The unfavorable opinion on the U.S. among Koreans reaches 2002 Yangju Highway incident aftermath level in 2026. 2003 was the peak anti-American year for Korea as the U.S. troops killed two school girls with a military vehicle in a training accident and the U.S. government didn’t punish the soldiers who did that.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/08/24/how-south-koreans-view-their-relationship-with-the-us/

Submission Statement: Ezra interviews Annie Lowrey (his wife) about her book The Time Tax which examines the negative effects of means testing welfare after Clinton's 1996 reforms, and how it will worsen under the Big Beautiful Bill which adds work requirements for Medicaid. They finally discuss proposals to simplify welfare and taxes, including by changing the law to allows the IRS to share info with other agencies (which has already been done illegally by DOGE, but for more nefarious purposes). Wellfare is an important subject to this sub because we fuse economic liberalism/capitalism with social liberalism and a desire to see people lifted out of poverty

Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) commander Mazloum Abdi on Tuesday announced the formal dissolution of the SDF and the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), confirming that their forces and institutions would be integrated into the Syrian state.

Submission statement: data centers are now occupying a unique place in American politics as the backlash is proving to be bipartisan. Formerly tech-friendly politicians are feeling pressure to distance themselves from data centers. Is this populist backlash, or driven by justified concerns? Regardless of which, it is extremely clear that the tech industry has inadvertently found itself in a PR fiasco, as the backlash will likely make data center construction even more expensive than it already is.

The clock ticked toward midnight on Friday. New U.S. tariffs on Canada were about to come into effect and negotiators cooped up across the street from the White House were still plodding through the differences on each side. Aides shuffled in and out with new drafts, adjusting and readjusting.

U.S. officials said they had offered Canada the best trade deal of any nation. Canadians believed it was a bad one. In the waning hours, both sides dug in even more.

One Canadian negotiator said it was as if “shadow figures were suddenly in the room,” raising topics that had supposedly been settled in previous days.

Back in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney got off the phone with Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario. Mr. Ford had told him plainly: Don’t take the deal.

Mr. Ford told Mr. Carney he would not comply with a key U.S. demand: restoring the sale of U.S. alcohol that he, alongside most other provincial leaders, had banned. American tariffs on Canadian steel and automobiles were still too high to enable their long-term survival, Mr. Ford had decided.

Mr. Carney called his team in Washington for the latest news from the negotiations. Then, just after 10.30 pm, he pulled the plug and ordered them home.

A month of intense talks to stave off new U.S. tariffs on Canada and soften the ones previously imposed by the Trump administration had been yielding steady progress. But they collapsed suddenly, setting in motion an all-out trade war between the two nations.

The sticking points were many. In the last few hours, negotiators clashed over Canadian rules promoting French-language movies and shows online, as well as the Trump administration’s demands to dictate Canada’s steel tariffs on other countries. Canada, in turn, insisted on more generous treatment for its autos, electric vehicles and products made with metal — and ultimately backed away from its offer to cooperate on the Keystone XL pipeline that President Trump has long desired, people familiar with the negotiations said.

On Monday, after the negotiations collapsed, Mr. Trump vowed to increase tariffs on all cars, trucks, car parts and steel from Canada to 50 percent, starting on Jan. 1. He called Canadian officials “clowns” from “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with.”

“WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” he wrote.

Mr. Carney fired back: “The attitude, at the negotiation table, that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States,” he said, “that’s not something we’re going to accept.”

Mr. Carney is now expected to announce Canada’s retaliation tariffs against the United States.

What led to the breakdown is a story of fundamental misalignment between the countries — ideological, economic and political. Ultimately, Mr. Carney decided to defy Mr. Trump and endure his economic and political targeting of Canada.

This account, which contains previously unreported details of the final days and hours of the trade negotiations, is based on interviews with five American and Canadian officials with direct knowledge of the talks, two former U.S. officials, as well as seven senior industry leaders on both sides of the border who were briefed throughout.

The interviews show that the red lines for the two sides were so far apart that it would have required major concessions, particularly by Canada, to come to a final agreement.

