October 28, 2026

Photo credit: UCG / Contributor / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

America is in a panic over automated license plate readers (ALPRs). As stories have emerged about abusive cops and people being wrongly jailed, critics have worried about a supposed surveillance state, leading to cancelled contracts and legislation calling for the cameras to be banned.

Largely missing from the conversation is the fact that Flock cameras save lives, Charles Fain Lehman writes. They’ve been particularly successful in helping to find abducted children, since they can track cars based on appearance alone. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates that since it started working with Flock Safety in 2024, the cameras have helped rescue more than 1,000 missing persons.

As Lehman writes, “tearing down ALPRs is little more than political theater, a gesture that makes people feel safer, without actually offering them the intelligent balance of costs and benefits for which policymakers are responsible.”

Read more about the children who have been saved.

Last week, several government websites went offline after the U.S., European Union, and the United Kingdom announced vulnerabilities in the computer scripting language PHP. A researcher used AI tools to uncover ways that hackers could run code on a server using PHP without its operator knowing.

PHP’s developers quickly released a patch, but the incident has raised fears about AI’s potential role in facilitating cyberattacks. Indeed, a recent analysis found that vulnerability disclosures doubled from January to August of this year. This is almost certainly thanks to AI-enabled attacks, Dario Marino writes.

The good news, though, Marino continues, is that AI tools can also help companies defend themselves against these attacks. In fact, “AI may be a bigger boon to cyber-defenders than cyber-attackers,” he writes.

Read more.

No Republican has won a high-profile electoral race in Colorado since 2014, and the state is considered lost terrain for the GOP. It shouldn’t be, Robert Almelor Delfeld argues. For one thing, Texas was the third-largest source of Colorado’s new residents during the 2010s. And it’s likely that residents from other blue states moved to Colorado to escape misgovernance and high costs.

Further, unaffiliated voters now make up 51 percent of the state electorate, up from just 37 percent in 2016, and progressive policies have repeatedly been rejected in recent ballot initiatives. Factor in Democratic infighting, and Republicans could have a real shot at making headway. As Delfeld observes, “the electorate’s underlying rightward shift suggests that progressives will face a tougher hike than they anticipate,” he writes. “That could open a window for savvy, disciplined Republicans to pick off seats.”

Read more.