is not misinformation. The presentation itself says the department has contracted for 90 fixed readers and 208 readers mounted in marked police vehicles.

More importantly, Suffolk’s own Q1 report to Virginia State Police reported 283 ALPR cameras. The state reporting instructions explicitly say the total includes readers mounted inside or on police vehicles. (suffolkva.us)

A camera does not stop being an automated license plate reader because somebody bolted it to a patrol car instead of a pole. There are legitimate constitutional and operational distinctions between fixed and mobile readers. But acting as though counting both categories together is “misinformation” is especially difficult to understand when Suffolk itself reports them that way to the Commonwealth.

Data ownership is not data security.

Another repeated reassurance is that Suffolk “owns” its data. That is true. Virginia law requires agency ownership of ALPR data. (law.lis.virginia.gov)

But ownership is about legal responsibility and control. It is not a security mechanism. Your bank owns its customer database. That does not tell you whether the database is secure.

What matters is who can access the information, how access is authenticated, how authorization works, what other systems it connects to, what vendor personnel can do, what happens when credentials are abused, what logs are reviewed, and whether the controls can actually stop misuse rather than merely record it afterward.

This is why pointing to multi-factor authentication also misses much of the concern. MFA is excellent protection against someone stealing an officer’s password. It does nothing when the person abusing the system is the officer who legitimately owns the account.

And “Flock has never been hacked” is much narrower than it sounds.

Flock’s transparency portal responds to concerns that Flock has been hacked by saying its cloud environment has never been breached. Maybe that is entirely true. But that is a very carefully worded claim, and it is not the same as saying Flock’s products have never had serious security vulnerabilities.

Published vulnerabilities affecting Flock hardware have included a hard-coded password in Flock LPR firmware, an unauthenticated administrative API affecting Falcon, Sparrow and Bravo devices that could allow remote code execution from the local network, embedded secrets, and a Bravo device shipping with Secure Boot disabled. One of those unauthenticated-access vulnerabilities received a CVSS score of 9.8, Critical. (avd.aquasec.com) (opencve.alliance.unm.edu)

Flock itself has also acknowledged an incident in which a cellular carrier configuration error temporarily placed some cameras’ diagnostic interfaces onto the public cellular network, making them discoverable through internet scanning services. Flock says this did not expose its cloud or allow attackers to modify recorded video, and says it added authentication and detection controls afterward. (flocksafety.com)

None of this proves Suffolk’s currently deployed cameras are vulnerable today. Vulnerabilities get patched. Products change. But it demonstrates why “our cloud has never been breached” is not a meaningful substitute for a real security assessment.

This is not an accusation against Suffolk Police.

I actually think Suffolk Police deserves credit for several things.

They were conducting monthly audits before Virginia required them. They require training. They use MFA. They require case information for searches. They retain ordinary ALPR data for only 21 days, as Virginia law now requires. They confirm alerts before enforcement action. And I believe the officers who gave this presentation genuinely care about preventing misuse.

None of that answers the bigger question.

The City of Suffolk has built a system that collects hundreds of thousands of vehicle-location observations every few weeks, shares access across a large statewide network, combines license plate information with an expanding Real Time Crime Center, relies heavily on software supplied and continuously updated by a private vendor, and now exists in an environment where that same vendor is rapidly adding artificial-intelligence search and alerting capabilities.

A system with that much power deserves more scrutiny than “we have an audit log and we have never caught anyone abusing it.”

In every highly secure software environment I have worked in, the first question is never simply “Can this system be useful?” Of course it can.

The questions are: What can it do? Who can access it? What happens when someone abuses that access? How would we know? How quickly would we know? Who independently verifies the answer? And does the benefit justify giving the system that power in the first place?

Suffolk Police spent nearly an hour telling City Council why Flock is useful.

Those are the questions they still have not answered.

Rather than simply complain about it, I wanted to see what it would take to build a system that does this using my own dashcam footage. I have a VIOFO A229 front/rear dashcam that captures high-quality video and embeds the date, time, and GPS coordinates into each recording. Using a computer vision model to detect and extract license plates, an OCR model to read the text on each plate, and the embedded metadata from the video, it is possible to recreate much of the functionality of an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) using nothing more than a consumer dashcam.

As you can imagine, this raises privacy concerns when the same license plate is encountered in multiple locations. With enough data, it would be possible to reconstruct someone’s movements. However, because there is generally no expectation of privacy while driving on public roads, collecting this kind of information is generally lawful in the United States. Although, the legality of specific uses depends on the circumstances and applicable state and federal law. Different legal issues may arise if someone were to intentionally track a specific person, publish their movements, or use the information to harass someone.

I do not intend to release the source code, training data, videos, or collected data used for this project. The purpose is to demonstrate what is technically possible, not to build a searchable surveillance database. I spent a few weekends, probably about only 5-8 hours in total, developing this system.

As I mentioned, I’m using a VIOFO A229 camera. It is a 4K camera with a wide-angle lens, which is excellent for capturing the overall driving environment. However, that same wide field of view means individual license plates occupy only a small portion of each frame. Low resolution, compression artifacts, low light, and distance can therefore make many plates unreadable. VIOFO also sells a secondary camera with a much narrower field of view designed specifically for capturing license plates at greater distances, which would likely improve accuracy considerably.

As I drive, the camera records video in three-minute increments. I wrote a program in Python that opens each video, extracts every frame, and processes each frame individually. At 30 FPS, a three-minute clip contains approximately 5,400 frames.

For each frame, two models are run. First, a YOLOv8 computer vision model detects the location of any license plate. This produces only the bounding box around the plate, it does not read the text. In the image above, this bounding box is shown in green.