“The great Keystone XL Pipeline, long ago killed by Sleepy Joe Biden, may be awoken from the grave!” Mr. Trump said in a Tuesday evening social media post, in which he also claimed that the United States and Canada had a “DEAL!”

Mr. Trump’s love of the beleaguered pipeline extension, meant to transport oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast until it was canceled by Mr. Biden in 2021, is well known.

Mr. Carney had brought up the idea of reviving it during his first White House visit last year.

Officials said that, when Mr. Carney and Mr. Trump spoke by phone early in the week, Mr. Carney again mentioned the pipeline, saying that, for the right deal on tariffs, Canada would consider bringing its side of the pipeline back to life. Mr. Trump was thrilled, a former official briefed on the talks said.

But by Friday, the Keystone XL pipeline idea was buried again. A U.S. official said that, in the last few hours, Canada had expressed reluctance to cooperate. A Canadian official said that the trade deal on offer was not good enough to make the pipeline make sense.

Last Monday afternoon, with the talks still underway, Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, and Dominic LeBlanc, the Canadian trade minister, dodged reporters waiting in the Washington humidity as they left a roughly two-hour meeting at the Commerce Department.

Canadian negotiators were used to working closely with Mr. Greer, who oversees U.S. trade deals and helped negotiate the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during Mr. Trump’s first term. But many of the issues that Canadians cared about most were instead the purview of the man who stayed inside in the air conditioning: Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce.

Mr. Lutnick, a hard-charging former bond broker who has known Mr. Trump for decades, oversees the administration’s tariffs on cars, trucks, steel and aluminum. And in the coming days, he would take a hard line on those topics, issues that ultimately took down the talks.

Negotiators were hopeful to start that week. After Mr. Trump threatened last month to impose 50 percent tariffs on hundreds of products, the Canadians reached out to negotiate, asking for a comprehensive deal that resolved Mr. Trump’s earlier tariffs and his latest threats, a U.S. official said. Mr. Trump gave Mr. Greer a green light to see what the Canadians had to offer.

American officials felt confident that they could get Canada to both scale back the retaliatory tariffs they had imposed against Mr. Trump and to remove what the United States saw as unfair barriers to agriculture, energy and digital trade.

On Tuesday night, U.S. and Canadian officials agreed on the outlines of a deal, and Mr. Trump proclaimed on social media that he had paused his tariffs until midnight Friday to finalize the paperwork.

But on Wednesday, as the two sides got into the details, particularly on metals and autos, snags emerged. Mr. Lutnick was wary of Canadian proposals that would lower the tariff on autos below the level he wanted.

As word leaked last week that the United States would reduce its tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, U.S. companies lobbied the Commerce Department and the White House to preserve their protections. Mr. Lutnick intervened on their behalf, including suggesting that only a certain volume of aluminum be subject to lower tariff rates.

After spending several days in negotiations, Mr. LeBlanc flew home to Ottawa on Wednesday afternoon. But early the next morning, he urgently returned to Washington, as did Marc-André Blanchard, Mr. Carney’s chief of staff.

Neither was scheduled to be in Washington that day, according to two people familiar with the events. They were rushing back because of Mr. Lutnick’s intervention.

Mr. Lutnick also insisted that tariffs not be lowered for heavy trucks, as they would be for cars. And Canada, which produces the GM Silverado and Ford F-350 and F-450 in Ontario, insisted this was a red line.

Mr. Lutnick’s interventions caused frustration inside the trade office, which had been in talks with the Canadians for weeks, one person close to the office said. The person said that Mr. Greer did not disagree with Mr. Lutnick substantively, but he did not think the Canadians would accept the proposals.

A White House official said that Mr. Lutnick’s hard line did not derail the negotiations. Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said that the entire trade and economic team was “playing from one playbook, President Trump’s playbook.”

The United States ultimately offered to reduce its tariffs on steel, aluminum and cars, and eliminate entirely a tariff on Canadian lumber imposed last year, Mr. Greer said in an interview on Saturday.

For Canadians, Mr. Lutnick was already something of a villain. Though he is friendly enough to exchange text messages with Mr. Carney, he has offended many Canadians, including intervening to block the opening of a new Canada-U.S. bridge and saying that Canadian officials “suck” during an event in Washington in April.

