A letter signed by the economy minister has the center-left SPD up in arms.

The country “presents itself internationally as a champion of ambitious climate policy. The problem is that the state is not putting its words into action,” the plaintiffs' lawyer said.

The storm comes a week after Typhoon Bualoi tore through northern Vietnam, leaving at least 56 people dead.

For decades, it’s been known that subtle chemical patterns exist in metal alloys, but researchers thought they were too minor to matter — or that they got erased during manufacturing. However, recent studies have shown that in laboratory settings, these patterns can change a metal’s properties, including its mechanical strength, durability, heat capacity, radiation tolerance, and more.

Now, researchers at MIT have found that these chemical patterns also exist in conventionally manufactured metals. The surprising finding revealed a new physical phenomenon that explains the persistent patterns.

In a paper published in Nature Communications today, the researchers describe how they tracked the patterns and discovered the physics that explains them. The authors also developed a simple model to predict chemical patterns in metals, and they show how engineers could use the model to tune the effect of such patterns on metallic properties, for use in aerospace, semiconductors, nuclear reactors, and more.

“The conclusion is: You can never completely randomize the atoms in a metal. It doesn’t matter how you process it,” says Rodrigo Freitas, the TDK Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “This is the first paper showing these non-equilibrium states that are retained in the metal. Right now, this chemical order is not something we’re controlling for or paying attention to when we manufacture metals.”

For Freitas, an early-career researcher, the findings offer vindication for exploring a crowded field that he says few believed would lead to unique or broadly impactful results. He credits the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which supported the work through their Young Investigator Program. He also credits the collaborative effort that enabled the paper, which features three MIT PhD students as co-first authors: Mahmudul Islam, Yifan Cao, and Killian Sheriff.

“There was the question of whether I should even be tackling this specific problem because people have been working on it for a long time,” Freitas says. “But the more I learned about it, the more I saw researchers were thinking about this in idealized laboratory scenarios. We wanted to perform simulations that were as realistic as possible to reproduce these manufacturing processes with high fidelity. My favorite part of this project is how non-intuitive the findings are. The fact that you cannot completely mix something together, people didn’t see that coming.”

From surprises to theories

Freitas’ research team began with a practical question: How fast do chemical elements mix during metal processing? Conventional wisdom held that there’s a point where the chemical composition of metals becomes completely uniform from mixing during manufacturing. By finding that point, the researchers thought they could develop a simple way to design alloys with different levels of atomic order, also known as short-range order.

The researchers used machine-learning techniques to track millions of atoms as they moved and rearranged themselves under conditions that mimicked metal processing.

“The first thing we did was to deform a piece of metal,” Freitas explains. “That’s a common step during manufacturing: You roll the metal and deform it and heat it up again and deform it a little more, so it develops the structure you want. We did that and we tracked chemical order. The thought was as you deform the material, its chemical bonds are broken and that randomizes the system. These violent manufacturing processes essentially shuffle the atoms.”

The researchers hit a snag during the mixing process: The alloys never reached a fully random state. That was a surprise, because no known physical mechanism could explain the result.

“It pointed to a new piece of physics in metals,” the researchers write in the paper. “It was one of those cases where applied research led to a fundamental discovery.”

To uncover the new physics, the researchers developed computational tools, including high-fidelity machine-learning models, to capture atomic interactions, along with new statistical methods that quantify how chemical order changes over time. They then applied these tools in large-scale molecular dynamics simulations to track how atoms rearrange during processing.

The researchers found some standard chemical arrangements in their processed metals, but at higher temperatures than would normally be expected. Even more surprisingly, they found completely new chemical patterns never seen outside of manufacturing processes. This was the first time such patterns were observed. The researchers referred to the patterns as “far-from-equilibrium states.”

The researchers also built a simple model that reproduced key features of the simulations. The model explains how the chemical patterns arise from defects known as dislocations, which are like three-dimensional scribbles within a metal. As the metal is deformed, those scribbles warp, shuffling nearby atoms along the way. Previously, researchers believed that shuffling completely erased order in the metals, but they found that dislocations favor some atomic swaps over others, resulting not in randomness but in subtle patterns that explain their findings.

“These defects have chemical preferences that guide how they move,” Freitas says. “They look for low energy pathways, so given a choice between breaking chemical bonds, they tend to break the weakest bonds, and it’s not completely random. This is very exciting because it’s a non-equilibrium state: It’s not something you’d see naturally occurring in materials. It’s the same way our bodies live in non-equilibrium. The temperature outside is always hotter or colder than our bodies, and we’re maintaining that steady state equilibrium to stay alive. That’s why these states exist in metal: the balance between an internal push toward disorder plus this ordering tendency of breaking certain bonds that are always weaker than others.”