Next, the detected plate is passed to an OCR model. After testing several options, I settled on RapidOCR because it produced the most consistent results. Rather than crop only the exact plate, I include a slightly larger region around it, which noticeably improves OCR accuracy at the cost of somewhat slower processing. This area is shown above in red.

This process repeats for every frame. A three-minute video currently takes roughly five to ten minutes to process on my consumer-grade NVIDIA RTX 3070, so the system is not yet capable of real-time performance. Faster hardware, newer models, or processing fewer frames would all significantly improve throughput. I also only extract GPS coordinates every 200 frames because they change much more slowly than the video itself during normal city driving.

One of the biggest challenges is that OCR results vary slightly from frame to frame. A plate such as ABC-1234 may occasionally be read as ABC-l284 or even PlBC-1234 as viewing conditions change. Fortunately, consecutive frames provide temporal redundancy. Bounding boxes that significantly overlap are assumed to represent the same physical plate, and each OCR result becomes a vote toward the final value. Confidence scores from the OCR model can also be incorporated to further improve reliability. If ABC-1234 is detected correctly in 112 frames but incorrectly in only a handful, the correct reading overwhelmingly wins. This approach is especially effective because the software analyzes dozens or hundreds of observations of the same plate rather than relying on a single frame.

What I have built is only a hobby project running on consumer hardware. Organizations that deploy dedicated ALPR systems have access to purpose-built cameras, larger training datasets, and significantly greater computing resources. If this level of capability is possible with a single off-the-shelf dashcam and a gaming GPU, it is worth considering how much more sophisticated commercial systems are likely to be.

Large surveillance networks likely collect far more information than my prototype, including vehicle make, model, and color. Where they have lawful access, they may also compare detected license plates against vehicle registration records.

Perhaps it makes you a little uncomfortable that this can be done so easily with off-the-shelf equipment available to anyone. I think it should. These systems can make mistakes, and they can be misused. Just last week an automotive journalist was reportedly arrested at gunpoint after incorrect information was entered into an ALPR system. Another recent case involved an officer who allegedly used ALPR data to stalk a woman he had met. I do not believe the benefits of these systems outweigh the costs they impose on the privacy of the general public.

If you find yourself in these places online where people in Suffolk complain about every decision made by city council, you’ll find two extremely common opinions about road improvement, often held by the same people. The first opinion is:

The city should have done this years ago and historically has never completed work fast enough to make any difference.

The second opinion is:

The city should not be doing all of this work at the same time because it will cause more traffic in the short term.

These two views are difficult to reconcile but are often both held by the same people. To be clear, both of these views can be seen as correct in isolation. It is true that the city has historically not managed to keep up with necessary infrastructure. It is true that doing all of this work at the same time will cause more traffic. But to both argue that the city needs to speed up its work while also arguing that it should not make up for a decade of unmanaged growth does not make sense. If the city does these projects more slowly, upgrading only one or two roads a year, ten years from now we’ll still be saying the same thing: the needed infrastructure improvements should have been done ten years ago but were put off.

The reasons often given publicly for opposing local development are not always the primary motivations. A substantial body of research on NIMBYism finds that opposition frequently reflects concerns about preserving property values, neighborhood exclusivity, and the demographic composition of communities, even when public arguments instead emphasize traffic, infrastructure, aesthetics, or neighborhood character. For more on this, read Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis by Einstein, Glick, and Palmer.

I don’t mean to say here that every resident complaining about infrastructure development has hidden motives. Most people are frustrated by traffic. But it’s hard not to acknowledge the pattern identified in NIMBY research: opposition to development and infrastructure often exists even when the long-term benefits are well documented. And if every project is delayed to alleviate short-term inconvenience, the result can be higher housing costs, reduced racial integration, and less housing available to young and working-class families.

The reality is that there is no version of infrastructure investment that doesn’t involve temporary inconvenience. Roads cannot be widened without lane closures. Intersections cannot be redesigned without detours. Utilities cannot be upgraded without construction. The choice is not between traffic and no traffic. The choice is between accepting short-term disruption now or accepting worsening congestion for years to come.

Suffolk is one of the fastest-growing cities in Virginia. Whether someone supports additional growth or not, thousands of people have already moved here and thousands more will continue to do so. The infrastructure serving Suffolk has to reflect that reality. Refusing to improve roads will not address this. We’ll just end up with a city that has experienced decades of population growth but still relies on infrastructure that cannot adequately support it.

Good infrastructure is one of those things people rarely notice. When I drive down the upgraded parts of I-64 between Suffolk and Chesapeake, I hardly remember the days of torn-up roads, orange barrels, and constant construction and traffic because it is so much easier to travel that road today. The temporary pain of traffic, in the long term, helps buy us a city that is easy to travel through and live in, and that is affordable and open to anyone who wants to live here.

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“The Electoral College was invented to account for population disparity between states, and it’s what the Founding Fathers intended.”

This is an argument you see online a lot. It’s also mostly false. People tend to look at history, try to represent the views of historical groups of people as monolithic, and often ignore historical context and differences in the world and society that contributed to decisions made in the past. It is very easy to create these quips that seem true on the surface, especially to anyone who has a moderate knowledge of the relevant history, but typically, when you dig into the details of almost any political argument that relies on history, you’ll find that a lot of modern narrative is being applied.

Let’s look at the Electoral College, for example. Firstly, the Electoral College today does not work the same as when the United States was first founded. In 1796, your ballot depended heavily on where you lived. In some states, your state government selected the electors. In others, you voted for the president by direct popular vote. In some, you elected electors without any mention of the presidential candidate. In these states you would have been voting directly for an elector, someone from your local region whom you trusted to vote for your preferred candidate, or deliberate with others to make an informed decision. In the 1700s, most people would not have known much about politicians from other states. They may have heard about them, but would likely not even be aware of their reputation or policy positions. Many people may not have even known who the representatives from their own state were, just their local representative! So a system like the Electoral College became a natural solution to this problem. People could elect someone they trusted and knew locally, send them to meet with other electors from their state, and trust them to make an informed decision on who should be president. But this system only remained for a few elections. It wouldn’t be long until every ballot simply allowed you to vote for “the electors for [President] and [Vice President]”.