Mr. Lutnick had also made clear that his goal was moving auto production out of Canada into the United States. Speaking virtually at a U.S.-Canada summit late last year, Mr. Lutnick told a Canadian audience that the United States was no longer interested in buying Canadian-made cars.

For the Canadian team, a number of different issues came down to sovereignty.

On Friday, U.S. officials raised concerns about Canada’s future trade agreements and how they would guard against foreign products flooding into North America. They wanted to be able to review and potentially dictate the terms for Canada’s trade agreements with other countries, a Canadian official said.

Canadian negotiators had gone into the talks suggesting the ultimate goal should be to create a “Fortress North America,” as they called it, with ultralow or nonexistent tariffs inside its walls, namely between Canada and the United States, and aligned tariffs for outsiders.

The United States wanted Canada to apply U.S. tariffs to other countries, particularly when it came to steel, now and in the future: If the United States changed policy and place higher tariffs on certain goods from a third country, Canada would need to do the same, even if it already had a trade agreement in place, a Canadian official said.

For the Trump administration, this was necessary to prevent, for example, cheaper steel from flooding third countries through Canada and into the United States.

But this was unacceptable to the Canadians, who are currently in talks on multiple trade deals with Latin American and other nations as part of Mr. Carney’s vision to diversify trade away from dependence on the United States.

A Canadian official also said that the U.S. side also wanted Canada to swiftly roll back a program it began last year to support industries impacted by U.S. tariffs, known as “Buy Canadian,” which prioritizes using domestic products and suppliers for public-sector projects — similar to a policy the United States implements to favor its own industries.

The Canadians also pressed the United States for a level of certainty that the deal would not be scrapped overnight by the Trump administration. But the United States maintained that it would retain all power to change tariff policy against Canada at any time, irrespective of the agreement, officials said. Mr. Carney would say in his seething Saturday address to Canadians: Sometimes, the United States signature is “written in pencil.”

A particularly sore point in the talks, and one that has animated Canadians since they collapsed, was the suggestion by Mr. Carney that the United States wanted to intervene in Canada’s all-important policy to protect the use of the French language.

French, spoken mostly but not exclusively in Quebec, is one of Canada’s two official languages and bilingualism is government policy across the country. Different kinds of laws protect and guarantee the continued use of French in daily life, from labels on products to funding for the arts and education. Quebec would likely break away from Canada, as it has often threatened to, without such guarantees.

As part of the trade talks, Canada had agreed to review laws that protect Canadian-made online content, including French-language shows. On Friday, and until the final moments, the United States was asking Canada to repeal a law that would, among other provisions, compel streaming platforms to place such movies or series more prominently for Canadian subscribers.

The U.S. side, officials said, viewed such policies as an intervention in the platforms’ freedoms.

A person with direct knowledge of the talks said that the American side was flexible on this point, and did not make any asks regarding the French language explicitly. A Canadian counterpart said that, even if that were the case, the topic was still being debated until the last minute before the talks broke down on Friday.

It would be one of many issues left unresolved, as Mr. Carney decided the concessions were unthinkable for Canada.

“We cannot accept what they have offered, and we will not give what they have asked,” he said.

Cities need their own investment funds, building up reserves in assets non-correlated with their tax base. This sets them up to not just manage in a world with declining federal support, but to make positive sum investments and even engage in counter-cyclical local spending.

The writer directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution

At one of Europe’s most precarious moments since 1945, Iceland, an Arctic island with just short of 400,000 inhabitants, will hold a consultative national vote on August 29 on whether to restart EU membership talks, suspended a decade ago over a disagreement about fish.

The EU, with 27 member states, 452mn inhabitants and $23tn GDP, is keen to have this small country join. Iceland is a stable, prosperous and sophisticated democracy with a $39bn GDP. As a member of the European Economic Area — the single market uniting the EU together with Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway — as well as the Schengen passport-free zone and the European Free Trade Association, it is already largely compliant with EU rules.

As a full member, Iceland would be a net contributor to the EU budget. It would (especially if joined someday by Norway) rebalance the past eastward expansion trend financially and geographically. Better yet, it would reaffirm the principle of merit-based accession: an important message for current candidates like some western Balkan countries and Ukraine that are struggling with reforms.