Applying a new theory

The researchers are now exploring how these chemical patterns develop across a wide range of manufacturing conditions. The result is a map that links various metal processing steps to different chemical patterns in metal.

To date, this chemical order and the properties they tune have been largely considered an academic subject. With this map, the researchers hope engineers can begin thinking of these patterns as levers in design that can be pulled during production to get new properties.

“Researchers have been looking at the ways these atomic arrangements change metallic properties — a big one is catalysis,” Freitas says of the process that drives chemical reactions. “Electrochemistry happens at the surface of the metal, and it’s very sensitive to local atomic arrangements. And there have been other properties that you wouldn't think would be influenced by these factors. Radiation damage is another big one. That affects these materials’ performance in nuclear reactors.”

Researchers have already told Freitas the paper could help explain other surprise findings about metallic properties, and he’s excited for the field to move from fundamental research into chemical order to more applied work.

“You can think of areas where you need very optimized alloys like aerospace,” Freitas says. “They care about very specific compositions. Advanced manufacturing now makes it possible to combine metals that normally wouldn’t mix through deformation. Understanding how atoms actually shuffle and mix in those processes is crucial, because it’s the key to gaining strength while still keeping the low density. So, this could be a huge deal for them.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, MathWorks, and the MIT-Portugal Program.

One of the newest weapons that scientists have developed against cancer is a type of engineered immune cell known as CAR-NK (natural killer) cells. Similar to CAR-T cells, these cells can be programmed to attack cancer cells.

MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers have now come up with a new way to engineer CAR-NK cells that makes them much less likely to be rejected by the patient’s immune system, which is a common drawback of this type of treatment.

The new advance may also make it easier to develop “off-the-shelf” CAR-NK cells that could be given to patients as soon as they are diagnosed. Traditional approaches to engineering CAR-NK or CAR-T cells usually take several weeks.

“This enables us to do one-step engineering of CAR-NK cells that can avoid rejection by host T cells and other immune cells. And, they kill cancer cells better and they’re safer,” says Jianzhu Chen, an MIT professor of biology, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research,and one of the senior authors of the study.

In a study of mice with humanized immune systems, the researchers showed that these CAR-NK cells could destroy most cancer cells while evading the host immune system.

Rizwan Romee, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is also a senior author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications. The paper’s lead author is Fuguo Liu, a postdoc at the Koch Institute and a research fellow at Dana-Farber.

Evading the immune system

NK cells are a critical part of the body’s natural immune defenses, and their primary responsibility is to locate and kill cancer cells and virus-infected cells. One of their cell-killing strategies, also used by T cells, is a process called degranulation. Through this process, immune cells release a protein called perforin, which can poke holes in another cell to induce cell death.

To create CAR-NK cells to treat cancer patients, doctors first take a blood sample from the patient. NK cells are isolated from the sample and engineered to express a protein called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), which can be designed to target specific proteins found on cancer cells.

Then, the cells spend several weeks proliferating until there are enough to transfuse back into the patient. A similar approach is also used to create CAR-T cells. Several CAR-T cell therapies have been approved to treat blood cancers such as lymphoma and leukemia, but CAR-NK treatments are still in clinical trials.

Because it takes so long to grow a population of engineered cells that can be infused into the patient, and those cells may not be as viable as cells that came from a healthy person, researchers are exploring an alternative approach: using NK cells from a healthy donor.

Such cells could be grown in large quantities and would be ready whenever they were needed. However, the drawback to these cells is that the recipient’s immune system may see them as foreign and attack them before they can start killing cancer cells.

In the new study, the MIT team set out to find a way to help NK cells “hide” from a patient’s immune system. Through studies of immune cell interactions, they showed that NK cells could evade a host T-cell response if they did not carry surface proteins called HLA class 1 proteins. These proteins, usually expressed on NK cell surfaces, can trigger T cells to attack if the immune system doesn’t recognize them as “self.”

To take advantage of this, the researchers engineered the cells to express a sequence of siRNA (short interfering RNA) that interferes with the genes for HLA class 1. They also delivered the CAR gene, as well as the gene for either PD-L1 or single-chain HLA-E (SCE). PD-L1 and SCE are proteins that make NK cells more effective by turning up genes that are involved in killing cancer cells.