This is how we get the system we have today, designed to solve a problem that no longer exists, and not even working in the way it was originally designed.

But even the argument I’ve presented here has a lot of narrative. This wasn’t just a solution to logistical issues of electing the president. In fact, several founding fathers wanted a national direct election of the president by popular vote! But the political reality at the time was that they needed broad support from the states to ratify the Constitution, and direct election of the president sidelined many states with small populations.

It would be easy for Virginia, for example, to use its large population at the time to maintain longstanding control of the presidency. So politically, there was in fact a desire to have a compromising system in which smaller states would have a disproportionately larger say in the election of the president. But the southern states also had concerns. In direct elections, enslaved people could not vote, but with the Electoral College they could be counted towards the number of electors and benefit slaveholding states.

But it is not true that the Electoral College was designed to be a permanent solution, lasting to the end of time, agreed upon by all as the perfect way to elect the president. It was a compromise that, indeed, no one was fully satisfied with, even at the time of ratification. It was supported by different groups for different reasons, and solved enough practical issues that it became popular, and most importantly it allowed individual states to decide how they would manage their elections. Any argument that frames the Electoral College in absolutist historical terms is misleading at best.

Tax Collection in the Roman Empire

Let’s look at another example: tax collection in the Roman Empire. This is a less common argument, but you will occasionally hear someone argue that all tax collection is inherently sinful, pointing to how often tax collectors appear in the Bible as an example of essentially the “morally lowest common denominator” in many stories. For example, “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” and “If he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” The Bible does in fact refer to tax collectors in this way very often. There are also stories of Jesus explaining in essence that “even tax collectors can be forgiven.”

Any argument based around this, though, is inherently misleading due to historical context. The original wording for most modern English translations of “tax collector” in the Bible comes from the Greek word telōnēs, referring to workers in the Roman publicani system, or “tax farmers.”

These individuals were not like modern IRS agents. They were more comparable to the kind of private debt collector who calls and harasses debtors, and perhaps in some cases, they were comparable to criminal loan sharks who use violence to extract payment. The Romans used a tax farming system in which the right to collect certain taxes was auctioned off to private contractors, who would pay the Roman government up front and then be allowed to extract taxes from the local populace to enhance their own wealth. Imagine if, instead of filing your own taxes every year, a man simply showed up at your door demanding that you pay him taxes, showing you a contract he purchased from the government allowing him to collect money directly from you. This system was often corrupt, and while these tax collectors were subject to Roman laws, in occupied areas like biblical Judea their corrupt and criminal behavior was often overlooked.

This is all to say that trying to apply these sorts of historical arguments to modern institutions often falls flat. Most people today simply do not live or experience the same context under which many historical events occurred, and the events of the past often do not apply so cleanly to modern day politics. While we can use the past as a basis to inform our beliefs in the present, we need to remember that we are living in a vastly different world than even existed 40 years ago, let alone 250 years ago, or 2000 years ago.

These are just two examples, but once you start looking for this pattern, you’ll find it everywhere. Almost any time someone reaches into history to settle a modern argument with a clean, quotable line, there’s a good chance the reality was messier, more contested, and more tied to its own time than the argument lets on. It doesn’t mean history has nothing to tell us, it means the work of actually understanding it is harder than a single sentence can capture. The next time you see one of these arguments, whether it’s about the Founding Fathers, a Bible verse, an ancient philosopher, or anything else, it’s worth pausing to ask what’s being left out. More often than not, the answer is “quite a lot.”

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The reality is that these are very complex and interconnected problems. Economists estimate that there is a housing shortage of 3.3-5.5 million homes, homes that must be built for housing prices to come down. This is a national issue that impacts us all locally. If we don’t build enough housing units, housing prices will continue to rise, but if we build more locally, it will impact traffic and our community. But the reality is that this same discussion is being had in every community in the country, and the vast majority of city councils are choosing to build far fewer homes than needed.

Suffolk City Council, on the other hand, has taken actions that are consistent with the economic research on housing affordability. Research by Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko from the Wharton School of Economics found that low-density zoning and other land-use controls restricting the development of housing were the primary drivers of increased housing costs.

Some argue that an influx of high-earning workers increases home prices in a region and that zoning changes will not stop price increases, but in “Zoning and affordability: A reply to Rodríguez-Pose and Storper”, they argue very strongly against this idea. One quote from that article summarizes the issue perfectly:

“If high earners drive prices, why do Cadillac Escalades cost about the same in San Jose and Kansas City, while San Jose’s median home is seven times more expensive than its Kansas City counterpart?”

The authors’ answer is simple. Escalades are easy to build, and if there aren’t enough of them you can ship more of them in. Housing construction is heavily restricted by zoning, and if there isn’t enough housing, the only option is for prices to go up.

To be clear, building housing in Suffolk is necessary. Suffolk and Hampton Roads are areas experiencing a large influx of high-paying jobs. There is nothing that Suffolk City Council can do to prevent companies in Newport News and Norfolk from hiring software engineers or other high-salary workers. Nor can the city council stop those workers from considering purchasing a home in North Suffolk. But the City Council can choose to build more housing and lessen the impact of increased demand by high-salaried workers.

