Tech bills of the week: Cutting federal funding for Flock; Making data centers shoulder their power costs; and more
Legislators from both parties are advancing bills that would cut federal funding for AI-powered surveillance systems like Flock, and require data centers to bear more of their own energy costs rather than passing them to the grid or taxpayers.
Why this matters: Two separate fights are happening here, and both matter. Flock's license plate readers are already in hundreds of cities, pulling in data on millions of drivers with almost no federal oversight. Cutting the money that spreads these systems is a direct check on how fast that surveillance expands. The data center bill is a different kind of accountability: if companies building massive AI infrastructure do not pay their own power bills, everyone else does. Both bills put real costs back on the people creating the problems.
Who should care: AI governance · Lawyers · Administrators · Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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