In six states, you do not need a prosecutor’s permission to start a criminal investigation. Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Oklahoma allow citizens to convene a criminal grand jury by petition. No district attorney has to agree. No attorney general has to agree. No governor has to agree.

The case those grand juries would examine is already admitted. In a January court filing, the federal government acknowledged that DOGE employees at the Social Security Administration moved agency data to an unauthorized server the agency cannot audit, sent an encrypted file of roughly 1,000 people’s names and addresses to other agencies in a format the SSA cannot open, and signed an agreement with a political group seeking to match SSA records against state voter rolls.

Every state makes identity theft a crime, and the crime is the act itself, knowingly obtaining, possessing, or transferring another person’s identifying information without authorization and with wrongful intent; no one has to prove a specific account was later misused. And these cases can be filed where the victims live: Kansas, Nebraska, and New Mexico expressly place the crime in the county where the victim resides, regardless of where the perpetrator sat.

The SSA holds records on virtually everyone with a Social Security number, and the agency has told a federal court it cannot determine whose data was taken. Finding that out is what grand juries are for.

The signature requirements are reachable in most of these states. In Kansas, a woman named Madison Smith needed 212 signatures to force a grand jury in her county; she collected 329, and the grand jury was convened.

Oklahoma requires 100 signatures plus 2 percent of the county’s vote in the last governor’s race, with a floor of 500 and a ceiling of 5,000. New Mexico requires the greater of 200 signatures or 2 percent of the county’s registered voters.

In most counties, that is a number a determined group of neighbors with clipboards can gather, and in the largest counties it is a few thousand. Nevada is the exception: its petition requires signatures equal to 25 percent of the county’s turnout in the last general election, a far higher requirement than the other five states.

The process has the same structure everywhere: a written petition alleging specific crimes, signatures from registered voters in your county, certification by the clerk, and a judge who must then act.

In Oklahoma, the petition is filed with the court clerk before any signatures are gathered. A judge reviews it within four days and, if it is deficient, states every deficiency in writing, with two days to amend. Once it is approved, circulators have forty-five days to collect the signatures, and once the election board certifies them, the judge must impanel the grand jury within thirty days.

In Kansas, the person who filed the petition testifies to the grand jury first, and the jury can hire its own special counsel and investigators with the court’s approval, instead of or in addition to the local prosecutor. From there the grand jury does what grand juries do: it subpoenas witnesses and records, and it decides whether to indict.

That power is not theoretical. Citizen-petitioned grand juries in Kansas have subpoenaed thousands of records and returned indictments, and the court enforces a grand jury’s subpoenas with compulsory process.

The subpoena power does not end at the state line, either. Under the Uniform Act to Secure the Attendance of Witnesses, adopted in every state and sustained by the Supreme Court, a court where a grand jury investigation has commenced can certify that a person in another state is a material witness, and that person’s home-state courts can summon them to appear, with refusal punishable as if they had defied a subpoena at home. That is the process by which the engineers who moved the data, and the leadership they answered to, can be required to answer questions under oath in a county courthouse, before a jury of ordinary citizens. They will fight it, and some fights will be lost, but a subpoena fought in public is still a public record of who fought it. And if the jury finds the evidence warrants charges, it returns an indictment, a state indictment, which no presidential pardon can reach.

For six months, The Existentialist Republic has given readers the tools to act on this at every level that has authority: hundreds of police reports filed, and letters, emails, and phone calls to county prosecutors and attorneys general in all fifty states, asking them to investigate the DOGE employees who mishandled the Social Security records of hundreds of millions of Americans, conduct the federal government has admitted in court.

Not one of those officials has publicly signaled a willingness to act, despite the conduct affecting their own residents and despite possessing the legal authority to do so. Many of the answers repeat two refusals: that it is a federal matter, which the venue laws say it is not, and that civil lawsuits are underway, which cannot convict anyone.

Every official with the power to start this has now been asked. The petition is the next step, and it is the one way to start criminal process that does not require any official’s permission, which makes it the one way a refusing official cannot refuse.

One caution. Courts quash defective petitions. In 2022, the New Mexico Supreme Court invalidated petitions seeking a grand jury to investigate the governor over her COVID orders. A petition has to allege specific crimes, not general grievances. This record supplies them: state identity theft and computer crime statutes, venue where the victims live, and a Justice Department court filing admitting the conduct. Our article on the DOGE prosecutions explains all of it.

Pennsylvania has a related mechanism. Rule 506 lets any citizen submit a private criminal complaint, which the district attorney must approve or disapprove with written reasons, reviewable by the Court of Common Pleas and public under the Right-to-Know Law. It does not bypass the prosecutor, but it converts a refusal into a signed public document.

We are beginning that process now. If you live in Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, or Oklahoma, comment below or send us a direct message with your state and county, and we will invite you to the organizing group for your state.

We are building a toolkit for each state: the signature number for your county, the filing rules and deadlines, and a petition template drafted to that state’s requirements and based only on the court-admitted record. Your comments and messages tell us which states to prepare first. We will publish each state’s materials as they are ready, and as petitions advance, we will gather and share the resources filers need at each step.

