FIRST ON FOX: ‘No Kings’ protest network behind fight against AI data centers and Flock cameras
FIRST ON FOX: The same hard-left network behind "No Kings" and other protests is leading the battle against data centers and Flock surveillance cameras, according to a Fox News Digital investigation and a new report.
In growing protests from San Francisco to North Carolina, organizations and activists associated with the same ecosystem that rallied against President Donald Trump, Israel, Elon Musk, Tesla and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the last two years are now taking on data-center construction and license-plate readers.
The overlap includes organizations funded by pro-China, Shanghai-based tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham, whose sprawling nonprofit and media network has faced Congressional and federal scrutiny over its funding and foreign ties. Singham and the nonprofits he has funded have denied taking orders from any government or political party and haven’t been charged with any crimes.
The findings are detailed in a new report, "The Compute War at Home," commissioned by Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, an Alexandria, Va., free-markets nonprofit that used social-media analysis by Arken Intelligence, a technology firm based in Washington, D.C., for parts of its study.
"The money, media, organizing capacity and campaign objectives converge in the same ecosystem," the report says.
Based on reporting over the past several years from street protests, Fox News Digital has identified the protest movement’s evolution across three phases. The new report chronicles a repeatable political model, in which activists first identify a local grievance, then connect it to a larger ideological narrative and package the argument through national media and activist infrastructure and carry it into new communities.
The first phase appeared in early January 2025 with Trump’s inauguration and the launch of "Tesla Takedown" demonstrations to protest Tesla founder Musk as he led efforts to cut waste in federal spending. It became the mobilization infrastructure built around "No Kings" and "Hands Off" anti-Trump protests, anti-Israel activism and related campaigns, supporting the Communist Party of Cuba, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Venezuelan communist strongman Nicholas Maduro.
Organizations from the Singham network – including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, CodePink, the People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition and affiliated groups – appeared repeatedly across those movements, working with nonprofits more aligned with the Democratic Party, including Indivisible, a nonprofit network funded in part by billionaire Democratic megadonor George Soros. The organizations deny any wrongdoing as agents of alleged foreign influence and say they are addressing legitimate community grievances.
AGITATORS UNITED BY CHINESE MONEY, HATE FOR AMERICA TARGET DATA CENTERS, EXPERTS WARN
The second phase shifted that protest infrastructure toward American technological infrastructure. Over the past year, CodePink developed a national campaign against data centers, while the campaign took root among the approximately 70 chapters of the Party for Socialism and Liberation with near-identical messaging and strategies. Liberation News, which describes itself as the newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, nationalized local victories and promoted moratoria, bans and project cancellations. Media outlets, like BreathThrough News, from the Singham network provided additional amplification.
The third phase involved an ideological crossover in which Flock cameras have now become a bridge between local privacy and policing concerns and the national fight over artificial intelligence, cloud systems, energy and data centers.
The report doesn’t claim that every opponent of Flock cameras or data centers is connected to the activist network. It notes that opposition to Flock has become genuinely bipartisan, with legitimate concerns about privacy, data retention, misuse and poorly written government contracts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently ordered license-plate readers removed from state highways, while Texas has also moved to pull back from the technology, and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has launched an investigation into Flock cameras over surveillance concerns.
But the report credits the left-wing organizers with fusing the two issues into a one-two punch that has caught on with a broad coalition.
According to the Arken Intelligence analysis, posts mentioning both Flock and data centers increased from 639 posts in the 10 weeks before a spike in organizing on May 19 led to 9,009 posts over the next 10 weeks, a 14.1-fold increase.
Among posts for which a political affiliation could be classified, the report said, 81% came from right-wing, conservative or libertarian accounts.
"Issue pairings rarely multiply fourteen-fold in a matter of weeks without a catalyst, particularly when the surge begins immediately after organizers start promoting the connection," the report states.
"These influence actions are cognitive warfare. Foreign actors don't need Americans to become pro-China," Rob Joyce, former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, told Fox News Digital. "They need Americans to argue for the outcomes Beijing wants. And a free society that can't build the power and govern the advanced technology is going to wind up renting it from the adversary, read the PRC, that doesn't share its own values. And that scares me as an American."