All of these genes can be carried on a single piece of DNA, known as a construct, making it simple to transform donor NK cells into immune-evasive CAR-NK cells. The researchers used this construct to create CAR-NK cells targeting a protein called CD-19, which is often found on cancerous B cells in lymphoma patients.

NK cells unleashed

The researchers tested these CAR-NK cells in mice with a human-like immune system. These mice were also injected with lymphoma cells.

Mice that received CAR-NK cells with the new construct maintained the NK cell population for at least three weeks, and the NK cells were able to nearly eliminate cancer in those mice. In mice that received either NK cells with no genetic modifications or NK cells with only the CAR gene, the host immune cells attacked the donor NK cells. In these mice, the NK cells died out within two weeks, and the cancer spread unchecked.

The researchers also found that these engineered CAR-NK cells were much less likely to induce cytokine release syndrome — a common side effect of immunotherapy treatments, which can cause life-threatening complications.

Because of CAR-NK cells’ potentially better safety profile, Chen anticipates that they could eventually be used in place of CAR-T cells. For any CAR-NK cells that are now in development to target lymphoma or other types of cancer, it should be possible to adapt them by adding the construct developed in this study, he says.

The researchers now hope to run a clinical trial of this approach, working with colleagues at Dana-Farber. They are also working with a local biotech company to test CAR-NK cells to treat lupus, an autoimmune disorder that causes the immune system to attack healthy tissues and organs.

The research was funded, in part, by Skyline Therapeutics, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program through the Kathy and Curt Marble Cancer Research Fund and the Elisa Rah Memorial Fund, the Claudia Adams Barr Foundation, and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.

Privacy laws are only as strong as their enforcement. In California, the state’s privacy agency recently issued its largest-ever fine for violation of the state’s privacy law—and all because of a consumer complaint.

The state’s  privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act or CCPA, requires many companies to respect California customers' and job applicants' rights to know, delete and correct information that businesses collect about them, and to opt-out of some types of sharing and use. It also requires companies to give notice of these rights, along with other information, to customers, job applicants, and others. (Bonus tip: Have a complaint about something else, such as a data breach? Go to the CA Attorney General.)

If you’re a Californian and think a business isn’t obeying the law, then the best thing to do is tell someone who can do something about it. How? It’s easy. In fewer than a dozen questions, you can share enough information to get the agency started.

Start With the Basics

First, head to the California Privacy Protection Agency’s website at cppa.ca.gov. On the front page, you’ll see an option to “File a Complaint.” Click on that option.

That button takes you to the online complaint form. You can also print out the agency’s paper complaint form here.

The complaint form starts, fittingly, by explaining the agency’s own privacy practices. Then it gets down to business by asking for information about your situation.

The first question offers a list of rights people have under the CCPA, such as a right to delete or a right to correct sensitive personal information. So, for example, if you’ve asked ABC Company to delete your information, but they have refused, you’d select “Right to Delete.” This helps the agency categorize your complaint and tie it directly to the requirements in the law.  The form then asks for the names of businesses, contractors, or people you want to report.

It also asks whether you’re a California resident. If you’re unsure, because you split residency or for other reasons, there is an “Unsure” option.

Adding the Details

From there, the form asks for more detailed information about what’s happened. There is a character limit on this question, so you’ll have to choose your words carefully. If you can, check out the agency’s FAQ on how to write a successful complaint before you submit the form. This will help you be specific and tell the agency what they need to hear to act on your complaint.

In the next question, include information about any proof you have supporting your complaint. So, for example, you could tell the agency you have your email asking ABC Company to delete your information, and also a screenshot of proof that they haven’t erased it. Or, say “I spoke to a person on the phone on this date.” This should just be a list of information you have, rather than a place to paste in emails or attach images.

The form will also ask if you’ve directly contacted the business about your complaint. You can just answer yes or no to this question. If it’s an issue such as a company not posting a privacy notice, or something similar, it may not have made sense to contact them directly. But if you made a deletion request, you probably have contacted them about it.

Anonymous or Not?

Finally, the complaint form will ask you to make either an “unsworn complaint” or a “sworn complaint.” This choice affects how you’ll be involved in the process going forward. You can file an anonymous unsworn complaint. But that will mean the agency can’t contact you about the issue in the future, since they don’t have any of your information.

For a sworn complaint, you have to provide some contact information and confirm that what you’re saying is true and that you’d swear to it in court.