If you are in Pennsylvania and want the Rule 506 private complaint materials, the same applies. A petition has been certified before by ordinary people who decided to do it. There is no reason yours cannot be next.

Do you want to help all this happens? It’s all funded through subscribers, our Buy Me A Coffee page, and our store. They’re all linked below. If you can chip in, you’re making this all real for the folks who will be gathering signatures, drafting and filing paperwork, and eventually getting some serious consequences delivered to Musk, Big Balls, or any other DOGE member who committed a crime. Let’s make some justice.

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By Christopher Armitage

LINDSEY GRAHAM, SENATOR FROM SOUTH CAROLINA HAS DIED JULY 11, 2026, UNEXPECTEDLY. The MAGA/GOP is in a tailspin with tow Senatorial losses  within days.

 

 

She spent decades fighting over contaminated water. Now Erin Brockovich is asking a new question: where is all the water for AI going to come from?

Brockovich recently launched a crowdsourced national map that tracks AI data centers across the United States, logging facilities that are operational, under construction, or rumored. Thousands of reports have poured in from communities in nearly every state.

When those locations were laid over federal drought data, a troubling pattern showed up. A significant share of the data centers under construction right now sit in regions already struggling with drought, especially across the South and Southwest.

The timing could not be worse. More than 60 percent of the country is currently experiencing drought conditions, and water demand is climbing at the same time AI infrastructure is exploding. A single large data center can consume millions of gallons of water every day, most of it for cooling the racks of chips that never stop running.

One estimate from researchers at UC Riverside puts it in everyday terms. Generating a single 100 word AI response can use roughly one bottle of water once cooling and electricity are counted.

Residents near some of these sites are reporting the same fear over and over: that the aquifers they depend on could be drained before anyone asked their permission. Brockovich says the most common complaint is not even the water. It is transparency. Projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who never return calls, officials who signed NDAs before neighbors knew anything was being considered.

Tech companies argue newer cooling systems can cut water use dramatically, but those systems usually demand more electricity instead. Every solution trades one scarce resource for another.

Would you be okay with an AI data center being built in your town, or would you fight it?

Source: Brockovich Data Center Reporting; Newsweek drought analysis

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Occupy Democrats, you're part of that same "MEDIA" you backhandedly criticize! We know what's going on, and we know that you know it too. Yet you manipulate us just like the media. Trump was put into office twice by the same group of people that are corporate billionaires who also own all the media that is watched, read, and heard. "WHY ANYONE WANTED THIS DEMENTED CLOWN BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE IS BEYOND ME!" You whine. Why aren't you "following the money?" It all leads straight to oligarchs, corporations, billionaires, media owners like Larry Ellison, bought and paid for political whores, etc... Cease your pathetic ignorance and wheedling, and thinking we taxpayers haven't caught on to what is going on both to our country and to us. You've all gotten away with it far too long due to the face we were not paying attention through clever distraction. We've finally had enough and are coming wide awake. Calling this kind of deceptive nonsense out is the first warning that many of us are not the gullible fools you've been taking us for, and the fact we are sick of it all.
 

More manure du jour spread by the corporate billionaires who schemed to install Trump, a friable, obtuse psychotic mutant the preferred choice for many of the billionaires who support and protect him to use as a battering ram to dismantle what was left of democracy freeing them from all taxation, and accountability. Meanwhile, they are beginning to run from the very people they planned on annihilating, and ruling those left after the great "culling". One may have been born into great wealth, but unfortunately inherit the character of a crapulous immoderate in appetite too feckless, and mentally inefficient to accomplish the original intent due to spasmodic miscalculations of ill-conceived plans, proving the brilliance money should have brought along with it was in fact short-changed by nonexistent intelligence. Being born rich is often luck, but then so is being born a true genius, or visionary which rarely happens at the same time, as we are beginning to see clearly that many of these oligarchs born to great wealth, and enormous greed possess the intelligence of a rattlesnake, along with wealth, but little else.

 

Mitch McConnell is supposedly well enough to hold 20‑minute policy chats from his hospital bed… but somehow a 60‑second proof‑of‑life video is a logistical nightmare? Sure. Totally normal. Nothing to see here.

We’re expected to just “take their word for it” — the same party that lies about elections, lies about coup attempts, lies about everything from crowd sizes to classified documents — but now, magically, they’re the gold standard of medical transparency when it comes to an 84‑year‑old power broker who keeps disappearing from public view.

And it’s not just Twitter weirdos asking questions. The governor of Kentucky literally had to send a formal letter asking McConnell to update the public on his health and whether he can still do his job. That’s how little information is being shared. When your own state’s governor has to beg for basic clarity, something is deeply wrong.

Meanwhile, Kentucky law sets a hard deadline for calling a special election, and that date is crawling closer while Republicans conveniently insist that everything’s “under control.” What a coincidence that the foggiest health situation in America just happens to surround a man whose seat is crucial to their grip on power.

Kentuckians deserve a senator who is visibly, verifiably sentient — not a remote‑controlled vote being wheeled out by staffers and party operatives. Right now, they have a guy making decisions for millions of people who might as well be Schrödinger’s Senator: we’re told he’s fine, but we’re not allowed to actually see proof.