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The report identifies at least a year of coordination among far-left activists in the Singham network, deliberately linking the issues through propaganda media outlets and activist networks funded and supported by Singham.
Late last September, BreakThrough News laid the groundwork, publishing an article that described Flock as "America’s authoritarian tracking infrastructure." Soon after, People’s Dispatch, now merged into the BreakThrough News operations, covered a Denver campaign against data centers the next month, using a photograph from the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Denver chapter and quoting a local Party for Socialism and Liberation organizer.
By early May, the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Denver chapter partnered with Indivisible and the far-left Sunrise Movement and promoted a forum examining the "connections between mass surveillance and data centers and how BOTH only serve the needs of billionaires and not our communities."
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Days later, on May 19, when the convergence of issues went public, the local Denver chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation circulated a petition to urge the Denver city council to block the building of data centers, arguing, "FIGHTING BACK AGAINST DATA CENTERS MEANS FIGHTING FOR SOCIALISM!" It also posted photos opposing Flock cameras.
On July 11, in Charlotte, N.C., the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s local chapter published an anti-Flock post centered on "AI mass surveillance" and police "brutality," then directed readers to sign a North Carolina petition opposing data-center construction on a dedicated website, nodatacentersnc.com, anonymously purchased the month earlier on June 19, according to online records.
By July 25, in Tucson, Ariz., the local Party for Socialism and Liberation chapter joined "deFLOCK Tucson" and the "No Desert Data Center Coalition" for an event called "It’s ALL Connected" at the "Global Justice Center" on E. 26th Street.
The promotional material asked what mass surveillance, data centers and electric power had in common. The answer: "IT’S ALL CONNECTED."
The report says the campaigns combine concerns over water, electricity rates, land use, noise, health, immigration enforcement, policing and artificial intelligence. Those concerns can be legitimate, the report notes, but organizers can also use them to make the broader infrastructure supporting American computing appear inherently dangerous or illegitimate.
In July, CodePink’s Detroit chapter published a description of data centers as the physical infrastructure of mass surveillance, linking them to OpenAI, Palantir Technologies, military contractors and ICE, crafting a narrative around the argument that the AI data center industry "creates harm and destruction."
CodePink has dedicated a website page to a new campaign, "DATA CENTERS AND THE WAR ECONOMY," describing data centers as products and instruments of war and warning that projects "must be halted wherever they are." Its action page calls on activists to build a joint struggle against data centers and the "war economy."
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Flock cameras provide a particularly effective local "entry grievances," according to the report. A dispute over a police contract, a license-plate reader or a single alleged misuse can be expanded into a broader argument about databases, artificial intelligence, cloud systems and data centers.
"Flock gives that abstraction a visible local target," the report states, allowing organizers to portray "a much larger infrastructure buildout" as threatening.
Flock’s actual computing footprint is small, according to company officials. According to Rahul Sidhu, chief strategy officer at Flock, the company uses less than 0.1% of the capacity of a single data center. But the report argues that Flock’s political value is far greater than its computational footprint because it gives the "surveillance state" argument a concrete and emotionally potent target.
Ultimately, the causes have converged, say experts, with Republican politicians joining the chorus of criticism by pro-China communists in recent days against data centers and Flock cameras. As the Party for Socialism and Liberation continued to rail against "AI mass surveillance," DeSantis this week opposed the rise of an "AI digital surveillance state."
The renewed scrutiny on the Singham network’s alleged influence operations on local communities emerges as it faces serious investigation by Congress and federal investigators. The Senate Judiciary Committee previously asked the Justice Department and FBI to assess whether CodePink and the People’s Forum should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, called FARA.
The House Oversight Committee has sought records concerning Singham’s funding relationships, while the House Ways and Means Committee recently sent subpoenas to BreakThrough News, Tricontinental and the People’s Forum, which have refused to supply documents, saying they are the targets of a "witch hunt."
As Fox News Digital first reported in late June, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York launched a grand jury investigation earlier this year that is examining possible money laundering, wire fraud and bank fraud violations by Singham and the network of nonprofits he funded.