Just because you submit contact information, that doesn’t mean the agency will contact you. Investigations are usually confidential, until there’s something like a settlement to announce. But we’ve seen that consumer complaints can be the spark for an investigation. It’s important for all of us to speak up, because it really does make a difference.

The California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) issued a record fine earlier this month to Tractor Supply, the country’s self-proclaimed largest “rural lifestyle” retailer, for apparently ducking its responsibilities under the California Consumer Privacy Act. Under that law, companies are required to respect California customers’ and job applicants’ rights to know, delete, and correct information that businesses collect about them, and to opt-out of some types of sharing and use. The law also requires companies to give notice of these rights, along with other information, to customers, job applicants, and others. The CPPA said that Tractor Supply failed several of these requirements. This is the first time the agency has enforced this data privacy law to protect job applicants. Perhaps best of all, the company's practices came to light all thanks to a consumer complaint filed with the agency.

Your complaints matter—so keep speaking up. 

Tractor Supply, which has 2,500 stores in 49 states, will pay for their actions to the tune of $1,350,000—the largest fine the agency has issued to date. Specifically, the agency said, Tractor Supply violated the law by:

• Failing to maintain a privacy policy that notified consumers of their rights;
• Failing to notify California job applicants of their privacy rights and how to exercise them;
• Failing to provide consumers with an effective mechanism to opt-out of the selling and sharing of their personal information, including through opt-out preference signals such as Global Privacy Control; and
• Disclosing personal information to other companies without entering into contracts that contain privacy protections.

In addition to the fine, the company also must take an inventory of its digital properties and tracking technologies and will have to certify its compliance with the California privacy law for the next four years.

It may surprise people to see that the agency’s most aggressive fine isn’t levied on a large technology company, data broker, or advertising company. But this case merely highlights what anyone who uses the internet knows: practically every company is tracking your online behavior. 

The agency may be trying to make exactly this point by zeroing in on Tractor Supply. In its press release on the fine, the agency's top enforcer was clear that they'll be casting a wide net. 

 “We will continue to look broadly across industries to identify violations of California’s privacy law,” said Michael Macko, the Agency’s head of enforcement. “We made it an enforcement priority to investigate whether businesses are properly implementing privacy rights, and this action underscores our ongoing commitment to doing that for consumers and job applicants alike.”

It is encouraging to see the agency stand up for Californians’ rights. For years, we have said privacy laws are only as strong as their enforcement. Ideally we'd like to see privacy laws—including California’s—include a private right to action to let anyone sue for privacy violations, in addition to enforcement actions like this one from regulators. Since individuals can't stand up for the majority of their own privacy rights in California, however, it's even more important that regulators such as the CPPA are active, strategic, and bold. 

It also highlights why it's important for people like you to submit complaints to regulators. As the agency itself said, “The CPPA opened an investigation into Tractor Supply’s privacy practices after receiving a complaint from a consumer in Placerville, California.” Your complaints matter—so keep speaking up. 

Laurent Demanet, MIT professor of applied mathematics, has been appointed co-director of the MIT Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE), effective Sept. 1.

Demanet, who holds a joint appointment in the departments of Mathematics and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences — where he previously served as director of the Earth Resources Laboratory — succeeds Youssef Marzouk, who is now serving as the associate dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

Joining co-director Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou, the Quentin Berg (1937) Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Demanet will help lead CCSE, supporting students, faculty, and researchers while fostering a vibrant community of innovation and discovery in computational science and engineering (CSE).

“Laurent’s ability to translate concepts of computational science and engineering into understandable, real-world applications is an invaluable asset to CCSE. His interdisciplinary experience is a benefit to the visibility and impact of CSE research and education. I look forward to working with him,” says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“I’m pleased to welcome Laurent into his new role as co-director of CCSE. His work greatly supports the cross-cutting methodology at the heart of the computational science and engineering community. I’m excited for CCSE to have a co-director from the School of Science, and eager to see the center continue to broaden its connections across MIT,” says Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, department head of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and MathWorks Professor.

Established in 2008, CCSE was incorporated into the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing as one of its core academic units in January 2020. An interdisciplinary research and education center dedicated to pioneering applications of computation, CCSE houses faculty, researchers, and students from a range of MIT schools, such as the schools of Engineering, Science, Architecture and Planning, and the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as other units of the college.

“I look forward to working with Nicolas and the college leadership on raising the profile of CCSE on campus and globally. We will be pursuing a set of initiatives that span from enhancing the visibility of our research and strengthening our CSE PhD program, to expanding professional education offerings and deepening engagement with our alumni and with industry,” says Demanet.