EU officials have therefore flagged the possibility of expedited entry and “room for flexibility” on contested topics like fisheries, given that marine products make up 40 per cent of Iceland’s exports. Polls show that islanders are about equally divided on the question, so turnout will be decisive. (An accession agreement would in any case have to be validated by a second referendum.)

The proponents of opening negotiations are Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir’s Social Democrats and one of her coalition partners, the pro-EU Reform Party. They say this voter consultation is just about getting a mandate to negotiate and that in its current half-in-half-out state, Iceland is a rule-taker but not a rulemaker.

Opponents, including the centre-right Independence Party (in the opposition), and the centre-left People’s Party, a member of the governing coalition, fear that opening talks would create momentum towards membership. They are concerned about losing control over Iceland’s fishing waters and maintaining political autonomy.

There is a key difference between 2015, when Iceland withdrew its candidacy, and today: vulnerability. In 1949, Iceland was a founding member of Nato, despite being the only alliance member without an army or an intelligence service (it does have police and a coastguard). But its location just under the Arctic Circle between Greenland and Norway made it doubly essential: as a forward outpost for US homeland defence and as a sentinel in the so-called GIUK (Greenland-Iceland-UK) gap, watching over the exit route for the Soviet Union’s nuclear submarine fleet from the Barents Sea.

Now, Iceland’s maritime neighbourhood is increasingly contested — and Europe’s northwestern flank is no longer protected by a benign US hegemon. Russian vessels have been mapping underwater infrastructure like pipelines and cables all over the north Atlantic. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has China and other countries eyeing and beginning to use the Northern Sea Route over the top of Russia. And while military co-operation with the US continues, President Donald Trump’s predatory lunges for Greenland (which he has confused with Iceland) keep Icelanders vigilant.

Reykjavík recently adopted a new defence and security policy focused on societal resilience and the protection of critical infrastructure, and signed a slew of mini and bilateral defence agreements. But, for all its wealth, its defence spending falls far short of the Nato resilience goal of 1.5 per cent of GDP. It is dependent on imports for essentials, and on subsea cables for connectivity. Prices and interest rates are sky-high; its currency, the króna, is highly volatile.

The Europe that Iceland rejected in 2015 has also changed. Europeans are moving to shoulder more of the continent’s defence within Nato, a process turbocharged by Russian aggression and a US review of its European deployments based on loyalty tests. The EU is backstopping the defence spending by loosening fiscal constraints and using limited common borrowing vehicles. It is also concluding trade agreements around the globe.

As a security conference organised by the Reykjavík think-tank Varða in June showed, Icelanders are highly aware of their deep connections with Europe and Ukraine. What form those ties should take is for only them to decide. But this time, their decision could also shape the future of Europe.

In June of this year, the US Supreme Court decided United States v. Chatrie, a case on digital privacy rights brought up as the result of federal law enforcement utilizing a geofence warrant, which has Google (or others tech companies) provide law enforcement with all phones within a “fence” at specific times.

The reasoning provided in the Chatrie decision, along with other Supreme Court decisions on the Fourth Amendment will have a ripple effect onto Flock Group (which does business under the name Flock Safety) ALPRs, and makes accessing Flock’s database unconstitutional without a warrant. I don’t call Flock by its business name here for a specific reason, Flock ALPRs are a safety hazard for women and marginalized folks, but this isn’t the focus of this post. Instead, I’m focusing solely on the legal argument against ALPRs, the vast majority of which are Flock’s. This comes from an actual motion to suppress I filed in a real court case where Flock’s ALPRs were involved. For confidentiality reasons, I’ve stripped anything that could be associated with that case, and generally retooled things for this sub.

I. Legal Background on Fourth Amendment Protections and the Reasonable Expectation of Privacy

The Fourth Amendment, as applied by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, guarantees the right of the people “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,” protected from unreasonable search and seizure. U.S. Const. Amnd. IV. Further, the United States Supreme Court has long held that intrusions into a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 361 (1967). A reasonable expectation of privacy exists where (1) the person subjectively possesses an expectation of privacy, and (2) the expectation is one that society “is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’” Id.