So if one assumes that more housing supply is necessary to counter rising costs, the question should not be “should we build more housing”, but “how can we build housing without causing other problems?” This is where I think the City Council is really excelling. There are ongoing plans to expand existing schools and build new schools. Bridge Road is being expanded and the intersections are being reworked for better traffic flow and safety, alongside many other major traffic improvements throughout the entire city. There are studies to bring an Amtrak station back to the city. A new fire station has been built to support Northern Suffolk not just for Fire & EMS services, but also as a polling site for elections. New mixed-use developments are shortening the distances people need to travel to shop and eat, helping to reduce the number of people driving on major roadways.

The next challenge to ensure affordability is region-wide. Prices still increase in Suffolk because we are not just supporting growth for a single city, people moving into North Suffolk work all over Hampton Roads, and the other constituent cities of the region seem to have fallen much further behind on housing development than Suffolk has. And people who are priced out of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake are moving into Suffolk. There is a lot of work to do, and for any effort to be truly successful at reducing prices it needs to be a region-wide initiative.

I’ve lived in Suffolk since I was 12, for almost 20 years now. I have family roots in Downtown Suffolk going back to my great-grandparents. Suffolk today is a lot different than when I was a kid, but Suffolk when I was a kid was also a lot different than in their time. The reality is that cities change over time, and resistance to that change will only lead to higher prices and people who live here eventually being priced out and displaced, just as happened in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake when growth skyrocketed and was not met with appropriate housing development.

Suffolk City Council isn’t perfect, and no one should expect them to be when navigating problems this complex. But they deserve credit for making the hard, often unpopular choice to build, and for pairing that growth with real investments in schools, roads, and public services. The alternative isn’t a Suffolk that stays the same forever; it’s a Suffolk that becomes unaffordable for the people who already call it home. I’d rather live in a city that’s growing thoughtfully than one that’s pricing out its own residents by refusing to grow at all.

At this point, it seems clear that Donald Trump is inching toward invoking the Insurrection Act, a move that could upend democratic norms in the United States. Blue states with Democratic governors remain the last meaningful check on his power when all three branches of government are kneeling to his command. In just over a month, Virginia could become the next target on his list.

So far, Virginia has avoided the mass ICE raids that have terrorized other states. We’ve also been spared Trump’s strategic deployment of the National Guard, a tactic he uses to provoke unrest and then justify an even heavier federal response. The pattern is clear: he sends in troops, peaceful demonstrators are tear-gassed, the resulting chaos is used as proof that “more” military intervention is needed. It is a calculated cycle designed to create the appearance of disorder and to justify further repression.

When Abigail Spanberger wins, perhaps even before she takes office, we should expect these same tactics to intensify here. A new Democratic governor would represent one of the most significant challenges to Trump’s authority since his return to power. It would be unsurprising if he contested the results outright. If Spanberger wins by eight to ten points, as current polls suggest, it’s easy to imagine Trump on television calling it fraud: “Nobody ever saw a swing from red to blue like that.”

Virginia and Virginians must be ready. The incoming administration needs a clear plan to respond to any unlawful federal use of force within the state. There must be strong lines of communication between state and local governments, and a readiness to protect civil rights and the rule of law. The strength of Virginia’s institutions, and the resolve of those who lead them, will determine whether our Commonwealth becomes the next bulwark of democracy in the United States.

Thank you to Ian Hutchinson for providing the header image to this article for free under the Unsplash license. https://unsplash.com/photos/yellow-truck-parked-near-bare-trees-during-daytime-GWG6IxeDwYw

Before we get into the data there’s a few things to clarify - trying to read election performance based on past lean of the districts is somewhat difficult. VPAP calculates their lean index for the House of Delegates based on the 2021 Gubernatorial results and the 2024 Presidential results. This results in a few estimates that are very obviously incorrect - for example there are several districts that are listed as “leans dem” that actually have the dem candidate running unopposed for HOD. Another obvious mistake to make in predicting what the data means is assuming that every single person is voting down ballot for the same party. That’s a flaw I’m going to have in my data as well. Of course, in a district that voted 95% for an unopposed democratic HOD delegate, a smaller percent may vote for the democratic governor candidate.

Let’s first look at VPAP’s lean index and compare it to the 2023 House of Delegates election results.

There’s a few interesting things here. “Strong Democratic” district’s median vote split in 2023 was 78% of votes going to Dems, while “Strong Republican” districts still contributed 26% of their votes to Dems. So in “Strong Republican” districts, they contribute somewhat more of their votes towards the opposite party than in “Strong Democratic” districts.

That split disappears on the “Lean” districts though, which are 56% and 43% voting in favor of the Dems. And the competitive districts slightly disfavored the Dems at 49%.

Again though, this is reading the tea leaves. It’s difficult to predict exactly what voters will do in 2025, and looking at data on what voters did from 2021, 2023, or 2024 isn’t necessarily a great predictor of what voters will do in the future. That being said, Spanberger is polling quite a lot higher than McAuliffe was, so using 2023 data probably gives a better idea than 2021 data.

So lets look just at the ballots cast using the VPAP index data. It shows that Dems are slightly behind in early voter turnout. This is where news articles saying that there is an early lead for republicans are coming from.

However let’s break down this data in a very detailed way. For each district, we will look at the 2023 vote split percentage and calculate an estimated number of votes for each party by multiplying the number of ballots cast so far by the percentage of votes going to either party. Then, we can use the sum of votes by district to get a more accurate idea of how the votes may actually look.

Using historical data to estimate the vote split for each district, this allows us to see that there is an estimated 34310 votes for Dems, and 31097 votes for Republicans, an ~2.45% lean in favor of the Dems. But this data is still not very reliable. You’ll note that only 1% of ballots have been cast as of 09/23/2025. Even if this estimate was 100% accurate today, there are many reasons that the first week or so of early voting may be skewed one way or the other. For one, early voting from M-F is going to be geared more heavily towards people who are retired or who do not work M-F, 9-5 jobs. So using the voting data of the general population to make estimates about what is happening with only a very tiny fraction of the total votes in so far is never going to generate an accurate result. So in general, you should be wary of any person or news outlet who is telling you that that the early ballot info so far has any real meaning or indication of what is going on with the election.

