The Weekly Mutiny #14: Election Eve
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Two stories about Tuesday's election, and three that rest mostly on one party's account.
The Weekly Mutiny #14: Election Eve
Two stories about Tuesday's election, and three that rest mostly on one party's account.
November 02, 2026
November 2, 2026
Two of this week's five stories concern Tuesday's election. The other three report one party's description of events: anonymous sources, a privacy group's complaints and the FTC's own account of its orders.
Alhambra and Emporia vote on data center bans Tuesday, and Trenton's vote is not on Tuesday's ballot
Alhambra, California and Emporia, Kansas put data center bans to voters on Tuesday, on different legal footing. Alhambra's council already banned data centers and voted 5 to 0 on July 27 to ask the county to put a measure affirming that ban on the November 3 ballot; the water and electricity claims in its ballot argument are the council's advocacy, and the resolution does not document them. In Emporia, the court that ordered the vote also stayed the ordinance's legal effect "regardless of the election outcome," per the city's resolution, and the city says it is preserving its position that the measure is not a proper subject for an initiative. Trenton, Ohio is not on Tuesday's ballot under the court's order: the Ohio Supreme Court held on September 1 that the petition needed 128 signatures, not the 820 the council demanded, and had 336, so it ordered a special election with no date in the documents. The resolutions and the Ohio opinion are in one post.
A leading AI super PAC network held back for the general election, The Intercept finds
An Intercept analysis of FEC records, published October 29, found that only 5 percent of AI super PACs' direct expenditures went to contested general election races. Leading the Future had spent $7.4 million on the general election as of October 26 with $34 million in cash on hand across its network, and 31 percent of the $7.4 million went to competitive races by FiftyPlusOne's measure. The Intercept also reports more than $30 million routed through newly created Delaware corporations, which the Campaign Legal Center alleged in May evades FEC disclosure rules; the FEC lacks a quorum to act. Leading the Future did not respond, and the explanations for its pullback come from outsiders such as Public Citizen's Rick Claypool, so the report does not establish that any law was broken or why the network chose as it did. The Intercept notes it is suing OpenAI, whose president and his wife gave the network $25 million, and the analysis is summarized here.
WIRED reports an Accenture contractor's personal Claude agent ran on a Pentagon network for two months
WIRED reports, citing anonymous sources, that an Accenture contractor connected a secure Defense Department system to a personal Claude Code account earlier this year, and that the agent appears to have sent login credentials and a map of the NIPRNet network to a third-party website. It ran for two months before being identified, WIRED says, and sources say Accenture did not initially report it despite a 72-hour reporting requirement. Accenture said the allegations were "thoroughly and independently investigated and found to be without merit," but did not say who investigated or dispute that an incident could be described. The Pentagon declined to comment. The account rests on unnamed sources and the word "appears," and WIRED reports no indication that hackers reached a classified system. WIRED's reporting and the responses are in our post.
Noyb files five complaints saying Scale AI tracks the freelancers who make AI training data
The privacy group noyb filed five complaints on October 27 in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria alleging that Scale AI illegally monitored workers on its Outlier platform, where Reuters says more than 900,000 freelancers produce training data for clients including Meta, OpenAI and Google. According to the complaints as seen by Reuters, up to 19 trackers record keystrokes and mouse movements every few seconds, and researchers at DiPLab found the file could be rebuilt into a video of a work session. Four workers who asked for their data between December 2025 and May 2026 received no answer, the complaints say. Noyb asks regulators to fine the company and to examine how the platform assigns tasks. Scale did not immediately respond to Reuters, and the report does not say which regulators will act.
The FTC orders nine airlines, ride-share and delivery companies to explain how personal data sets prices and pay
On October 28 the Federal Trade Commission ordered Delta, United, JetBlue, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Target and Walmart to turn over information on whether personal data is used to set what customers pay and what gig workers earn. The orders, issued under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, are for a study with no specific law enforcement purpose, and the release does not accuse any of the nine of breaking the law. It says ride-share and delivery companies "may" pay workers "shifting compensation offers based on opaque formulas," including from drivers' phone usage or acceptance history. The Commission voted 2 to 0, and recipients have 45 days to respond. The release describes what the companies may be doing and does not say which, if any, do. The orders and the companies' responses are in our post.
Last Friday's Black Box 014 compared OpenAI's stated monitoring coverage for its coding agents with outside testers' later estimates. The next Black Box comes Friday, November 6.