The Pentagon has announced “Autonomous Warfare Command,” a new four-star command built to scale autonomous and robotic weapons across the military, which Zach and Elizabeth break down as a cute Orwellian name for AI making its own kill decisions, backed by the same surveillance infrastructure being built at home. They dig into what “human supervision” will actually mean once split-second AI decisions are involved, why this always ties back to the surveillance buildup they talk about every week, and the case for basic self-sufficiency (cash on hand, water, a backup plan) when so much of modern life depends on systems that can go down in a disaster.
Then: a report reveals that Dunwoody, Georgia police have been intentionally entering incorrect license plates into Flock’s “hot list,” on the record, specifically because they know Flock’s cameras misread certain letters and numbers, an admission that a system running an estimated 20 billion plate reads a month is error-prone enough that cops are manually patching around it, with real people getting pulled over at gunpoint as a result.
Plus a strange and unsettling report on always-on aerial surveillance over major cities that can rewind time to track anyone, anywhere they went, and how one political operative claims it helped catch Luigi Mangione, and Apple’s rollout of facial-scan age verification.
Zach Varnell
Zach Varnell is a cybersecurity expert and advocate for privacy and individual liberty. He is a founding member of Banish Big Brother, a nonprofit dedicated to combating invasive surveillance. He also runs Asteros, a security firm that helps software teams and compliance-driven organizations understand and reduce their real-world risk. His insights have been featured in publications like Infosecurity Magazine, Threatpost, ZDNET, and the Washington Examiner.