Thursday, September 10, 2026

How to get engaged with the Flock Safety debate in Iowa

In Iowa, the debate over public safety versus government surveillance has escalated rapidly. A major joint investigation by the University of Iowa Technology Law Clinic and the ACLU of Iowa revealed that ALPR cameras have spread to more than 60 Iowa communities. The report sparked a wave of public backlash across the state, mirroring the exact concerns about lack of transparency, data tracking, and public-private collusion with vendors like Flock Safety and Motorola. [1, 2, 3]
The momentum is shifting toward public redress in Iowa. The public is leveraging local, legislative, and transparency tactics to effectively push back.

1. Disrupting the Local Council Process (The "Ditch Flock" Movement)

Because these contracts are signed at the municipal level, localized pressure on city councils is proving highly effective in Iowa. [4, 5]

  • Recent Successes: Public pressure and privacy debates have recently forced cities like Indianola and Waukee (in the Des Moines area) to completely suspend their contracts and pull down their Flock cameras. [5]
  • Leveraging City Council Agendas: Surveillance companies often pitch these contracts quietly, slipping them into city council "consent agendas" where they are voted on en masse without public debate. The ACLU of Iowa's "Pump the Brakes on ALPRs" Campaign explicitly urges citizens to check past city council minutes, email their city representatives, and demand public hearings before contracts are renewed. [6, 7]

2. State-Level Legislative Lobbying

Iowa currently lacks a comprehensive law regulating mass ALPR surveillance, making it a "patchwork" of data-sharing rules. However, citizens have successfully pressured lawmakers to act: [8, 9]

  • The ALPR Guardrails Bill: The Iowa House and Senate have actively advanced legislation (such as HF 2161 and SF 2284) aimed at clipping the wings of these networks. The bipartisan push seeks to force municipal oversight, mandate local ordinances before deployment, ban facial recognition software on ALPRs, and force police to delete all non-investigative plate data within 24 to 30 days. [4, 10, 11]
  • The "Private Vendor" Loophole: While candidates for governor have indicated a willingness to sign data safeguard laws, localized pressure is shifting toward ensuring these bills don't leave a backdoor loophole for private vendors to retain ownership of Iowans' travel data. [11, 12]

3. Demanding Audits & Exposing "Secret" Directives

Investigative reports have exposed that public safety technology is sometimes explicitly obscured from the public record to avoid scrutiny.

  • Exposing the Paper Trail: An investigative report by 404 Media recently unearths that one county in Iowa explicitly instructed officers in its usage policy: "DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE... DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY," telling them to cite generic "county resources" instead.
  • The Mechanism for Redress: Knowing this, citizens and legal advocates are aggressively using Iowa open records laws to demand data logs. Under intense scrutiny, Flock Safety was forced to shorten its standard retention windows across several jurisdictions from 30 days to 7 days and introduce mandatory case-code entry requirements to prevent police officers from freely scrolling through vehicle locations without a specific criminal case number. [12, 13, 14]

How to Take Immediate Action in Iowa

If you want to take a step toward addressing this locally, the most impactful path is utilizing the ACLU of Iowa Stop Government Surveillance Toolkit. This toolkit provides direct guidance on how to: [7]
  1. Draft an open records request to your local police department or county sheriff to unearth their hidden surveillance contracts.
  2. Track whether your town is currently considering an ALPR vendor contract on upcoming city council agendas.
  3. Lobby your state representatives to vote in favor of strict data-purging timelines and warrant mandates for license plate databases. [4, 7, 14]

 

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Wednesday, September 9, 2026

Can our monetary system ensure fair labor earns a minimal standard of living?

Ensuring that a full-time worker can afford basic room and board is one of the central challenges of modern economic policy. Because the cost of housing and food is driven by separate market forces than the price of labor, societies typically use a combination of income-boosting policies and supply-side interventions to bridge the gap. [1, 2]
Economists and policymakers generally approach this problem through three main strategic pillars:

1. Reforming Incomes and Wages


  • Living Wage Laws: Unlike standard minimum wages, a living wage is dynamically indexed to the localized cost of living. This ensures that a 40-hour work week automatically covers local rent, utilities, and groceries. [3]
  • Direct Income Supplements: Programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) use taxpayer funds to supplement the wages of low-income workers. This places the financial baseline on the state rather than entirely on the employer. [4, 5]
  • Strengthening Labor Power: Protecting collective bargaining rights allows workers to negotiate wages that scale with corporate productivity and regional inflation. [4, 6]

2. Lowering the Cost of Housing (Room)


  • Reforming Land Use and Zoning: Many cities restrict high-density housing, which artificially chokes supply and drives up costs. Relaxing zoning laws to allow for microunits, co-living spaces, or accessory dwelling units (ADUs) substantially lowers rental entry points. [7, 8, 9, 10]
  • Social and Public Housing Options: Building government-subsidized or community-owned "social housing" removes the profit motive from a baseline percentage of the housing stock, keeping rents permanently tied to income. [9, 11]
  • Tenant Protections: Implementing localized rent stabilization and robust eviction protections prevents sudden, predatory spikes in living costs that outpace wage growth. [9, 11]

3. Stabilizing Food Security (Board)


  • Food Subsidies and Assistance: Integrating working poor families into streamlined food assistance programs helps ensure that an unexpected rent hike doesn't result in hunger.
  • Supply Chain Infrastructure: Investing in regional agricultural networks and reducing urban "food deserts" lowers the baseline cost of nutritious food by cutting logistics and distribution markups. [4, 12]

To explore how these policies apply to your perspective, let me know:

  • Do you lean more toward market-driven solutions (like cutting regulations to build more housing) or government interventions (like raising the minimum wage)?
  • Are you interested in looking at a specific region or country that has successfully balanced these two factors?



