Inlay

We start this week with Emanuel’s story about the internal memes Google employees are making all about AI. Definitely check out some of the examples in the article or on YouTube. After the break, Jason tells us how Microsoft explicitly wants to “make people addicted” to its new AI assistant, according to an internal document. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains how companies are using Reddit to manipulate AI search results and big LEGO drama. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts_,_**** Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. **If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.** * ⁠Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks⁠ * ⁠Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal⁠ * ⁠Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search⁠

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to make it effectively impossible for people to buy what many call burner phones—a phone not explicitly linked to your identity at the point of purchase—which would impact privacy-conscious people, to domestic abuse survivors, to journalists, and many more. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number and their physical address, alarming privacy advocates and civil rights activists who compare the measures to those from authoritarian countries where it can be difficult to buy a mobile phone plan without giving up your identity. The proposed change would drastically shake up how people obtain phone plans in the U.S., and have all sorts of privacy and cybersecurity knock-on effects. The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers, with telecoms being required to collect other information on business and foreign customers like the intended use case of their bulk phone plan purchase and their IP address. But the changes would mean telecoms collect data on all new and renewing customers, and the FCC provides a long list of other things that the collected data could help authorities with. 💡 ****Do you know anything else about this proposed change? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at [email protected].**** “For decades, civil libertarians have looked overseas at authoritarian countries where the government requires people to register to get a mobile phone to ensure they can be tracked. We never thought that would happen here,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project told 404 Media in an email. “But make no mistake: with this rulemaking, the government is contemplating taking away people’s ability to get a burner phone, which will hurt low-income people, domestic violence victims, and anyone else who cares about their privacy.” In a synopsis of the proposed changes, the FCC writes, “Specifically, we seek comment on requiring originating providers to, at a minimum, obtain and retain the name, physical address, government issued identification number, and an alternate telephone number of any new and renewing customer before granting access to its services.” The goal of collecting this data, the FCC writes, is to deter some scammers from getting onto a telecom network in the first place, and so “enforcers will be better able to identify the scammers when they do.” The FCC compares the changes to the sort of data collected by banks to prevent money laundering. One section stresses that the newly collected data would help “law enforcement to more easily identify callers that use the network to perpetuate crimes by ensuring that voice providers have accurate and complete customer information.” It goes on to ask if the data would help identify people buying and selling illicit goods; the investigation of “fraud, espionage, or influence operations that undermine national security”, and “address abuse in text messaging networks.” “Criminals continue to leverage the anonymity provided by phone calls and texts to defraud Americans and exploit communications networks to further other crimes,” one section reads. At the moment, the FCC is seeking comments about its proposed changes, with interested or concerned parties—think telecom companies, law enforcement, or privacy advocates—able to weigh in. But the intention of the FCC is clear: the agency wants telecoms to be legally obligated to collect much more personally identifying information on new and returning customers, linking them directly to their phone number and phone usage data. The FCC also asks whether the amount of data collected should change depending on whether a customer is seeking a prepaid or a postpaid service plan. Multiple privacy and technology experts strongly pushed back against the proposed changes. “This proposal by the FCC will do little to combat scams and robocalls, since most people doing that will have no trouble creating fake documentation or identities,” Cooper Quintin, security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media. “Given this administration’s crackdown on free expression, protest, immigrants, and women’s health we have trouble seeing this as a bold attack on freedom of communication. They want to take away our ability to make an anonymous phone call.” Eric Null, the director of the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in an emailed statement “To address the scourge of illegal robocalls, the FCC has unfortunately proposed to force every wireless subscriber in the nation to sacrifice their privacy and give up significant personal details before receiving or renewing a wireless line. While some carriers already collect such details, there are specific circumstances where a person may need privacy and anonymity when seeking a cell phone, including if that person is a victim of domestic violence, or is a journalist or whistleblower. This proposal represents a loss of privacy across the board, and from an agency whose remit includes protecting privacy. The FCC might let a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch.” Cape is a privacy-focused telecom company that limits the amount of data it collects on its customers. John Doyle, the company’s CEO, told 404 Media in an emailed statement “We hate robocalls and support eliminating them, but entrusting telecom carriers to effectively create a nationwide ID registry for every American with a phone is not the solution. Mobile carriers have been breached time and again because the incentives to secure trillions of dollars of legacy architecture aren’t there. Further enriching compromised telecom datasets with government ID, physical addresses, and alternate phone numbers harms our security rather than improving it.” Given this proposal is in the comments stage, the FCC has many questions it is hoping to receive information on, such as whether “renewing” customers should be only those new to the provider, or those switching plans with their current telecom; or whether they should not allow the use of P.O. boxes or shared office locations as the required “physical address.” The FCC did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment. The proposal is open to comments until June 25.

