The Weekly Mutiny #5: The Week Someone Read the Logs
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Felony stalking charges, stolen surveillance passwords, 3.9 million warrantless searches, and the water records Texas sealed
The Weekly Mutiny #5: The Week Someone Read the Logs
Felony stalking charges, stolen surveillance passwords, 3.9 million warrantless searches, and the water records Texas sealed
August 17, 2026
Four stories this week, and all four are the same discovery made in different rooms: the surveillance state keeps a written record of itself, and almost nobody with authority is required to read it. The fourth is what happened when we read one of those records ourselves.
Fifteen Georgia officers are out over plate-camera stalking. Three Bibb County deputies were arrested on felony stalking charges on August 10 after a monthly audit found they had used Flock Safety's license plate network to track people they knew personally, current or former relationships, not suspects. Statewide, counting five officers arrested in Albany, six dismissed in Savannah, and a Conyers dispatcher, at least fifteen Georgia law enforcement personnel have been charged, fired, or dismissed over plate-reader misuse in a matter of weeks. The under-reported part: Georgia found these cases because Georgia agencies chose to audit, and no rule requires Flock's 5,000+ other agency customers to ever look. The full picture, including a charge-list discrepancy across outlets that nobody else has flagged, is in our report on the Georgia arrests.
Congress told the FTC that Flock passwords are already stolen. A November letter from Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi documents at least 35 Flock customer passwords sitting in a public database of malware-stolen credentials, Flock accounts apparently for sale on a Russian-language cybercrime forum, and the company's confirmation to Congress that it does not require multi-factor authentication. It also documents DEA agents running searches on a borrowed local detective's login, which means the audit trail can log the wrong name. The detail everyone skipped: a stolen password isn't just an access problem, it breaks the accountability system itself. We read the letter in full.
One city's cameras were searched 3.9 million times in a year. San Jose's plate-reader database logged 3,965,519 searches between June 2024 and June 2025, none requiring a warrant, in a city of roughly a million people. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are suing under the California Constitution's privacy clause rather than waiting for federal Fourth Amendment doctrine to catch up. The number worth watching is the one the lawsuit hasn't produced yet: the discovery record showing what those four million searches were actually for. Our breakdown of the suit.
Texas sealed the water bills of 36 data centers under a law written to stop payday lenders. San Antonio's water utility denied a public records request for three years of data center usage records, citing a 2021 smart-meter privacy statute whose own author says it was never meant to cover corporate accounts. Asked whether the utility is reading his bill the way he wrote it, State Rep. Diego Bernal answered: absolutely not. Fewer than one-third of data center companies answered the state's voluntary water survey, so the compulsory channel is sealed and the voluntary one is silent, in a region where demand may exceed supply by next summer. The full mechanism, from the statute's text to the ruling that widened it case by case, is in The Black Box 005.
Friday's Black Box goes deep on the thread running through this whole issue: The Black Box 006 examines Flock's audit logs themselves, the twelve million searches obtained through public records, the corrupted attribution problem Congress documented, and why the company is quietly rebuilding the very audit system it says was working.