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So why has it taken nearly 6 months to stop this unlawful action? This was a blatantly illegal policy impacting thousands of people and enabling a gross violation of the law by the President in a way that is extremely ripe for abuse against potentially millions of people living in the United States. The judiciary must be reformed to allow for swift action against such blatant violations of the law and of the U.S. Constitution as we see today. When an issue involving the federal government is before any federal court, and that issue addresses urgent questions of legality and constitutionality of federal actions against individuals living within the United States, there should be a way to fast-track these issues directly to appeals courts. Even earlier this year, when hearing the case on nationwide injunctions over the birthright citizenship case, a few conservative members of the Court, even Clarence Thomas, made comments implying that they do not think Trump’s order is constitutional. Brett Kavanaugh even noted that he wished they were simply looking at that case on the merits rather than discussing the legality of the injunction. We still have not had a resolution in that case!

The Supreme Court ruled that nationwide injunctions are not legal and not a power granted to federal courts by Congress. When Democrats take back the presidency and Congress, we can re-establish nationwide injunctions, perhaps in a more limited way so that they only apply to urgent matters such as questions impacting large groups of individuals or questions of core constitutional rights and powers.

One of my very long-standing issues with many “old guard” Democrats is their willingness to expand the power of the executive branch over the years with no regard for how it can be used by bad actors. Joe Biden’s administration was hampered heavily by nationwide injunctions, and I fear that a future Dem majority may not want to bring them back. I think there are many cases where they should be limited, but broadly speaking there should be a judicial process to stop a president who does not care about the law and takes swift action to abuse it as much as possible before he can be stopped, even if that means increased difficulty for future presidents. To quote Elrond: Cast it into the fire, destroy it!

The Court rejected this reasoning, finding that because race was the determining factor in whether a marriage was legal, the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court also held that denying a fundamental right on the arbitrary basis of race violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Obergefell v. Hodges is a closely related ruling, except the question was discrimination based on sex rather than race. In fact, the Court in Obergefell noted that it would be impossible to uphold same-sex marriage bans without disregarding Loving v. Virginia entirely. Any ruling overturning Obergefell would therefore put Loving itself at risk.

The dissents in Obergefell are worth examining. There are four, one from each dissenting justice, each advancing different arguments. Justice Clarence Thomas disputes the concept of substantive due process, the same legal principle applied in Loving v. Virginia. Under his reasoning, it could be constitutionally permissible for a state to ban his own interracial marriage.

Justice Samuel Alito, in his dissent, argues that the Due Process Clause should protect only those rights “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history.” Was interracial marriage “deeply rooted” in 1967, when Loving was decided? Given the Court’s recent fixation on “historical balancing,” it’s difficult to imagine them objectively concluding that Loving is constitutional under such logic.

Any decision that narrows Obergefell inevitably jeopardizes Loving as well. For that reason, the Supreme Court should deny certiorari in Kim Davis’s request to overturn Obergefell.

Article Photo By Ted Eytan - https://www.flickr.com/photos/taedc/18588276403/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41256464

Today is Good Friday, according to the Catholic church it’s tradition it’s 1992 years since Jesus was Crucified, although that is generally considered to be slightly off.1

According to the Bible, Jesus was brought before Pontius Pilate by a public mob of elders and priests, demanding that he be tried for the accusations against him.

“When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people conferred together against Jesus in order to bring about his death. They bound him, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate the governor.” (Mathew 27 NSRVUE)

Pilate was the Governor, and in this case he also acts in the role of Judge. He questioned Jesus on the charges laid against him by the mob.

“Now Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus said, “You say so.” ¹² But when he was accused by the chief priests and elders, he did not answer. ¹³ Then Pilate said to him, “Do you not hear how many accusations they make against you?” ¹⁴ But he gave him no answer, not even to a single charge, so that the governor was greatly amazed.” (Mathew 27 NSRVUE)

Pilate ultimately found that there was no evidence that Jesus was guilty of a crime. But Jesus was sentenced to death anyway, because ravenous political and religious leaders in Judea had stormed up a mob of hate and of people who believed that he was guilty despite no evidence.

“Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him” (John 18 NSRVUE)

“Pilate then called together the chief priests, the leaders, and the people ¹⁴ and said to them, “You brought me this man as one who was inciting the people, and here I have examined him in your presence and have not found this man guilty of any of your charges against him. ¹⁵ Neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us. Indeed, he has done nothing to deserve death. … Then they all shouted out together, “Away with this fellow! Release Barabbas for us!” … ²⁰ Pilate, wanting to release Jesus, addressed them again, ²¹ but they kept shouting, “Crucify, crucify him!” ²² A third time he said to them, “Why, what evil has he done? I have found in him no ground for the sentence of death; I will therefore have him flogged and then release him.” ²³ But they kept urgently demanding with loud shouts that he should be crucified, and their voices prevailed. ²⁴ So Pilate gave his verdict that their demand should be granted.” (Luke 23)

I think there are very few people in the world who do not know what happens next in this story. Jesus is imprisoned and tortured. He is forced to drag the instrument of his death across the city, as the people who have been riled up by their leaders celebrate and take joy in his pain in suffering, while a small few attempt to help him. By the end of the day, Jesus is nailed to a cross (Most Roman crucifixions only had the victims tied to the cross), and he is left to languish until he dies of suffocation.