🌘 Subscribe****to 404 Media to get**** The Abstract****, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.**** Scientists have discovered that people walking in crowds tend to spontaneously turn counterclockwise—regardless of the environment, from schoolyards to busy settings—a surprise finding that “may represent a manifestation of a deeper biological principle of symmetry breaking,” according to a study published in Nature Communications__ on Wednesday. The bizarre finding was made essentially by accident; during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers led by Iñaki Echeverría Huarte, a professor who studies pedestrian dynamics at the University of Navarra in Spain, studied the movements of pedestrians as part of a project to inform public health guidance on social distancing measures. But the videos revealed something unexpected—a consistent pattern of people turning counterclockwise when switching direction. “The discovery was a serendipitous one (as sometimes happens in science),” Huarte told 404 Media in an email exchange that also included study co-author Claudio Feliciani, a professor who studies crowd dynamics at the University of Tokyo. “Since then, we have completed a series of experiments in Spain to test several hypotheses.” “Curiously, during a conference where I was presenting the first part of this story, Claudio and I got talking and thought together: why not run an experiment in Japan?” he continued. “We were convinced the rotation would flip there, for several reasons (cultural ones, and the different type of avoidance behaviour that exists in Japan compared with Spain). However...it did not.” Indeed, over the course of several experiments that took place in different environments in Spain and Japan, the counterclockwise bias persisted, suggesting that the team may have stumbled on a hidden rule of behavior. This preference showed up whether people were walking alone, or as part of a group, suggesting that it emerges from individuals, rather than as a collective phenomenon that is only present in crowds. “We are now only sure that it is not a collective but an individual bias, and that is very, very robust,” said Feliciani. However, the team stopped short of describing the bias as a “universal law” until more research is conducted, especially in more complex scenarios, such as emergency evacuations or dense crowds. For this study, the researchers analyzed the movements of hundreds of participants, including adults who were instructed to move freely in different settings, teenagers playing in their schoolyard in Spain, and children at a nursery school in Japan. They accounted for individual variations such as handedness (left or right), age, as well as local social etiquette about expected behavior in crowds. In each situation, the participants displayed a clear counterclockwise bias in the rotation of their bodies as they moved to a new direction. Each group also contained people who turned predominantly clockwise or showed no rotational bias, but they were fewer in number than the counterclockwise turners. The nursery school children showed an even stronger bias toward counterclockwise turns, suggesting that it may not be a learned behavior, but something biologically rooted. “It is likely biomechanical, but exactly why is hard to tell,” said Feliciani. He added that this symmetry-breaking motion appears to be unusual in animals, and that “most animals show no bias, and humans are probably the exception or, for sure, a rare case.” That said, the study outlined a few exceptions, including temnothorax ants, which tend to turn left while exploring, and budgies, which show preferences in certain lateral directions during flight. Tip Jar Huarte is working on follow-up studies that use virtual reality to shed light on the bias, but for now, this weird pattern remains unexplained. A better understanding of its origins could be useful for applications in busy settings like airports, museums, shopping centres, and other public spaces. It’s also an example of how unexpected behavior can be hidden in plain sight. “I believe the real value of our discoveries lies in the fact that it can lead to other discoveries on how we process locomotor information and use them to move,” Feliciani concluded. 🌘 Subscribe****to 404 Media to get**** The Abstract****, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.****