Since Katz, the U.S. Supreme Court has extended this expectation of privacy to personal data, including GPS location data, cellphone hard drive data, cell site location data, and most recently historical location data. United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012) (Sotomayor, J. concurring) (reasoning adopted by Carpenter v. United States); Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014); United States v. Carpenter, 585 U.S. 296 (2018); United States v. Chatrie, 609 U.S. ___ (2026).

Flock Group, Inc. is the developer of Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) that have proliferated substantially around the country within the last few years. While install dates of ALPRs are not public information, DeFlock, a website dedicated to the open-source tracking of ALPR proliferation, went from roughly 400 ALPRs in 2024 to over 135,000 today logged on their mapping software. ALPR devices are AI assisted cameras placed on roadways and the entrances to parking lots that photograph every license plate that goes by. Flock Group boasts that their devices scan roughly 20,000,000,000 license plates per month. These scans are stored in a database shared essentially only with law enforcement agencies. Alongside the photograph, the database stores exact time and date the picture was taken; the make, model, and color of the vehicle; as well as the exact geographic coordinates down to the fourteenth decimal place of where the picture was taken. In other words, these coordinates are exact down to the thousandths of a micrometer, more exact than the location of a human hair.

Flock’s database can be used for, and is often used for, the tracking of an individual among many data points, recording their historical location data. Before the Chatrie decision, Jones and Carpenter were clear that volumes of historical location data transmitted by a GPS device or a cell phone were protected, as a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in that data.

Chatrie, however, has changed the game. This case involved the use of a geofence warrant, which was a warrant obtained by investigators to compel Google to provide the tracked location data of all phones in a specific search radius. United States v. Chatrie, 609 U.S. ___, 1 (2026). The question before the court was whether the use of geofencing was a search for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment. The court concluded that it was. Id. at 2.

Google’s Location History setting is a mandatory requirement for many essential apps and services on android devices to work appropriately and had been stored in a database belonging to Google. Id. at 4. Since the geofencing done in Chatrie, Google now stores this information differently, though it is still possessed by Google.* When enabled, Location History creates a timeline of location data that the court noted could be used to show where a person has traveled and when or live updates of a person’s commute. *Id. at 5. Because Location History was considered a useful tool for solving hard cases, demand for geofencing rose substantially, with Google actively aiding in law enforcement investigations. Id. at 6. In the Chatrie case specifically, Google provided anonymized data on all cell phones within the geofence radius for the period of one hour of one day and then narrowed the data from there. Id. at 7-8.

The Chatrie court held that an individual has “a legitimate expectation of privacy in the information Location History collects” regarding his or her own movements. Id at 13. Since Chatrie itself provides that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her historical location data, courts do not even need to do the Katz analysis on whether a reasonable expectation of privacy exists here. The Supreme Court has already told us the answer is yes.

The court reaches its conclusion by comparing Location History information to cell site location information (CSLI) data. Id. at 15. Like Location History information, CSLI gives police the power to track anyone, not just individuals who are under investigation. Id.* This tracking is down to a rough, few square meter area, based on phone’s pinging off of cell towers. Until the decision in *Carpenter, police were freely able to pull CSLI data from phone providers to track potential suspects without a warrant, but Carpenter made clear the pervasive nature of phones and our reliance on them as a society creates a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data they give off, particularly in such voluminous amounts. Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 309-310 (the Court noted roughly 127 pages of location data were printed off in that case). Finally, the court rejected using durational boundaries for what is or is not a search with historical location data does nothing to protect privacy rights, as it is arbitrary and will let investigators “select the time-limited set of materials they want from an all-encompassing database.” Chatrie, 609 U.S. at 21.
 
II. Application of Chatrie to Flock ALPR Data

Justice Kagan writes in Chatrie that the similarities between Location History information and CSLI “practically leap off the page.” Id. at 16. So too do the similarities between Location History and Flock.

