How Cameras Can Track Every Car in the U.S., and Iran’s Catch-22

0:02From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, August 10th. Here's what we're covering.

0:13You see the white pole up there? Just below that? Kind of in the middle of it, actually. There's a camera kind of sticking down flat. I see it, yeah. See it, yeah. That's one. That's one. Around the country, up on poles and light posts, more and more surveillance cameras are going up, specifically aimed at tracking people's license plates. To the left. Uh-huh. Okay. The left pole. Law enforcement has embraced them. The technology can help officers see within seconds where a car might be and where it has been. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, right there. I see it. Yeah. The solar panel. Yeah. Okay.

0:54And that's a flock? That is a flock. One of the biggest companies in the mix is Flock. It has 120 ,000 cameras alongside roads in every state except Alaska. And it has contracts with 40 % of all law enforcement departments in the U.S. But as its cameras have spread, so has the opposition. Americans may be used to surveillance cameras. Lots of people willingly put cameras in their doorbells even. But what sets Flock apart is that it's created a vast searchable network that police all over the country can access. And for some people, once they start noticing the cameras, they're realizing just how many there are.

1:35A few weeks ago, I went on a ride along in North Texas, right outside of Dallas, with a 27-year-old who had joined a grassroots movement against Flock and license plate readers like it. He was going around documenting the locations of these cameras, and he saw this as his form of protest. He had, like many Americans, accepted a certain level of surveillance in their lives digitally and physically, whether that's cameras at an airport or hanging off the side of a business. But the ubiquitous nature of these cameras seemingly coming up overnight was really a step too far. My colleague Fernando Alfonso recently drove around in Texas where people have been adding the location of cameras they spot to an app called Deflock, a reaction to the company's spread.

2:26Flock's pitch to police departments has been simple. It can help them solve crimes. For example, a spokeswoman for a police union in Texas said authorities have been able to recover hundreds of stolen vehicles. But there have also been a number of controversies about how the license plate readers have been used. Officers have abused their access to Flock data, including using it to track their romantic partners. Several cities like Los Angeles and Dayton, Ohio, recently suspended their contracts with Flock to prevent immigration authorities from accessing camera data. And in Texas, an officer used Flock's cameras to track a woman across state lines who was suspected of getting abortion medication.

3:08I spoke to a lot of folks across Texas and how they felt about Flock in their communities and their feelings and their sentiment really reflects a bigger national trend where whether you're in New York or California or in between, what I learned is that it didn't matter if you were liberal, it didn't matter if you were conservative. This technology and how prevalent it's become in many of these communities was something people were very, very concerned about. In response to questions from The Times, Phlox's CEO acknowledged that the conversation around cameras and privacy is, quote, going to be an ongoing debate probably forever.

3:52And he added, We should have this debate, and we should continue to evolve our point of view as a society of what we're comfortable with and what level of safety we want.

4:06Now, two quick updates on negotiations in the Middle East. First, in Israel yesterday.

4:15Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government is rejecting a plan for Gaza that had been backed by the Trump administration. Last month, President Trump said his Board of Peace had reached a major breakthrough, brokering a deal for Hamas to begin turning over some of its weapons and for Israel to begin withdrawing some of its troops. There was immediate skepticism, however, about how that would work, and now Netanyahu has openly dismissed the plan, saying Israeli forces won't pull back at all until Hamas gives up all its weapons. It's an unusually public break between Netanyahu and Trump.

4:53But Netanyahu is facing a tough re-election campaign this fall, the first national vote since the October 7th attacks, and he's under pressure not to make concessions to Hamas. That leaves Gazans in limbo, with many of the two million people there still living in sprawling tent camps, since Israel has also insisted there will be no wide-scale rebuilding until Hamas disarms. Now, a second update about talks to end the war in Iran. Over the weekend, a top Iranian national security official delivered a sweeping set of demands that he said the U.S. must meet before Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

5:36That includes the U.S. lifting its sanctions and ongoing naval blockade of Iran, as well as releasing billions in frozen Iranian assets. The demands are almost exactly what President Trump agreed to back in June when the two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding, before that deal crumbled and fighting escalated. Now, experts tell The Times that Iran is trying to pull off a delicate balancing act by continuing to use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage. Iran can only keep that leverage if other countries rely on the waterway. But the longer the conflict drags on, the more countries are looking to alternative routes to move critical shipments.

6:17For example, Iraq and the Gulf states have been transporting oil and goods over land to ship them out of Syrian ports. And the UAE is fast-tracking a new oil pipeline that will let it bypass the strait altogether. Basically, it's become a kind of catch-22 for Iran. The strait is only a source of leverage if Iran threatens to close it. But the more it threatens that, the less leverage it may have in the future.

6:51On this vote, the yeas are 90, the nays are 6. The 60-vote threshold having been achieved... In Congress, senators worked late through the night on Friday to try and cram in crucial votes before their end-of-summer recess. A few to note. They passed a stopgap spending bill that could help avoid another politically toxic government shutdown next month. And Lindsay was committed to achieving a peaceful resolution to this war, and I'm confident that these sanctions will pave the way. The vast majority of senators pushed through a new package of sanctions on Russia, with some calling it a tribute to the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who co-sponsored this plan to help Ukraine before his sudden death last month.

7:36The bill extends sanctions on Iran, too, though, like the spending measure, it still needs to pass the House. Nomination, Department of Justice Todd Blanche of Florida to be attorney general. The Senate also voted to confirm President Trump's pick for attorney general. Todd Blanche, who has been serving in the role on an acting basis. Because of his previous attorney-client relationship with President Trump, Mr. Blanche would be precisely the person to push back on President Trump. Senator Bill Cassidy was one of a handful of Republicans who had initially expressed reservations about Blanche, but ultimately voted for him, saying he was persuaded that because Blanche had been Trump's defense lawyer, he wouldn't be shy about telling the president what he thought and could potentially talk him out of bad ideas.

8:22For his part, Blanche repeatedly made clear throughout the nomination process that he thinks presidents have nearly limitless authority over the Justice Department, a major break from decades of precedent. In this flurry of votes, there was one thing the Senate didn't get to, though. The Save America Act. It seems to me some days that I'm the only one here who can count to 50 in this town, but we don't have the votes. President Trump has been demanding that Congress pass the strict voting restrictions bill, suggesting the GOP needs it in place to win in the midterms. But GOP leaders have said repeatedly there's simply not enough Republican support to push through the controversial measure.

9:05They say they will bring it up again when they return in September. Though because of the Senate calendar, at that point, lawmakers will only have three scheduled weeks at the Capitol before the midterms.

9:22And finally, heat waves in Europe this summer have been inescapable. Countries there are bracing for another one right now. And in the Danube River, the extreme temperatures are exposing hulking pieces of the past. Water levels there have dropped to the point that a sunken Nazi-era fleet is now visible. Near the end of World War II, Germany sank more than 200 of its own ships in the Danube in eastern Serbia to try and block the Soviets from advancing up the river. Nearly every summer since, one or two rusted hulks have peaked above the waterline, but this year, residents have counted at least a dozen, and Serbian authorities are now trying to haul many of them out of the river entirely as they become an obstacle for captains to navigate around.

10:09There's also a concern that some of them may have unexploded weapons on board, posing a risk to passing ships and making a salvage mission more dangerous. Further upstream, the Slovakian police dealt with a similar situation. They recently detonated a 1 ,500-pound World War II bomb that appeared as the river receded. The police identified it as a British mine from approximately 1944, which had been exposed by falling water levels. Those are the headlines. today on The Daily. The hunt for an answer about why more and more young people are getting diagnosed with cancer. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts.

10:55I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.