A software update to some Amazon delivery vehicles is automatically turning off the air conditioning after a few seconds if the driver is not in their seat, according to multiple Amazon delivery drivers who are complaining about the update online. According to Amazon delivery drivers, the new update is for the Amazon EDV (electric delivery vehicle), the custom-built Rivian van. Delivery drivers say that this update automatically turns off the air conditioning in the van if the driver is not in the vehicle for more than 30 seconds. Drivers are complaining about the update as the start of the summer season, which can be particularly difficult and dangerous for delivery drivers. “As many of you are aware, the EDVs just got a software update where if you are out of your seat for 30 seconds with the side door open, the AC switches off,” one Amazon delivery driver said in an online forum for drivers. “We all hate this obviously.” When reached for comment an Amazon spokesperson said that the premise of my questions to the company was inaccurate, but conceded that the van will turn off the AC after 30 seconds under certain conditions that are commonplace during Amazon delivery shifts. “Rivian recently released a software update for Electric Delivery Vehicles that actually extends climate control for drivers,” the Amazon spokesperson said. “As a result, the AC now runs for up to 10 minutes after a driver exits the vehicle, ensuring a cool cabin when they return. The timer resets at every stop. The AC only shuts off if the driver sliding door is left open for more than 30 seconds — a battery conservation measure.” Amazon delivery drivers discussing the update online say that they are getting in and out of the van so frequently, and are spending most of their time out of the van delivering packages, that the update makes it harder to keep the van cool. “Thing is we are up and about waaaay longer than we are driving so the ac turns off and when it turns on again we are already getting up before im the air is even cold,” one driver said. “It effectively made the ac not work and those vans get hot as fuuuck.” "Every Amazon-branded vehicle is air-conditioned—a feature that exceeds the industry standard—and if the air-conditioning isn’t working in a vehicle, that vehicle is taken out of service immediately," the Amazon spokesperson said. "They also have cooling seats for drivers. This update was intentionally timed ahead of summer to improve driver comfort during the hottest months of the year. Driver safety and comfort in extreme temperatures remains a priority. If drivers have questions about this change, they should touch base with the DSP they work for - as details about this change were shared with them." Older delivery trucks may not have air conditioning or have air conditioning that breaks often. Delivery drivers for UPS, who are represented by the Teamsters union, negotiated a heat safety agreement with the company in 2023. Amazon has publicly outlined its strategy for keeping all its workers, including delivery drivers, safe during the heat, including using an app to ask drivers to take 10-minute break from the heat by resting in a cool place and drinking water, but Amazon delivery drivers are managed by a nationwide network of subcontractors who drivers say don’t always maintain those standards. As you’ve probably seen in your own neighborhood, delivery drivers will often park their vans wherever they can and deliver packages to multiple addresses on the same block. Amazon automatically turning off the air conditioning while they are out of the van delivering packages means the van can get hot again by the time they get back. As Amazon delivery drivers have to make frequent stops, it’s not hard to imagine why drivers would complain about Amazon automatically shutting down the AC, which makes it more difficult to cool down between stops.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes that artificial intelligence is going to lead to unprecedented productivity gains which could result in cheaper food, housing, and two income households deciding that they no longer need two incomes. Internally, Amazon employees mock the company’s AI tools, refer to its output as “slop,” and joke about the company’s failed attempt to motivate employees to use AI tools effectively. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company Flock exposed the reasons cops conducted searches, and sometimes the specific searched license plates, in common search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing, according to tests by privacy advocates and 404 Media and a statement from the company. The news marks an unusual data breach, and shows that sometimes surveillance technology can leak data in unexpected ways. 404 Media previously reported that Flock exposed the live feeds of some of its cameras. In May the NoCo Privacy Coalition, an activist organization focused on Northern Colorado, shared with 404 Media multiple search engine results that appeared to expose some data related to Flock searches. 💡 ****Do you know anything else about Flock? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at [email protected].**** ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Depending on which chatbot you ask, Elias Thorne might be a clockmaker, a lighthouse keeper, or a librarian. But if you ask ChatGPT or any of the other popular large language models to tell you a story, there’s a good chance he’ll appear, unbidden. And Elias’s stories are flooding the self-published AI generated book market, Youtube, and fake news sites. Software engineer Daniel May first noticed the Elias takeover earlier this year; he found that on Google Trends, people weren’t searching for “Elias Thorne” until late 2025. Searches for the name really spiked in early 2026, while the related query “lighthouse keeper” also started trending upward in the last few years. He tested a few chatbots, including Grok, Deepseek, and Gemini, with the prompt “tell me a story,” and the chatbots frequently started with similar stories about lighthouses, clockmakers, or explorers. In late May, researchers Sil Hamilton and David Mimno at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science published their paper, “Elias in the Lighthouse, Again?” on the preprint repository arXiv. They sampled 20,000 total stories from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and the Allen Institute for AI's chatbot using five prompts, and found that the same 11 words—names like Elias, Mara, and Elara, and occupations like lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, and librarian—appear in more than 88% of generated stories, with little difference between models. Unite.ai covered the study shortly after it was published. The researchers posit in their paper that these themes show up so often in part because of the models’ safety and alignment tuning. “Model development today is like a big family tree. Most models are related to each other because developers synthesize a lot of training data with models even from different companies,” Hamilton told me in an email. He, Mimno, and their colleague Rebecca M. M. Hicke found this in a 2025 paper where they looked at specific words used across models. OpenAI’s first ChatGPT model, GPT-3.5, is the root of the family tree because it was used to make WildChat, a training set that’s since been used to make other training sets. “WildChat contains 1 million real conversations with ChatGPT, and 166 of these contain the name ‘Elias’ like here and here,” Hamilton added. “These are written in that familiar ‘lighthouse’ style. Models trained on WildChat copied this style, and developers unwittingly replicated it when using _those_ models to generate newer datasets. It's like a virus.” 0:00 /2:36 1× Elias has since escaped chatbot containment. May noticed Elias Thorne popping up on Amazon as an author of alt-medicine cancer handbooks, a 2026 YouTube-algorithm guide, a book on Greek mythology, and a psychological thriller novella. “No human writes all of those,” May wrote in his blog post. “The first one sits in territory where bad advice causes real harm. The mode-collapsed name from the chat window is now a byline appearing across genres.” When I searched Elias Thorne on Amazon, I found Elias as the protagonist in fantasy books and producing music, too: he’s “a brilliant but cynical archaeologist with a knack for unearthing what powerful institutions want to keep hidden” in one fantasy series, or a musical artist making ambient listening albums of birds and nature sounds. Fittingly, one Elias Thorne with an AI-generated author photo is also churning out AI grift books. In the last few years, AI-generated books have flooded Amazon’s self-publishing offerings, especially, with books containing dangerous misinformation and messy errors taking over the platform. AI-generated books are also making librarians’ jobs hell. Elias has also escaped to the Youtube slop world: in one video from the channel Moments That Moved the World, a slop-illustrated story features the plight of “83-year-old Sergeant Major Elias Thorne.” On the AI slop site Wonderful Museums, “Snake Museum Owner Shot By Wife: Unpacking the Tragic Incident at Thorne’s Reptile Sanctuary” spins Elias Thorne’s story as a man shot by his wife. On another slop site called Tatticle, the “wealthiest man in Ohio,” Elias Thorne, died “with exactly twelve dollars in his pocket.” In these stories, Elias is usually a tragic figure, an aggrieved and unfairly-treated old man. He’s a similar character in a short story published by the BBC as a finalist in its 2024/2025 children's writing competition—but Elias is a real name, and could feasibly still be the subject of a human-written story (and there have been no accusations of the BBC’s children’s writing competition being infiltrated by AI slop). But with all the world’s literature as its training data, why do LLMs seem to default so often to the lighthouse? It comes down to how model makers try to safety-align and sanitize their outputs. “We found many stories in WildChat are not safe for work. This led us to hypothesize that models going through alignment are preferring a small slice of WildChat stories, like a bottleneck,” Hamilton said. “It isn't that Elias stories are frequent, but that they're just so safe.” He said the researchers plan to explore this theory further in future research. As for Elias, there is one example I’ve found of him existing pre-generative AI, as a time traveling mad scientist in the 1980’s trading card series Dinosaurs Attack!. And a real-life Elias that comes close to the stories told by LLMs did actually exist, Hamilton found—Elias Allen was a 16th century clockmaker in London.