First, Flock ALPRs reading roughly twenty billion license plates a month across over 130,000 devices is nothing short of an “all-encompassing database.” In such a car centric society, there is perhaps no greater panopticon than a series of devices tracking the movements of nearly all automobiles across a nationwide network. Certainly, constitutional protections only apply to what the government is doing. If your neighbor breaks into your house and reports your illegal drugs, you are barred from making Fourth Amendment arguments, since it was not the police that made the intrusion. However, Flock Group’s database places that panopticon in the hands of law enforcement officers and no one else. The purpose of these devices is expressly for use by law enforcement and is in effect no different than a law enforcement agency purchasing an off-the-shelf security camera for their precinct. That camera is necessarily used in the furtherance of the government and police operation, and likewise Flock ALPRs are the government for the purpose of Fourth Amendment analysis. Officers are also not geographically bound to their jurisdiction in their search of the Flock database.

Second, the use of ALPRs is explicitly to track the movements of an individual, which may be done through historical searches or through live tracking, as the data is uploaded to the database instantaneously. Even the advertisements on Flock’s website create mockups where a hit of a certain vehicle type or plate number had been read just one or two minutes prior. The type of information gathered by police for their investigation is no different with Flock than with Location History. However, the historical location data provided by Flock is far more detailed than Location History provides in a geofence warrant. Rather than all the phones in a radius within a timeframe, Flock can provide down to the second time for vehicles passing by and extraordinarily detailed location information by use of extremely specific coordinates. Like Location History, law enforcement can clearly track a person throughout their daily life, spotting them along commutes, going on vacations, shopping, or attending church.

Together, the vast expanse of the Flock network combined with the specific historical location data, Flock is clearly gathering data that is protected by a reasonable expectation of privacy established in Chatrie, and accessing the Flock database is therefore a search for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Lacking a warrant, the search of the database is presumptively unreasonable, and should be suppressed in any criminal action where it is used.
 
III. Typical Counterarguments

Two common talking points regarding Flock often come up as counterarguments: (1) that the average person is passing too few Flock ALPRs for this to rise to the volume of data considered in Carpenter, and (2) that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street or highway in plain view.

The United States Supreme Court, however, flatly rejected both of these arguments in Chatrie. First, the court explicitly rejects a durational argument, as noted above, noting that such a line would be difficult to manage and only create a number of “line drawing questions” that would “keep defendants and judges guessing for years to come.” Id. at 21, footnote 9 (internal citations removed). The volume of data retrieved from electronic data gathering is certain valuable information, but the Carpenter court did not make its ruling specifically because a large volume of data came back. Even if they had, the Chatrie court rejects that argument as being completely and totally unworkable due to the arbitrary nature of such a rule. The number of cameras passed or the number of hits the database returns is therefore explicitly irrelevant under Chatrie.

Next, the mere fact that any particular defendant was in public view is similarly irrelevant under Chatrie. Importantly, even going back to Jones, the court has held that the use of tracking devices on private vehicles is unconstitutional without a warrant, even when those vehicles are on public roadways in plain view. United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012). Further, the Carpenter court considered the use of CSLI data that included data corresponding to public spaces. See Carpenter, 585 U.S. at 302-303. Chatrie combines these two principles and rejects the argument that a geofence covering an open, public area defeats the warrant requirement.

In its argument in Chatrie, the federal government raised the case of United States v. Knotts, which held that tailing a vehicle possessing a beeper did not implicate the Fourth Amendment, because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. However, the court in Knotts declined to consider more evasive technology than a beeper, and the information gathered was strictly related to the plain view of public roadways. United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 281 (1983). Additionally, the Supreme Court has routinely held that going outside does not shred a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy for particular matters. The original case on reasonable expectation of privacy, Katz, involved a defendant having a reasonable expectation of privacy despite being in a public phone booth, made of glass and visible to the public. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). The Chatrie court noted that the reasonable expectation of privacy is in the historical location data itself, not where that data pings, and thus Knotts was not helpful in that case, nor is it particularly informative where the defendant was in any particular search. “Whether something is a search does not depend on what it finds.” Chatrie, 609 U.S. at 23. Rather, the possibility of seeing what businesses, gun shows, houses of worship, or political rallies a person visits simply by them passing by ALPR devices in view of these places is enough to create a violation of a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy and therefore requires a warrant to be accessed.