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What to do about inflation

No single theoretical monetary system can completely eliminate inflation. While strict models like a hard gold standard, a fixed-supply cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin), or Friedrich Hayek’s Choice in Currency proposal attempt to remove human discretion from money creation, they only shift vulnerability to supply shocks, technological shifts, or velocity changes. [1]

Fixed-Supply and Commodity Systems

  • Gold/Commodity Standard: Ties money to a scarce physical resource; inflation is bound by new resource discovery, but systemic banking panics or sudden supply shifts can still destabilize prices.
  • Algorithmic/Fixed Crypto: Caps the absolute maximum number of units (e.g., 21 million bitcoins); eliminates state debasement, yet allows fluctuating market demand and velocity to create wild price swings (effectively structural inflation or deflation).

Free-Banking and Market Competition

  • Denationalized Money: Hayek’s theory suggests competing private currencies force issuers to maintain stable values to survive; it curtails runaway political printing, though transaction costs and mismatched asset backing can still cause localized price instability. [1]

Managed Fiscal Constraints

  • Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): Relies on taxation and spending adjustments rather than interest rates to actively squash demand-driven price spikes at full employment; it treats inflation as a regulatory signal rather than eliminating its root potential. [2, 3, 4]
If you'd like, let me know:
  • Are you interested in historical examples (like the gold standard's performance)?
  • Do you want to explore deflationary risks in fixed-supply models?
I can provide a deeper breakdown of how these systems handle real-world economic shocks.

 

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Sunday, September 6, 2026

Why recording police in the Eighth Circuit is not yet clearly established

The Eighth Circuit’s hesitation in Robbins v. City of Des Moines stems from a mix of qualified immunity doctrine, judicial avoidance, and how the court treats the physical act of camera recording versus passive human observation. [1, 2, 3]
While the court acknowledged in Chestnut v. Wallace that recording and observing are closely linked, several key legal mechanics explain why the court stopped short of recognizing a clearly established right to record in Robbins: [1]
1. Circuit Split Dynamics and Strict Qualified Immunity Specificity
Under federal qualified immunity doctrine, a right must be "clearly established" by controlling Supreme Court or circuit precedent, or a robust consensus of persuasive authority.
When the Eighth Circuit decided Robbins, it faced a doctrinal loophole:
  • The Eighth Circuit had never explicitly issued a binding holding that recording police in public is protected by the First Amendment (unlike the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, and 11th Circuits). [1, 2]
  • In Chestnut, the court relied on out-of-circuit recording cases solely as an a fortiori justification to protect mere observation. Because Chestnut did not actually involve a camera or recording device, any language discussing recording was non-binding dicta, not a direct holding establishing a recording right. [1]
  • Supreme Court qualified immunity doctrine warns judges against defining rights at a "high level of generality." Thus, officers argue that establishing a right to "observe with your naked eyes" (Walker) does not automatically make it "clearly established" to every reasonable officer that pointing an electronic camera at vehicles and personnel near a secure building is protected. [1]
2. "Assumption Without Deciding" (Judicial Avoidance)
Instead of confronting the constitutional question head-on, the Robbins panel utilized the doctrine of constitutional avoidance. The court wrote: [1]
“Assuming Robbins had a constitutionally protected right to record as he was doing in this case, that right is not absolute.” -- [FindLaw].
By assuming the right exists arguendo, the panel sidestepped creating binding precedent that would affirmatively establish the right to record for future plaintiffs within the Eighth Circuit. [1]
3. Safety, Context, and Time, Place, and Manner Restrictions
The Eighth Circuit distinguished Robbins from Walker and Chestnut based on the surrounding security environment: [1]
  • In Walker and Chestnut, individuals watched ordinary traffic stops in public streets or parks from a safe distance. [1, 2]
  • In Robbins, Daniel Robbins was standing on the sidewalk outside police headquarters filming personnel and private vehicles entering and exiting the station. [1]
  • The court highlighted that officers were aware of recent vehicle thefts and a past ambush/stalking incident that led to the murder of officers. Because the First Amendment right to record in public is subject to "reasonable time, place, and manner" regulations, the court concluded that an officer assessing these security concerns could have reasonably believed Robbins’s conduct warranted an investigatory stop. [1, 2]
4. Naked-Eye Observation vs. Electronic Surveillance
From the Eighth Circuit's conservative perspective, physical looking and video surveillance carry different operational risks:
  • Passive observation (Walker) does not capture personal identifying details (e.g., license plates of undercover cars, schedules of off-duty civilian staff).
  • Targeted recording outside a secure facility was framed by the court as presenting distinct officer-safety concerns that blurred the line between First Amendment gathering and pre-attack reconnaissance. [1]
(Note: Although the Eighth Circuit upheld qualified immunity on the initial First Amendment detention claim, it did rule against the officers on Fourth Amendment grounds for holding Robbins's camera and phone for days without legal justification, leading to a $125,000 settlement with the city). [1]


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