The AI industry has been pushing a narrative that the technology is a “black box” whose inner workings are so complex that they remain unknown even to the people making it. But another black box of AI is the underlying cost of the technology, and, specifically, what the AI boom is costing people who live near massive data centers. The data centers and energy plants that power large language models and other generative AI tools are subject to contracts cloaked in non-disclosure agreements and in many cases shielded from public scrutiny on the pretext that they contain competitive information. A new report written by consultancy Synapse and commissioned by advocacy groups Earthjustice and Environmental Advocates Mississippi attempts to calculate the cost of 3 planned Amazon data centers to Entergy Mississippi customers, who share an energy utility with the centers. These hidden costs may offer a window into the broader burden borne by residents living near data centers around the country. The report estimates that residential customers of Entergy Mississippi, one of the state’s regional energy monopolies, have paid $38 million as of March 2026 for infrastructure and other costs related to data centers and will have paid $74 million by the end of the year. The average Entergy Mississippi customer is now paying at least an extra $10.60 a month to finance the data centers, the report says. It amounts to a 7 percent bill increase at a time when gas prices, choked supply chains and cuts to federal benefits are already hurting Americans. Entergy customers do not see costs for data centers highlighted separately in their bills. According to report author Ben Havumaki, this only represents the costs that Entergy Mississippi customers have paid so far, and bills will likely rise. “We know as a matter of fact that Entergy has made far more investments in service of data centers already and that the total..will be far in excess of that amount,” Havumaki told 404 Media. The assessment was made by examining public dockets filed by Entergy Mississippi as well as the company’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. While Mississippi law makes a specific cost breakdown of energy bills difficult to uncover, the authors traced a line item used to specify costs of large load energy infrastructure to make their assessment. In 2024, Amazon announced it was building two new data centers in Madison County and in 2025 announced plans for a data center in Warren County. To power the data centers, Entergy announced three new gas-fired plants in 2025 in Greenville, Ridgeland, and Vicksburg, two of which are replacing existing gas plants, as well as two solar facilities for a total cost of nearly $4 billion. Yolanda Daniel is a member of Environmental Advocates Mississippi, which helped commission the report and opposes the data center. Daniel says that the home that she grew up in is steps from the proposed gas-powered plant in Ridgeland Entergy is building. Daniel, who spent 30 years out of the state before returning to the area last year, first learned about the power plant driving down the road dividing Madison and Hines County, where she saw a sign notifying residents of a zoning board hearing. She said she and others helped pack the hearing in opposition. “We named all the harms, all the studies, all the science,” Daniel says. While the Ridgeland zoning board initially voted down Entergy’s permit to examine the land, the Board of Aldermen went ahead with the plans anyway. Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee said, “Nobody will even know it’s there, no pollution that sort of thing, and it’ll bring a lot of business to Ridgeland and Madison County,” according to the Magnolia Tribune. Four homeowners associations, including one Daniel belongs to, filed an administrative complaint against the gas plant. Entergy’s public messaging about the data centers focuses on the company using its newfound revenue from Amazon to make grid improvements that will lower customers’ bills in the long term. Haley Fisackerly, the company’s CEO, has argued that though energy bills are going up, they are going up at a slower pace than if the data centers were not built. In a June 8 press release, Fisackerly touted the company’s previously announced “Superpower Mississippi” plan, which includes $300 million of grid improvements he says will save customers money by, “improving reliability and reducing power outages through stronger materials, tree trimming measures and technology-driven distribution network upgrades.” He says the improvements are funded by Amazon and Avaio, which constructs data centers. Fisackerly says that this is in addition to $600 million grid improvements the company already had planned. The announcement assumes that Entergy would have replaced the two power plants regardless and makes hard-to-prove assertions about energy efficiency. But the fact that Entergy Mississippi is already charging its customers for the construction of those energy plants is more straightforward, according to the Synapse report. While Entergy Mississippi’s rate increases are typically restricted to 4 percent a year under state law, a 2024 law called SB2001 allows the company to raise rates in excess of that to fund the construction of energy plants that power data centers. The fees show up in public dockets as an “interim facilities rate adjustment,” which is