And if you think this is where the GOP stops, you haven’t been paying attention. This looks like a test run: normalize government by rumor and press release now, so they’re ready the next time it’s an even bigger problem — like when the president goes dark, and they decide the public doesn’t “need” to know the truth.

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They Put a Tracker on Every Road

Flock cameras were sold as a way to find stolen cars. They are becoming a searchable national map of where Americans go.

JC and Carolyn Herron were taking their three-year-old granddaughter to a doctor’s appointment when police stopped them at gunpoint. A Flock camera read the letter O in their personalized plate, “LOVEY,” as a zero. A bad machine read, combined with stale police information, turned a family trip to the doctor into an armed police stop. Their granddaughter sat in the back seat while adults with guns acted as though an algorithm could not be wrong.

Flock Safety sells automated license plate readers, which are cameras that record a vehicle’s plate, visible details, time, and location. Flock says it does not use facial recognition and deletes plate data after thirty days by default, but the system still lets authorities search by plate, color, make, partial plate, and other visible features. Flock’s own policies recognize that agencies can download and store images before the thirty days are up. The company can delete its copy, but it cannot erase the copy a police department already pulled into its own files.

Flock did not show up in a country that had fiercely protected privacy. After 9/11, Democrats and Republicans spent years building a surveillance state that kept asking Americans to give up more freedom in exchange for safety. They expanded the power to watch, collect, search, and share information about ordinary people, then called every new intrusion necessary. Flock takes that same rotten system and makes it cheaper, easier, more local, and harder to see. It does not need a secret wiretap or a federal court order. It needs a black camera on a pole, a contract signed at City Hall, and software that turns scattered sightings into a map of your life.

Flock says it has partnerships across every state except Alaska through thousands of contracts with police departments, towns, schools, businesses, apartment complexes, and homeowners’ associations. Nobody held a national vote on whether America should have a giant searchable vehicle tracking system. It was built quietly, one local purchase at a time, while most people had no idea that a camera outside a shopping center, an apartment complex, or a private neighborhood could feed into a far larger police network.

That matters even more under an administration that has already shown how willing it is to weaponize private information. A federal judge found that the IRS unlawfully gave ICE confidential taxpayer addresses about 42,695 times under a data sharing arrangement meant to help immigration enforcement. In Illinois, a state audit found that Flock allowed Customs and Border Protection to access license plate data even though state law was supposed to stop that kind of sharing. This is how authoritarian power works. Government collects information for one reason, then finds a new excuse to use it against people it wants to hunt, intimidate, punish, or deport.

The danger is already here. In Texas, a Johnson County official searched Flock for a woman after a self-managed abortion and wrote, “had an abortion, search for female.” One search reached 6,809 networks and 83,345 cameras. The sheriff’s office and Flock first called it a welfare check, but records showed deputies opened a death investigation, read the woman’s text messages, and asked prosecutors whether they could charge her. Prosecutors said Texas could not charge her for taking abortion medication. The man who reported her was later charged in connection with assaulting her. They used a system sold as a tool for stolen cars to track a woman whose partner had allegedly brutalized her.

One federal judge gave Norfolk, Virginia’s Flock system a green light after two residents learned their cars had been photographed about 475 and 325 times over four and a half months. The judge ruled that the city’s 176 camera network had not gathered enough information to reconstruct their whole lives, and the case is now on appeal. That is the legal trick holding this system together. Break the tracking into hundreds of separate pictures, call each one a harmless moment, and pretend the computer never stitched those moments into a detailed trail.

These systems never stay limited to the crimes used to sell them. Reviews of Flock searches found police using the network for school residency checks, background checks, and loud music complaints. A system marketed as a way to catch kidnappers and carjackers became another lazy shortcut for school bureaucracy, petty complaints, and everyday police convenience. Surveillance always spreads when those in power discover that watching people is easier than doing the real work.

A camera can help find a stolen car or locate a missing child in a real emergency. Nobody is asking police to be blind. But a camera cannot become a standing warrant to search the movements of every person who drove past it. When police want to dig through weeks of someone’s life, they should have to go before a judge and show probable cause. That rule should block nationwide fishing expeditions, abortion investigations, immigration dragnets, and secret data sharing schemes hidden behind the words “public safety.”

Flock’s promises about safeguards are getting harder to believe because the safeguards keep collapsing when they are tested. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Flock told city officials its system could not create a heat map showing where a vehicle had traveled, then admitted it could show where that vehicle had been captured over a month. The city revoked approval the next day. In San Francisco, an audit found 299 improper searches of Flock data for federal and out of state agencies through an intelligence sharing arrangement. Nobody hacked the system. Somebody with authorized access opened the side door and let them in.

Flock has not merely installed cameras. It has sold the next stage of America’s surveillance state, built through local blind spots and ready to be used by people who already believe private information is another weapon of government power. The camera does not need your face. Once it knows your plate, where you were, where you went next, and how often you returned, the people in power already have a file on your life.

They call it safety because “a tracker on every road” would make Americans understand exactly what has been done to them.

*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky @tonywriteshere.bsky.social

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