Demanet’s research lies at the intersection of applied mathematics and scientific computing to visualize the structures beneath Earth’s surface. He also has a strong interest in scientific computing, machine learning, inverse problems, and wave propagation. Through his position as principal investigator of the Imaging and Computing Group, Demanet and his students aim to answer fundamental questions in computational seismic imaging to increase the quality and accuracy of mapping and the projection of changes in Earth’s geological structures. The implications of his work are rooted in environmental monitoring, water resources and geothermal energy, and the understanding of seismic hazards, among others.

He joined the MIT faculty in 2009. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and the U.S. Air Force Young Investigator Award in 2011, and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 2012. He also held the Class of 1954 Career Development Professorship from 2013 to 2016. Prior to coming to MIT, Demanet held the Szegö Assistant Professorship at Stanford University. He completed his undergraduate studies in mathematical engineering and theoretical physics at Universite de Louvain in Belgium, and earned a PhD in applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, where he was awarded the William P. Carey Prize for best dissertation in the mathematical sciences.

For Priya Donti, childhood trips to India were more than an opportunity to visit extended family. The biennial journeys activated in her a motivation that continues to shape her research and her teaching.

Contrasting her family home in Massachusetts, Donti — now the Silverman Family Career Development Professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a principal investigator at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems — was struck by the disparities in how people live.

“It was very clear to me the extent to which inequity is a rampant issue around the world,” Donti says. “From a young age, I knew that I definitely wanted to address that issue.”

That motivation was further stoked by a high school biology teacher, who focused his class on climate and sustainability.

“We learned that climate change, this huge, important issue, would exacerbate inequity,” Donti says. “That really stuck with me and put a fire in my belly.”

So, when Donti enrolled at Harvey Mudd College, she thought she would direct her energy toward the study of chemistry or materials science to create next-generation solar panels.

Those plans, however, were jilted. Donti “fell in love” with computer science, and then discovered work by researchers in the United Kingdom who were arguing that artificial intelligence and machine learning would be essential to help integrate renewables into power grids.

“It was the first time I’d seen those two interests brought together,” she says. “I got hooked and have been working on that topic ever since.”

Pursuing a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, Donti was able to design her degree to include computer science and public policy. In her research, she explored the need for fundamental algorithms and tools that could manage, at scale, power grids relying heavily on renewables.

“I wanted to have a hand in developing those algorithms and tool kits by creating new machine learning techniques grounded in computer science,” she says. “But I wanted to make sure that the way I was doing the work was grounded both in the actual energy systems domain and working with people in that domain” to provide what was actually needed.

While Donti was working on her PhD, she co-founded a nonprofit called Climate Change AI. Her objective, she says, was to help the community of people involved in climate and sustainability — “be they computer scientists, academics, practitioners, or policymakers” — to come together and access resources, connection, and education “to help them along that journey.”

“In the climate space,” she says, “you need experts in particular climate change-related sectors, experts in different technical and social science tool kits, problem owners, affected users, policymakers who know the regulations — all of those — to have on-the-ground scalable impact.”

When Donti came to MIT in September 2023, it was not surprising that she was drawn by its initiatives directing the application of computer science toward society’s biggest problems, especially the current threat to the health of the planet.

“We’re really thinking about where technology has a much longer-horizon impact and how technology, society, and policy all have to work together,” Donti says. “Technology is not just one-and-done and monetizable in the context of a year.”

Her work uses deep learning models to incorporate the physics and hard constraints of electric power systems that employ renewables for better forecasting, optimization, and control.

“Machine learning is already really widely used for things like solar power forecasting, which is a prerequisite to managing and balancing power grids,” she says. “My focus is, how do you improve the algorithms for actually balancing power grids in the face of a range of time-varying renewables?”

Among Donti’s breakthroughs is a promising solution for power grid operators to be able to optimize for cost, taking into account the actual physical realities of the grid, rather than relying on approximations. While the solution is not yet deployed, it appears to work 10 times faster, and far more cheaply, than previous technologies, and has attracted the attention of grid operators.

Another technology she is developing works to provide data that can be used in training machine learning systems for power system optimization. In general, much data related to the systems is private, either because it is proprietary or because of security concerns. Donti and her research group are working to create synthetic data and benchmarks that, Donti says, “can help to expose some of the underlying problems” in making power systems more efficient.

“The question is,” Donti says, “can we bring our datasets to a point such that they are just hard enough to drive progress?”