how Synapse reached its calculation of costs to residential customers. $8.7 million in fees associated with the Delta Blues Advanced Power Station were charged to residential customers, as are $46.7 million in costs related to data center projects whose specifics are unknown. While in theory costs other than data center infrastructure could be present in this line item, “We see no evidence that that is occurring,” the author of the report, Ben Havumaki, told 404 Media. That’s because this line item was zeroed out before Entergy Mississippi began making its data center energy buildout, he said. Entergy Mississippi shares a parent company with Entergy Louisiana, which approved three new gas plants last year to power Meta’s data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Entergy Louisiana has now pitched an additional seven gas plants to serve Meta’s facility. The report also takes issue with a March claim by Entergy that agreements with data centers will actually be saving customers in three states (Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana) $5 billion over the next two decades. Synapse says “it is possible that data centers could be offsetting some or all of their incremental costs through separate financial arrangements with Entergy,” but there is no way of confirming this because filings between Entergy and data center operators are kept confidential. Mississippi is a uniquely difficult state to verify Entergy’s claims that customer’s bills are being subsidized by Amazon or other tech companies. SB2001 cloaks the public service commission’s review of energy contracts from public view, designating them “a trade secret” and exempting them from the state’s freedom of information law. The law limits the Mississippi Public Service Commission’s role in making sure that data centers are distributing their costs evenly to energy utility customers. It also exempts state agencies from competitive bidding requirements when courting data centers. This means, “they can just put the shovel in the ground and start building themselves immediately without proving that they are the least costly option,” Havumaki says. When Entergy says Amazon’s data center is saving customers money, “It's basically [saying] trust us, we've done the math and know that it works out better for you,” Havumaki says. Havumaki also notes that infrastructure costs related to data centers have skyrocketed, so Amazon has an incentive to hide costs. The 2024 law also makes it impossible for the public service commission to adjust how much Amazon pays for its energy bills later on. According to the law, public utilities can enter into agreements with a large customer, “without reference to the rates” set according to the state’s public utilities statute. ” SB2001 also says the utility can’t alter or edit the agreement between Entergy and the data center customer later on. According to the report, this means, “once the Entergy-[Amazon]contract sets a cost allocation, that allocation is locked in. The Commission cannot revisit it even if future rate proceedings reveal that it is unfair to other customers. “ While the commission can’t change rates that Amazon or other tech companies pay for energy, it still has the ability to stop charging residents for energy plant construction related to data centers. But Havumaki is skeptical this would happen. “It's highly unlikely that any commissioner would disallow recovery of any of these investments, because there is so much momentum behind this whole process,” he says. When reached for comment about the Synapse report, a spokesperson for Entergy sent a statement saying that, “Entergy Mississippi customers are not subsidizing data centers — they’re benefitting from them. Independent regulators in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana confirm that data centers are paying their fair share, plus additional benefits for customers.” When it comes to Entergy’s hidden contracts with Amazon and other tech companies, the spokesperson said, “Customer confidentiality doesn’t reduce accountability. The facts are clear: Technology investment is making power in Mississippi more reliable, more affordable, and more competitive.” The company did not answer any specific questions about the interim facilities rate adjustment that shows residential customers are paying for data center infrastructure. Amazon commissioned a report on the costs of its data centers to customers. The report found that Amazon was paying, “sufficient or surplus net revenue,” meaning that Entergy could be using its profits to subsidize other customers, but that “the use of this additional margin is at the utility’s discretion.” The Synapse report ends with a recommendation that Entergy commit that data centers’ energy needs not be subsidized by other customers. To make the process more transparent, Entergy should have a standard contract with customer protection provisions that it uses for data center customers. To prevent “stranded assets,” or costs incurred by customers for infrastructure that ends up abandoned or unused, the report recommends charging a minimum rate to the data center regardless of use, as well as “exit fees” if the data center closes. “These are really uncontroversial, widely adopted provisions to ensure a baseline of customer protection, a baseline of transparency, and actually hold Entergy's feet to the fire,” Havumaki said.