Mark Twain said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I think this story rhymes a lot with what is happening today in the United States. There are many people in the United States today who are being picked up off the street by ICE agents, and sent to foreign prisons without access to lawyers or trials. When these cases do eventually come up in US courts, Judges are largely finding that there is no evidence that these people committed any crime. But our leaders go on television and call these people criminals and terrorists, and beg the American public to support their actions of defying legal proceedings. The supreme court ruled 9-0 that the Trump administration must facilitate the release of Kilmar Abregio Garcia, and just this week we learned from Senator Chris Van Hollen’s discussion with the Vice President of El Salvador that the Trump administration is not only failing to facilitate his release - the only reason he is still being held is because the Trump administration is still paying for him to be held. Let’s be clear though - this is the worst and most violent prison in the western hemisphere. It’s notorious for mistreatment and torture of it’s inmates. Thankfully, we have learned that Kilmar is in fact alive and accounted for in El Salvador.

That being said, maybe they do not want him to be alive. These days, I’m seeing more and more frequently the sentiment that anyone accused of being a terrorist or a criminal by this administration should be sent to this prison without a trial, without any evidence of guilt. And this week I’ve started seeing the conservative mob on social media stating that they actually hope that they are killing everyone who arrives in these prisons.

The people who support this administration often claim to be Christians. I really wonder how they can consider themselves Christians when they seemingly hold the exact same stance that was used by the mob that had Jesus crucified in spite of the ruling of the presiding legal official.

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Recently, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies act to justify indefinitely imprisoning lawful US residents in an extremely cruel and brutal prison in El Salvador. One such resident, Jerce Reyes, was imprisoned simply for having a tattoo with the logo of a soccer team, Real Madrid, and for posting photos on Facebook with “Devil Horns” often seen in use by rock and metal musicians.

The Trump administration claims that this information - along with Jerce Reyes’ ethnic and national heritage - is enough to imprison him in a hellish gulag without any access to lawyers or due process of the law.

I grew up hearing about how America fought against the Nazis, who imprisoned and killed Jews based on a conspiracy theory that people of the Jewish ethnic background conspired to destroy Germany. I was told this could never happen in the United States because we have a right to a trial, a right to a lawyer, and equal rights for all people within the borders of the United States of America. That our system will always allowed the truth to be revealed and ensure that people receive fair and equal treatment under the law. Today that has been revealed to be a lie.

Adolf Hitler’s dismantling of Jewish rights in Nazi Germany was not done overnight. It was a steady process of spreading lies and propaganda until the population was willing to accept that some people were simply not deserving of the rights afforded to others. They were described as poisoning the blood of the Nation, as being inhuman, rats, roaches. They were blamed for all of society’s problems and economic woes. They were blamed for the deaths of children, and in conspiracy theories even accused of engaging in various ritual sacrifices. They were accused of being communists who were plotting to overthrow the state.

These are all accusations thrown against the Jews by the Nazis in Germany. They are also the same accusations thrown against immigrants to the United States by the President and the faction of White Supremacists within his government led by people like Stephen Miller.

During the first Trump Presidency it became clear that Donald Trump would do whatever the people around him told him to do. If he got frustrated with them he would fire them, but he would generally follow the advice of whatever advisors replaced them. The Nazis operating within the United States of America learned this, and have surrounded Donald Trump. People like Stephen Miller, Curtis Yarvin, and Matt Walsh are now running this government and turning this country into everything it once fought against.

In Band of Brothers there is a scene towards the end of the series where the US soldiers who have discovered one of the concentration camps confront the German civilians living nearby, who went about their daily lives as normal as if atrocities were not being committed around them daily. I think it’s a question many of us have been asked to ponder in high school or college essays. Today, it’s become so easy to see how it happened in Nazi Germany, and how close we are to having it happen here if normal people do not stand up against injustice.

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Dear Representative Kiggans,

I am writing to express my deep concern regarding the unconstitutional actions taken by President Donald Trump to override legislative authority. Specifically, I would like to understand what actions you are currently taking—or plan to take—to prevent such overreach and uphold the role of Congress in our government.

President Trump has made unlawful budget cuts and program reductions that were allocated and mandated by Congress. These actions have had an immediate and harmful impact on the residents of Hampton Roads. Families are losing jobs, children with special needs are losing critical support, and essential government services are being disrupted.

I recently read about a neighbor who works at NASA. He was recently promoted into a new role after years of diligence and hard work. However, due to his probationary status in the new role, he has now been informed that he will likely be laid off as a direct result of the Trump administration’s actions. Instead of being rewarded for his hard work, he is facing job loss due to unlawful executive overreach. He is not alone. This story is shared by thousands of Americans across Virginia.

If you do not intend to take action to oppose these violations of congressional authority, I must ask: What do you see as your role and responsibility in Congress if the President is allowed to ignore budgets and legislation passed by the legislature? Why should Congress exist at all if its mandates can be disregarded without consequence?

I urge you to take a stand in defense of the Constitution and the legislative branch’s authority. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Tristan Pressley

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Note: Image for this post provided for free by Joel Moysuh under the Unsplash License

I started writing this article yesterday after the White House published a new executive order, stating that the only accepted interpretations of the law in the executive branch will be those which are determined by the President of the United States or the United States Attorney General. However this afternoon, the White House posted, to all of its official social media pages, an image depicting Donald Trump wearing a crown with the text “Long Live the King”, as he seeks to override New York and New York City law to end congestion pricing in the city. That hasn’t actually appreciably changed the content of this article given that it’s fairly consistent with the point I’m going to make - that Donald Trump seeks to upend the rule of law and basic fundamental concepts of Democracy in the United States.

In Donald Trump’s executive order, “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies”
Section 7 declares: “The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.”