For her efforts, Donti has been awarded the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She was recognized as part of MIT Technology Review’s 2021 list of “35 Innovators Under 35” and Vox’s 2023 “Future Perfect 50.”

Next spring, Donti will co-teach a class called AI for Climate Action with Sara Beery, EECS assistant professor, whose focus is AI for biodiversity and ecosystems, and Abigail Bodner, assistant professor in the departments of EECS and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, whose focus is AI for climate and Earth science.

“We’re all super-excited about it,” Donti says.

Coming to MIT, Donti says, “I knew that there would be an ecosystem of people who really cared, not just about success metrics like publications and citation counts, but about the impact of our work on society.”

New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data in an abortion investigation, contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was “being searched for as a missing person,” and that “it was about her safety.” 

The new information shows that deputies had initiated a "death investigation" of a "non-viable fetus," logged evidence of a woman’s self-managed abortion, and consulted prosecutors about possibly charging her. 

Johnson County Sheriff Adam King repeatedly denied the automated license plate reader (ALPR) search was related to enforcing Texas's abortion ban, and Flock Safety called media accounts "false," "misleading" and "clickbait." However, according to a sworn affidavit by the lead detective, the case was in fact a death investigation in response to a report of an abortion, and deputies collected documentation of the abortion from the "reporting person," her alleged romantic partner. The death investigation remained open for weeks, with detectives interviewing the woman and reviewing her text messages about the abortion. 

The documents show that the Johnson County District Attorney's Office informed deputies that "the State could not statutorily charge [her] for taking the pill to cause the abortion or miscarriage of the non-viable fetus."

An excerpt from the JCSO detective's sworn affidavit.

The records include previously unreported details about the case that shocked public officials and reproductive justice advocates across the country when it was first reported by 404 Media in May. The case serves as a clear warning sign that when data from ALPRs is shared across state lines, it can put people at risk, including abortion seekers. And, in this case, the use may have run afoul of laws in Washington and Illinois.

A False Narrative Emerges

Last May, 404 Media obtained data revealing the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office conducted a nationwide search of more than 83,000 Flock ALPR cameras, giving the reason in the search log: “had an abortion, search for female.” Both the Sheriff's Office and Flock Safety have attempted to downplay the search as akin to a search for a missing person, claiming deputies were only looking for the woman to “check on her welfare” and that officers found a large amount of blood at the scene – a claim now contradicted by the responding investigator’s affidavit. Flock Safety went so far as to assert that journalists and advocates covering the story intentionally misrepresented the facts, describing it as "misreporting" and "clickbait-driven." 

As Flock wrote of EFF's previous commentary on this case (bold in original statement): 

Earlier this month, there was purposefully misleading reporting that a Texas police officer with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office used LPR “to target people seeking reproductive healthcare.” This organization is actively perpetuating narratives that have been proven false, even after the record has been corrected.

According to the Sheriff in Johnson County himself, this claim is unequivocally false.

… No charges were ever filed against the woman and she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.

That sheriff has since been arrested and indicted on felony counts in an unrelated sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation case. He has also been charged with aggravated perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury. EFF filed public records requests with Johnson County to obtain a more definitive account of events.

The newly released incident report and affidavit unequivocally describe the case as a "death investigation" of a "non-viable fetus." These documents also undermine the claim that the ALPR search was in response to a medical emergency, since, in fact, the abortion had occurred more than two weeks before deputies were called to investigate. 

In recent years, anti-abortion advocates and prosecutors have increasingly attempted to use “fetal homicide” and “wrongful death” statutes – originally intended to protect pregnant people from violence – to criminalize abortion and pregnancy loss. These laws, which exist in dozens of states, establish legal personhood of fetuses and can be weaponized against people who end their own pregnancies or experience a miscarriage. 

In fact, a new report from Pregnancy Justice found that in just the first two years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, prosecutors initiated at least 412 cases charging pregnant people with crimes related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth–most under child neglect, endangerment, or abuse laws that were never intended to target pregnant people. Nine cases included allegations around individuals’ abortions, such as possession of abortion medication or attempts to obtain an abortion–instances just like this one. The report also highlights how, in many instances, prosecutors use tangentially related criminal charges to punish people for abortion, even when abortion itself is not illegal.

By framing their investigation of a self-administered abortion as a “death investigation” of a “non-viable fetus,” Texas law enforcement was signaling their intent to treat the woman’s self-managed abortion as a potential homicide, even though Texas law does not allow criminal charges to be brought against an individual for self-managing their own abortion. 

