Critical State: The AI-Powered Surveillance Boom in Texas
If you read just one thing this week … read about the high-tech surveillance Texas state police have acquired.
At the Texas Observer, Francesca D’Annunzio recently reported on the growing “surveillance toolbox” that the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), the state’s police force, has amassed in recent years.
The DPS partly has Operation Lone Star – Governor Greg Abbott’s years-long, $11 billion border crackdown – to thank for its cache of high-tech equipment: spy planes, drones, cameras, and artificial intelligence-powered software.
Drawing on DPS records D’Annunzio wrote that the agency had doled out millions of dollars to obtain “an array of powerful — and controversial — artificial intelligence software tools.”
These tools, in part, allow the state police agency to “mine billions of images to provide facial recognition.” They also “track vehicle locations from automatic license plate readers, monitor phone conversations of inmates in Texas prisons and jails, break into and search for data evidence from seized cell phones and computers, and even track cell phones without a warrant.”
Though Republican state lawmakers have backed Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, some have meanwhile expressed concern over what the AI boom could mean for Texans. Still, the legislation they have filed has been “modest” and fails to provide the kind of protections rights groups and advocates insist are necessary for the protection of civil liberties.
If You Read One More Thing: Turkey’s Imprisoned
At The Guardian, Ruth Michaelson looked at the protests gripping Turkey in recent weeks — and the dashed hopes of the country’s youth as the government cracks down on demonstrators.
The protests erupted after the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a longtime opponent of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Police detained some 2,000 people in a single week of protests, Michaelson reported.
Erdoğan, for his part, has called the demonstrations “a movement of violence,” threatening: “The judiciary will hold those behind any sabotage against the Turkish economy and the wellbeing of the nation accountable.”
Among those arrested have been protesters, journalists, municipal employees, and lawyers. Berkay Gezgin, a 21-year-old student, was arrested not at a protest but while leaving city hall. “He loves İmamoğlu and he’ll meet him in jail,” his lawyer told Michaelson. “He is young, but very brave.”
California vs. Team Trump
In Noema Magazine, Nathan Gardels speaks to former California Governor Jerry Brown about the Trump administration’s “assault on climate policies.”
California, Gardels argues from the outset, is to thank for the fact that Tesla even exists today: “That fact reveals the lie in Team Trump’s narrative, that climate policies and regulation are strangling growth and innovation.”
After all, Tesla raked in more than $3.2 billion in state subsidies over the years, he reports. California also granted a $7,500 rebate on every Tesla that was purchased in the state until 2023.
Since Trump returned to office, his administration has set its sights on policies crafted to ease climate change. Gardels writes, “The aim of Team Trump is to get rid of California’s environmental and climate policies — which date back half a century to when Brown was first governor in the 1970s — that set standards for industry and the entire nation to follow.”
Deep Dive: The Rightwing Whitewash of American Libraries
In recent years, Republicans and rightwing activist groups have trained their sights on one of their most formidable enemies to date: books. From Texas to Florida, titles on gender, sexuality, and race, among other issues, have filled the ever-growing lists of banned books.
Book ban proponents routinely argue that they have targeted “obscene,” “anti-American,” or racially divisive literature. But in “Cover to Cover,” a recent report, PEN America conducted a comprehensive analysis of the thousands of titles on such banned book lists around the United States.
According to PEN America’s tally, schools around the nation banned more than 10,000 books and removed more than 4,200 unique titles from the shelves throughout the 2023-2024 school year.
Despite the uproar over supposedly sexual content, PEN America found that just 13% of the banned titles included sexual descriptions “on the page,” while fewer than a third had “off the page” sexual descriptions.
“Sex-related content is one of the most commonly discussed and criticized subjects in books in school libraries today,” the report pointed out. “The two states with the most school book bans last year–Florida and Iowa–both have legislation that, in part, targets books that include sex-related content.”
But if the most-cited talking point on book removals doesn’t actually apply to the majority of the banned titles, then what kinds of books are schools actually removing?
Well, well. In PEN America’s telling, more than a third of the books include a person of color or people of color as primary characters, while a quarter tell the stories of LGBTQ+ characters. Another 10% targeted books with neurodivergent or disabled characters.
According to one count, children of color accounted for half of the country’s child population in 2021. “These school book bans are, quite literally, removing the literature that represents the lives of more than half of young people in the United States,” PEN America explained. “This erasure in school libraries has deeply harmful impacts on the mental health of students of color.”
PEN took its breakdown further. Some 85% of banned titles were fiction, for instance, while books that deal with “nonsexual violence” made up 60%. Nearly a quarter of those were books that contained “violence within warfare.”
Of all the banned titles, around a fifth explore LGBTQ+ themes, another fifth look at race and racism, 15% cover political activism, and seven percent touch on refugee issues or immigration.
Back in January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order his administration called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” In recent years, that order claimed, “parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight.”
For its part, though, PEN America explained that book banning is “the result of a well-funded campaign to dismantle public education.” Behind that drive is “a coordinated network of groups that largely espouse white supremacist and Christian nationalist ideology,” the watchdog said.
Grim as it is, the group ultimately signaled a belief that book bans would backfire. “Hope can be found in the increasingly brave and growing movement to defend libraries from book bans,” the report noted. “People from all walks of life are standing together to protect libraries from those who seek to empty them.”
Show Us the Receipts
In the last episode of this season’s Things That Go Boom podcast, the team took a deep dive into the issues of student activism, the Palestine solidarity movement, and the Trump administration’s campaign to silence dissent against Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.
At Inkstick, Allen Hester asked how much — really — does Trump care about getting rid of nuclear weapons. Although Trump has time and again spoken about the existential risks of nuclear weapons, his administration has undertaken “a dangerous decision to reduce nuclear nonproliferation efforts,” Hester argues, adding: “This shift undermines critical nonproliferation efforts and represents a misguided approach that jeopardizes national security.”
Meanwhile, The World’s Patrick Winn reported on the fallout of the recent, widely destructive earthquake in Myanmar, a country already gripped by instability. Beyond the shocking estimates that the quake has killed north of 100,000 people, the Myanmar military responded by launching airstrikes in the affected area. “Myanmar’s military rulers are making this calamity even worse by launching airstrikes against resistance fighters near the quake’s epicenter,” Winn explained.
Collaboration Pitches to Inkstick
In the last few months, we’ve undertaken a few collaborative projects with other newsrooms. In January, we jointly published an investigation into AI-powered surveillance on European borders in partnership with Solomon in Greece, El País in Spain, WoZ in Switzerland, and Tagesspiegel in Germany. In early March, we published a joint analysis of the Trump administration’s ties to private military contractors in the Gaza Strip, which ran in print at Greece’s Ta Nea newspaper and online with the Athens-based Incubator for Media Education and Development (iMEdD). Inkstick welcomes proposals for potential collaborations from likeminded, independent newsrooms. If you have an idea, contact managing editor Patrick Strickland at pstrickland@inkstickmedia.com
Critical State is written by Inkstick Media in collaboration with The World.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.