This is a clear cut instruction to all employees of the federal government that they are not to follow the instructions of the Supreme Court of the United States unless directly instructed to do so by the President or Attorney General. This instruction is, in essence, an instruction to all employees of the executive branch that they are to entirely disregard the United States Constitution and simply do whatever the President tells them to do, regardless of regulation passed by Congress or any ruling in any court.

Donald Trump told us that he will be a dictator on day 1. It seems that this is a campaign promise he has actually kept. He has assaulted American institutions on all fronts, he conspired to create forged documents certifying an election win in 2020. He demanded that the Governor of Georgia rig the election in his favor. He sent a mob to the capital and told them to “Fight like hell”, as they called for the murder of Vice President Mike Pence to stop certification of the election in 2020. Now re-elected, Donald Trump is actively destroying all of the institutions designed to prevent him from successfully achieving what attempted in 2020.

Joe Biden left the Presidency with a clear message to the American people. “There are no kings in America.” Donald Trump is now coming in with a new one, “I am the King, Long Live the King.” If anything has become clear over the last 16 years of American politics it’s this: Our system of checks and balances, which exists to ensure that we have no tyrannical rulers in this country, only works when everyone plays by the rules. 16 years of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump gaming the system to control all 3 branches of government have resulted in a situation where Donald Trump can call himself King while 271 republicans in congress do absolutely nothing about it

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If you live in Virginia, and especially if you have spent time around DC, you’ve probably seen one of these license plates before. Foreign diplomats in the U.S. receive special license plates, symbolizing their immunity under international law. This immunity, common worldwide, exempts them from U.S. jurisdiction unless their home country waives it.

People who have entered the US illegally are still subject to US law. An illegal immigrant who commits a crime in the US can be tried, convicted, imprisoned, and then deported after serving their sentence. Legal aliens, that is - non immigrants in the US on a Visa, and immigrants such as permanent residents, refugees, asylees, etc. are also all subject to US law. If you are a foreigner visiting this country you cannot simply come here and commit crimes and then claim that you are somehow immune to US jurisdiction. Despite this, that is exactly what Donald Trump seems to have declared in his executive order seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship, which states that certain classes of alien are subject to US jurisdiction and do not receive citizenship. The 14th amendment states “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” I think this is pretty clear. All people born within the borders of the US, who do not owe some sort of allegiance to a home country (e.g. the children of foreign diplomats, soldiers, and officials) are conferred citizenship at birth.

Let’s be clear - Donald Trump knows that the US can punish aliens for any crimes committed in the US. His recent executive order requires the US government to seek the death penalty in all qualifying crimes committed by people who reside in the US illegally. This attempt to end birthright citizenship by claiming that aliens are not subject to US jurisdiction seems farcical at best. Even with the current makeup of the Supreme Court, I can’t really foresee any way that the Trump admin will be able to convince them to overturn United States v. Wong Kim Ark, decided nearly 130 years ago, a case in which the plaintiff gained citizenship in nearly the exact same scenario that Donald Trump seeks to prevent.

Concerns About Definitions

"Artificial intelligence" means a set of technologies that enables machines to perform tasks under varying and unpredictable circumstances that typically require human oversight or intelligence, or that can learn from experience and improve performance when exposed to data sets.

This definition encompasses a wide array of software not typically considered "artificial intelligence." Virtually any software that analyzes data could fall under this definition, as it includes "machines performing tasks under varying and unpredictable circumstances that typically require human oversight or intelligence." This broad phrasing essentially describes almost all software ever written.

For instance, all software is ideally developed to handle a wide range of varying and unpredictable circumstances. If you purchase an item from an e-commerce store, does the store's software handle the case where you attempt to order -1 items? Such an edge case—an attempt to purchase a negative quantity—could certainly be considered unpredictable, and the quantities vary. Without computers, such orders would require manual human oversight. Should software that handles this scenario by simply checking for positive values count as AI?

"...or that can learn from experience and improve performance when exposed to data sets."

This part of the definition aligns more closely with what is generally understood to be "AI." Artificial intelligence typically refers to a subset of software known as "machine learning." This involves systems trained on historical data to develop a mathematical model for producing outcomes based on inputs, rather than systems explicitly coded to produce specific outputs for given inputs.

The distinction between AI and traditional machine learning often lies in the complexity of the algorithms and models used. For example, software employing Bayes’ theorem to predict a flower type based on color, length, and shape would not generally be considered AI. However, software capable of analyzing a photograph of a flower, extracting its features, and then predicting its type could reasonably be classified as AI.

A more precise definition might replace the "or" in the original definition with "and," but even this might not narrow the scope sufficiently.

Later in the bill, the following terms are defined:

"Foundation model" means a machine learning model that (i) is trained on broad data at scale, (ii) is designed for generality of output, and (iii) can be adapted to a wide range of distinctive tasks.

"Generative artificial intelligence" means artificial intelligence based on a foundation model that is capable of and used to produce synthetic digital content, including audio, images, text, and videos.

This is a much better definition. It focuses on key characteristics that distinguish AI from typical deterministic software. Adding a requirement for foundation models to the AI definition would address many of my concerns.

Duties of Developers

59.1-608. Duties of developers.
A. A developer of a generative artificial intelligence system or service shall apply provenance data, either directly or through the use of third-party technologies, to synthetic digital content that is wholly generated by such developer's generative artificial intelligence system or service.
B. A developer of a generative artificial intelligence system or service shall make available to the public:

1. A provenance application tool; and

2. A provenance reader.

"Developer" means any person doing business in the Commonwealth that develops or significantly updates a generative artificial intelligence system or service that is offered, sold, leased, given, or otherwise provided to consumers in the Commonwealth.

This provision raises significant concerns. It places the entire burden of compliance on software developers, without addressing the roles of project managers, executives, stakeholders, and others who might push for features that could contravene the law.