The Investigator's Sworn Account

Over two days in April, the woman went through the process of taking medication to induce an abortion. Two weeks later, her partner–who would later be charged with domestic violence against her–reported her to the sheriff's office. 

The documents confirm that the woman was not present at the home when the deputies “responded to the death (Non-viable fetus).” As part of the investigation, officers collected evidence that the man had assembled of the self-managed abortion, including photographs, the FedEx envelope the medication arrived in, and the instructions for self-administering the medication. 

Another Johnson County official ran two searches through the ALPR database with the note "had an abortion, search for female," according to Flock Safety search logs obtained by EFF. The first search, which has not been previously reported, probed 1,295 Flock Safety networks–composed of 17,684 different cameras–going back one week. The second search, which was originally exposed by 404 Media, was expanded to a full month of data across 6,809 networks, including 83,345 cameras. Both searches listed the same case number that appears on the death investigation/incident report obtained by EFF. 

After collecting the evidence from the woman’s partner, the investigators say they consulted the district attorney’s office, only to be told they could not press charges against the woman. 

An excerpt from the JCSO detective's sworn affidavit.

Nevertheless, when the subject showed up at the Sheriff’s office a week later, officers were under the impression that she came to “to tell her side of the story about the non-viable fetus.” They interviewed her, inspected text messages about the abortion on her phone, and watched her write a timeline of events. 

Only after all that did they learn that she actually wanted to report a violent assault by her partner–the same individual who had called the police to report her abortion. She alleged that less than an hour after the abortion, he choked her, put a gun to her head, and made her beg for her life. The man was ultimately charged in connection with the assault, and the case is ongoing. 

This documented account runs completely counter to what law enforcement and Flock have said publicly about the case. 

Johnson County Sheriff Adam King told 404 media: "Her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.” He later told the Dallas Morning News: “We were just trying to check on her welfare and get her to the doctor if needed, or to the hospital."

The account by the detective on the scene makes no mention of concerned family members or a medical investigator. To the contrary, the affidavit says that they questioned the man as to why he "waited so long to report the incident," and he responded that he needed to "process the event and call his family attorney." The ALPR search was recorded 2.5 hours after the initial call came in, as documented in the investigation report.

The Desk Sergeant's Report—One Month Later

EFF obtained a separate "case supplemental report" written by the sergeant who says he ran the May 9 ALPR searches. 

The sergeant was not present at the scene, and his account was written belatedly on June 5, almost a month after the incident and nearly a week after 404 Media had already published the sheriff’s alternative account of the Flock Safety search, kicking off a national controversy. The sheriff's office provided this sergeant's report to Dallas Morning News. 

In the report, the sergeant claims that the officers on the ground asked him to start "looking up" the woman due to there being "a large amount of blood" found at the residence—an unsubstantiated claim that is in conflict with the lead investigator’s affidavit. The sergeant repeatedly expresses that the situation was "not making sense." He claims he was worried that the partner had hurt the woman and her children, so "to check their welfare," he used TransUnion's TLO commercial investigative database system to look up her address. Once he identified her vehicle, he ran the plate through the Flock database, returning hits in Dallas.

Two abortion-related searches in the JCSO's Flock Safety ALPR audit log

The sergeant's report, filed after the case attracted media attention, notably omits any mention of the abortion at the center of the investigation, although it does note that the caller claimed to have found a fetus. The report does not explain, or even address, why the sergeant used the phrase "had an abortion, search for female” as the official reason for the ALPR searches in the audit log. 

It's also unclear why the sergeant submitted the supplemental report at all, weeks after the incident. By that time, the lead investigator had already filed a sworn affidavit that contradicted the sergeant's account. For example, the investigator, who was on the scene, does not describe finding any blood or taking blood samples into evidence, only photographs of what the partner believed to be the fetus. 

One area where they concur: both reports are clearly marked as a "death investigation." 

Correcting the Record

Since 404 Media first reported on this case, King has perpetuated the false narrative, telling reporters that the woman was never under investigation, that officers had not considered charges against her, and that "it was all about her safety."

But here are the facts: 

• The reports that have been released so far describe this as a death investigation.
• The lead detective described himself as "working a death investigation… of a non-viable fetus" at the time he interviewed the woman (a week after the ALPR searches).
• The detective wrote that they consulted the district attorney's office about whether they could charge her for "taking the pill to cause the abortion or miscarriage of the non-viable fetus." They were told they could not.
• Investigators collected a lot of data, including photos and documentation of the abortion, and ran her through multiple databases. They even reviewed her text messages about the abortion. 
• The death investigation was open for more than a month.