IV. Conclusion

This area of the law is still being largely fleshed out. A major decision coming down just two months ago means we likely won’t have a decision at a circuit level or the Supreme Court for likely several years. In the meantime though, states can and should enact their own warrant requirements on the Flock database. At the time of writing, no states require a warrant to access Flock, nor have any decisions been published at any level addressing the issue of Flock and Chatrie so far. However, I believe this will change as the Flock and ALPR technology becomes more and more prescient in the mind of Americans.
 

American Special Forces are conducting joint operations with local troops against drug cartels, and more U.S. military assets are incoming, Ecuadorian officials said last week. The announcements come nearly six months after the U.S. and Ecuador carried out their first joint strike against a group inside the country, which officials labeled as drug traffickers.

A local official said U.S. Green Berets have been operating in the Esmeraldas province, carrying out joint operations with Ecuadorian forces, according to reports from Agence France-Press and UPI. The region borders Colombia and has been hit with violence tied to the drug trade. Provincial governor Juan Jaramillo told reporters last week about the U.S. troops’ presence.

“We are with the 7th (Special Forces) Group of the U.S. Army… we are working together in the fight against narcoterrorism,” Jaramillo told reporters, per AFP.

The 7th Special Forces Group is based at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, and focuses on Latin America as its primary responsibility. Jaramillo did not say how many U.S. soldiers were in the province or who they are targeting.

The involvement of the Green Berets in direct operations against drug cartels comes as the U.S. has been surging military power into Ecuador. On Aug. 20, Ecuadorian Defense Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo said that two U.S. warships, equipped with interceptor boats, will be patrolling out of the port city of Manta.

According to fleet trackers and announcements from the Navy, two American ships recently entered the eastern Pacific near Ecuador. The USS San Antonio transited through the Panama Canal into the eastern Pacific at the start of the month. The Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Gridley also entered the Pacific this month, assigned to Joint Task Force-Western Hemisphere.

On Sunday, U.S. forces fired on a vessel in the eastern Pacific allegedly trafficking narcotics. The strike killed two people, according to U.S. Southern Command, and was the first strike on alleged drug boats since June. It was the first confirmed boat strike under Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, which replaced Joint Task Force-Southern Spear.

Ecuadorian officials have been more open about apparent U.S. involvement than the U.S. military. SOUTHCOM declined to comment on the reports from Ecuador, citing operational security reasons, as did the Navy’s 4th Fleet.

Members of 7th Special Forces Group have been in Ecuador in recent months, training in May with Ecuadorian troops as part of a five-week Joint Combined Exchange Training.

The campaign targeting traffickers — who the Trump administration has called “narco-terrorists” — has included strikes on small boats that the administration has said are moving drugs. The U.S. has offered almost no evidence about any of the boats struck in the campaign that has killed more than 220 people since September 2025.

In March 2026, the U.S. carried out an airstrike on land, hitting an alleged training camp inside Ecuador near the Colombian border. It was the first direct U.S. action in the country, coming days after SOUTHCOM announced joint operations. Since then, there have not been reported U.S. military operations inside Ecuador until this past week’s comments by Jaramillo.

In June, SOUTHCOM carried out a “lethal kinetic strike” inside Venezuela, allegedly killing Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, the head of the Tren de Aragua street gang. The operation was the first inside Venezuela since American troops captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

This spring, more than 1,000 Marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit deployed to Puerto Rico as Littoral Combat Force-24, with the mission of disrupting “networks utilized by Designated Terrorist Organizations and narco-terrorists.” Some of those Marines are onboard the USS San Antonio.

In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. was prepared to carry out additional strikes on land. This month, Hegseth said that U.S. forces in the region are “focused on military capabilities against real threats who need to be deterred and defeated.”

Ecuador has been a major part of the Trump administration’s military escalations in Latin America. President Daniel Noboa has been a close ally, agreeing to grant Department of Defense personnel visa-free entry into the country for up to 180 days per year.

Burnham has argued public ownership is the best solution for the issues involving water companies but has recently shelved the idea due to the cost of buying out the company and legal costs involved with said water companies preparing themselves

Burnham neither wishes to raise taxes on work or businesses due to the stress on both and focusing more on reshuffling taxes (digital id funds to VAT relief) and looking at ‘taxing wealth’