_This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Trump fucking up the World Cup, some thoughts on ICE coverage, and movies._ **JASON:** I have been meaning for weeks to write an article with a headline like: Donald Trump and FIFA Have Really Fucked Up the World Cup, but I never really honed in on the exact correct thesis or argument to make, but I’m gonna ramble a bit here in the BTB in hopes it shakes loose something in my head that I can turn into a more coherent article later. It was going to be part of a bigger piece or series of pieces I’ve been meaning to do about live events in general, which make the basic argument that live ticket prices—for sports, concerts, everything—are simply too high, and it’s an entirely artificial problem that is having an actually negative effect on sports, the music industry, and the local communities that venues and stadiums nominally are there to serve. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

A County Commissioner in North Carolina refused to let dozens of residents speak opposing Flock surveillance at a public meeting this week, instead forcing the group to designate one single spokesperson. “How many people are here for public comment dealing with license plate readers AKA Flock?,” Michael Garrison, the chairman of the Madison County Board of Commissioners began the public meeting by saying. Nearly everyone in the audience’s hand went up. “Probably most everybody. Per our county policy, I’m going to respectfully ask that you guys take a few minutes to converse with each other, designate one person to speak … we’ll move forward with only one person, whoever that happens to be.” “What? No. We all want to speak on this,” someone in the crowd said; others can be heard trying to object as well. “You will not speak on Flock tonight,” he responds. “One person designated. You can pick that person … if I gave everyone three minutes to say the same thing, which is opposition to Flock, we’d never get done … I’ve spoken. I’m not debating this. I am taking advantage of our policy as it is written to streamline this process, you can either do it or not.” “You’re in a room full of people who care!,” a person in the crowd says. “We’re not going to engage in this back-and-forth conversation,” he responds. “We’re going to allow one person. Pick a person or not.” 0:00 /1:50 1× The Madison County Sheriff’s Office has been using Flock’s automated license plate readers, which scan and analyze the time and location of cars as they drive by, since at least March, according to a Facebook post by the Sheriff’s Office. Records compiled by HaveIBeenFlocked.com based on public records requests show that the Sheriff’s Office searches Flock hundreds of times per month. Over the last year, citizen privacy groups have successfully pressured their local governments into ending contracts with Flock. But in some cities and municipalities, residents feel like their concerns have been ignored. “The Sheriff Office claims they are only using this technology for serious crimes, yet published audit logs tell a different story,” a website called Madison for Privacy says. “Madison County has searched the nationwide database over 1,200 times over just a 60 day period. In a county over only 20,000 residents, its hard to understand what could warrant this many searches.” Members of the audience and several of the commissioners then argued back and forth. The commissioners said that the citizens constituted a “group” who all had the same position, and therefore could only select one representative to speak for seven minutes, which the board said was longer than the three minutes each person would normally be allowed to speak for. Residents argued that they were not a “group” but were there to give different perspectives on the issue and that they were concerned about the surveillance as specific individuals: “I’m not here as a group, I’m an individual,” one person says. “I’m not here to argue with you,” a commissioner responds. “So you’re going to decide to not listen to your citizens, that’s what you’re saying,” a woman in the crowd says. “We’re going to follow the policy,” the commissioner responds. “Can we request that there be a special meeting,” about Flock, a resident says. “If you want a special meeting, you go back to the 250 years that the sheriff has been the elected official in the state of North Carolina and you have that meeting with him. This board, we don’t own Flock cameras, I’ve emailed some of you this. We don’t pay for Flock cameras. We don’t operate Flock cameras. We have no interest in Flock camera or Flock camera discussion. That’s your elected sheriff. So if you want to have a meeting with the person that’s involved with that, then you’ll have a meeting with [him], not with us that’s a legislative body. We don’t control the sheriff’s budget. We give him X number of dollars, he does with it what he wishes. I’m not having this discussion. Either you select a person or not.” One of the residents suggests that the board of commissioners could pass an ordinance about Flock cameras; he is cut off by Garrison, who says again that the residents can pick a person to speak or not. Eventually, the residents do select one representative, who was allowed to speak for seven minutes. Garrison’s argument is that the Board of Commissioners gives the Sheriff’s Office a budget, and that the Sheriff can spend the money on whatever it wants to. He suggested that the board therefore does not have oversight of what surveillance technology police are buying or what they are using it for. This fact highlights a problem many communities around the country are facing: Cities and counties are sometimes buying Flock surveillance technology without any transparency, with no public process, and with very little oversight. Citizens around the country have also felt like their elected officials are not listening to their concerns about surveillance. It is common practice at city council and county council meetings to allow all residents who have shown up to speak provide public comment, which is one of the reasons that these types of meetings are often many hours long. At the Madison County meeting, these residents were not allowed to speak, which is much different than the practices we’ve seen at other, similar meetings. Later in the meeting, another resident explains that their public records requests for details about the Sheriff’s Office contracts and use of Flock have not been sufficiently responded to. She was allowed to speak because she was providing comment about her requests for public records, and not Flock specifically. “I’m here to talk about the lack of government transparency and accountability that I’ve seen come up with the Flock issue, starting with tonight. I think that it’s disgraceful the way you are refusing to let citizens speak to their elected officials,” she said. “We’ve repeatedly asked you to hold a public meeting for us to discuss this, so I’m very disappointed to see a lack of transparency.” The Madison County Board of Commissioners and Madison County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.