The death investigation was only marked closed in mid-June, weeks after 404 Media's article and a mere days before the Dallas Morning News published its report, in which the sheriff inaccurately claimed the woman "was not under investigation at any point."

Flock has promoted this unsupported narrative on its blog and in multimedia appearances. We did not reach out to Flock for comment on this article, as their communications director previously told us the company will not answer our inquiries until we "correct the record and admit to your audience that you purposefully spread misinformation which you know to be untrue" about this case. 

Consider the record corrected: It turns out the truth is even more damning than initially reported.

The Aftermath

In the aftermath of the original reporting, government officials began to take action. The networks searched by Johnson County included cameras in Illinois and Washington state, both states where abortion access is protected by law. Since then: 

• The Illinois Secretary of State has announced his intent to “crack down on unlawful use of license plate reader data,” and urged the state’s Attorney General to investigate the matter. 
• In California, which also has prohibitions on sharing ALPR out of state and for abortion-ban enforcement, the legislature cited the case in support of pending legislation to restrict ALPR use.
• Ranking Members of the House Oversight Committee and one of its subcommittees launched a formal investigation into Flock’s role in “enabling invasive surveillance practices that threaten the privacy, safety, and civil liberties of women, immigrants, and other vulnerable Americans.” 
• Senator Ron Wyden secured a commitment from Flock to protect Oregonians' data from out-of-state immigration and abortion-related queries.

In response to mounting pressure, Flock announced a series of new features supposedly designed to prevent future abuses. These include blocking “impermissible” searches, requiring that all searches include a “reason,” and implementing AI-driven audit alerts to flag suspicious activity. But as we've detailed elsewhere, these measures are cosmetic at best—easily circumvented by officers using vague search terms or reusing legitimate case numbers. The fundamental architecture that enabled the abuse remains unchanged. 

Meanwhile, as the news continued to harm the company's sales, Flock CEO Garrett Langley embarked on a press tour to smear reporters and others who had raised alarms about the usage. In an interview with Forbes, he even doubled down and extolled the use of the ALPR in this case. 

So when I look at this, I go “this is everything’s working as it should be.” A family was concerned for a family member. They used Flock to help find her, when she could have been unwell. She was physically okay, which is great. But due to the political climate, this was really good clickbait.

Nothing about this is working as it should, but it is working as Flock designed. 

The Danger of Unchecked Surveillance

Flock Safety ALPR cameras

This case reveals the fundamental danger of allowing companies like Flock Safety to build massive, interconnected surveillance networks that can be searched across state lines with minimal oversight. When a single search query can access more than 83,000 cameras spanning almost the entire country, the potential for abuse is staggering, particularly when weaponized against people seeking reproductive healthcare. 

The searches in this case may have violated laws in states like Washington and Illinois, where restrictions exist specifically to prevent this kind of surveillance overreach. But those protections mean nothing when a Texas deputy can access cameras in those states with a few keystrokes, without external review that the search is legal and legitimate under local law. In this case, external agencies should have seen the word "abortion" and questioned the search, but the next time an officer is investigating such a case, they may use a more vague or misleading term to justify the search. In fact, it's possible it has already happened. 

ALPRs were marketed to the public as tools to find stolen cars and locate missing persons. Instead, they've become a dragnet that allows law enforcement to track anyone, anywhere, for any reason—including investigating people's healthcare decisions. This case makes clear that neither the companies profiting from this technology nor the agencies deploying it can be trusted to tell the full story about how it's being used.

States must ban law enforcement from using ALPRs to investigate healthcare decisions and prohibit sharing data across state lines. Local governments may try remedies like reducing data retention period to minutes instead of weeks or months—but, really, ending their ALPR programs altogether is the strongest way to protect their most vulnerable constituents. Without these safeguards, every license plate scan becomes a potential weapon against a person seeking healthcare.

Citizen Lab has uncovered a coordinated AI-enabled influence operation against the Iranian government, probably conducted by Israel.

Key Findings

• A coordinated network of more than 50 inauthentic X profiles is conducting an AI-enabled influence operation. The network, which we refer to as “PRISONBREAK,” is spreading narratives inciting Iranian audiences to revolt against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
• While the network was created in 2023, almost all of its activity was conducted starting in January 2025, and continues to the present day.
• The profiles’ activity appears to have been synchronized, at least in part, with the military campaign that the Israel Defense Forces conducted against Iranian targets in June 2025. ...

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