Software developers are not licensed in any state. There is no licensing board, no formal code of ethics, no whistleblowing/reporting structure, and no real protection against termination for refusing to follow illegal instructions. On a team of 15 developers where management has deprioritized work required by this law, how would you determine which developer to hold legally responsible? Why wouldn’t the corporation bear the responsibility of the decisions it makes?

That said, there is an aspect of this law that I appreciate. It mandates the creation of a software tool called a "provenance reader," defined as follows:

"Provenance reader" means an online service, product, or feature that enables a user to view the provenance data, if any, of synthetic digital content.

If this means that all training data used to produce a model must be made public, it could have significant benefits. For example, it would ensure companies are not using copyrighted materials without permission and that the data used to train models accurately represents reality, preventing potential manipulation of the public. There are some concerns here though - what if I build an AI system that is trained in PII? Surely we should not be exposing individuals personal data to the entire world to see. A provision like this needs to come with more clarity on the responsibility of the organization to provide data security to end users.

This bill is a Good Idea

The intent of this bill is great. We absolutely need to ensure that AI software is used responsibly, and that the public and consumers can understand how that data is being used. But I’m extremely worried about the scope of this bill. As written, it could apply to almost all software written in the state of Virginia. It places way too much of the burden on software developers who have no real recourse when management instructs them to take an action that is illegal under this law. And while it rightfully pushes for transparency in data, it doesn’t address any privacy concerns that might arise from the transparency. In fact, the word “Privacy” does not appear once in the current draft of the bill.

Note: The photo used in this article was provided for free under the Unsplash license by Tingey Injury Law Firm, West Charleston Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV, USA

As the 2025 Virginia Legislative Session approaches, here’s what I’d like to see from the Democrats and my Delegate, Nadarius Clark, even if some of these goals may be unrealistic given the current political makeup of the Virginia General Assembly.

Digital Identification

Last year, Virginia launched a pilot for the Virginia mID program. Digital ID can provide a more secure form of proof of identity, it would not be possible to create a fake digital ID, and digital IDs can reduce costs and time for Virginians needing physical replacements, and it can reduce costs to the Commonwealth, and therefore taxpayers. Digital ID can also be incredibly secure - the “user” can provide a token, somewhat like an multi-factor authentication key that you would get from your bank, to the party that needs to verify the identity. Then, they can check the token against a state verification system, which provides them only with the information that they need to access. For example, a hotel may only need your name and photo, so they would not be able to see your DMV customer number.

This year, the program should be expanded to allow all Virginians to use mID as a companion to their physical licenses, with a long-term plan to eventually allow issuance of digital IDs with no physical copy.

Land Value Tax

In 2023, HB 2112, which would have permitted the implementation of a land value tax in Charlottesville, failed to pass out of committee along party lines. Currently, only the cities of Fairfax, Poquoson, Richmond, and Roanoke are authorized to use a land value tax. This tax would enable taxation of land value without taxing the value of property built on it, shifting the tax burden from small businesses and homeowners to investment companies holding large amounts of undeveloped land. Such a policy would encourage those companies to develop or sell the land to generate income without increasing their own tax burdens. The City of Suffolk could greatly benefit from adopting a land value tax, and it would be prudent to make this option available to any locality in Virginia that chooses to implement it.

Cut Through Local Bureaucracy to Build Housing

In 2024, Los Angeles County in California added fewer than 35,000 new housing units, despite being the most populous county in the U.S., with over 9 million residents. This housing shortage is part of a larger crisis across the country: cities consistently fail to build enough housing to meet demand, causing prices to rise, particularly in Democratic stronghold states like California and New York. After decades of growth without sufficient housing, California’s population has begun to decline as residents are forced to relocate to states with lower housing costs.

These trends have two major implications for elections. First, Democrats are losing electoral votes as people leave large, expensive cities for states like Texas, where housing is more affordable. Second, many Americans view Democratic-led cities like Los Angeles as poorly governed when they see median housing prices approaching $1 million.

Virginia can help address this issue by cutting through red tape and local bureaucracy. By restricting the ability of localities to limit residential zoning or designate zoning exclusively for single-family homes, the state can encourage developers to build more condos, townhouses, and apartments. This approach would lower housing costs in Virginia and attract residents fleeing high-cost states.

Education Funding

Last year, Delegate Nadarius Clark’s bill to require Virginia teachers to be paid at least the national average salary was vetoed by Governor Glenn Youngkin after passing with bipartisan support. Education is one of the most critical factors in a state’s economic success. Educated citizens contribute more economically (and pay higher taxes), commit fewer violent crimes, and enjoy better health and longevity. Virginia must ensure its long-term success by providing fair wages for highly effective educators. Failure to do so risks exacerbating the teacher shortage and its consequences for the Commonwealth.

LGBT Rights

Remove the Gay Marriage Ban from the Virginia Constitution

Last year, the House of Delegates’ Committee on Privileges and Elections continued a bill to amend the Virginia Constitution to repeal the gay marriage ban. In 2025, this bill must pass a full vote in the House of Delegates and again in 2026 before being presented to voters in November 2026. With a conservative Supreme Court likely for the next 30 years, this effort must be a top priority for Virginia Democrats to ensure that conservatives cannot reinstate a ban on gay marriage without legislative approval, even if Obergefell v. Hodges is overturned.

Affirm the Right to Medical Care for Transgender Virginians

Virginia is the only southern state without bans or restrictions on medical care for transgender individuals. Since 2022, 14 states have passed laws explicitly protecting access to such care, and two have issued executive orders to the same effect. Virginia Democrats should take the lead in not only maintaining the state’s lack of restrictions but also enacting a shield law to protect transgender residents’ access to medical care.