Taking Names, Recording Plates: How Feds Spied on MN Protesters, Groups During Metro Surge

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories. 

Court Docs Show Extent of Homeland Security Spying

"Four days after Alex Pretti was fatally shot while filming officers taking part in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the Homeland Security Department quietly opened an investigation at its office in St. Paul," the New York Times' Alan Feuer and Ernesto Londoño write today (gift link).

Were they investigating the Border Patrol agents who killed Pretti in the street? No! The targets included several unions and left-leaning political groups in the Twin Cities, including SEIU and the Democratic Socialists of America. That's according to documents filed Thursday by defense attorneys for the 15 Minnesotans who have been indicted and accused of interfering with immigration officers throughout Operation Metro Surge. (Get a load of the PowerPoint slide prosecutors showed grand jurors, which somehow implicates Monarca, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, AFL-CIO, and the friggin' Grease Pit bike shop as being part of some wider conspiracy to hinder immigration officers' work.)

As the Minnesota Reformer's Madison McVan reports, these docs show that federal surveillance extended far beyond the 15 people who have so far been indicted by the feds. Undercover agents posed as activists to surveil and record meetings at libraries and churches, and they collected license plate numbers and names at some gatherings to create dossiers on attendees—dossiers they filled out with help from Clearview AI facial recognition software.

And that, I'm sorry to say, is really not even the half of it. Click through to the NYT and Reformer reports to get the full story of First Amendment violations run amok.

"The Pillsbury Doughboy Is Coming for Hollywood"

That's the headline on the Hollywood Reporter's latest cover story, which features the Doughboy as a frighteningly enthusiastic cameraman:

The deeply bleak upshot of this THR feature is that as film and TV production declines and studios find themselves strapped for cash, brands like locally headquartered General Mills and its baking arm are rolling in the dough. (Their pun, not ours.) Forget ads, forget product placement... we're talking about brand-generated TV series and feature-length productions like those developed by Imagine, which has worked with companies like GE, Nike, Ford, and Coca-Cola.

Some brands have launched in-house studios; small- and midsize film and TV production companies are staying afloat by leaning into branded entertainment, THR's Alex Weprin writes. Ha ha no, I think it's awesome that literally every facet of life is owned by brands. Not at all dystopian.

Flock Backlash x Scooter Takeovers

The Star Tribune has a big story today (gift link) about the growing backlash to Flock cameras. As we reported earlier this week, Duluth and West St. Paul are among the municipalities cutting ties with the Big Brotherly cameras masquerading as traffic law enforcement, and "freedom-fighting vandals in Duluth, Edina, Faribault, and Winona are smashing the living shit outta those AI-powered eyes in the sky," my colleague Jay Boller wrote.

Since then, the Strib's Elliot Hughes and Paul Walsh write, North Branch City Council has voted to remove its Flock cameras indefinitely, and Winona leaders announced that they will not replace the eight stolen cameras. “I understand the government overreach stuff,” North Branch Mayor Kevin Schieber said ahead of a unanimous vote.

And the backlash just keeps growing. Johan Vargas, the organizer behind the increasingly well-attended Lime scooter takeovers in Minneapolis (which also appeared in The Flyover this week), just called for a third takeover, this one "in peaceful protest against the Flock cameras." Vargas is asking attendees to wear costumes, make signs, and above all, be peaceful at the August 14 gathering. BYO Lime.

Minneapolis Transit Infrastructure Really Is That Good

We can get a little high on our own supply here in Minneapolis—that Midwest exceptionalism is a powerful force. But then, every once in a while, an outsider publishes something like this...

...and our heads grow three sizes yet again.

In his latest CityVisit video, Ray Delahanty of CityNerd takes his 413K YouTube subscribers to Minneapolis, making use of MetroTransit's expanding Bus Rapid Transit service and his bike to get from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Delahanty's feedback is mostly glowing. He calls the Metro B Line "a microcosm of what transit should be: frequent, direct, democratic, serving people from all walks of life." He says the city's bike infrastructure is "clearly a cut above" Portland, Oregon's, even though the two cities are tied atop the national bike score rankings, and that "the gap is widening rapidly."

It's always interesting to see the city through the eyes of an outsider—especially when they have generally kind things to say. Delahanty seems to have the sense (we do, too) that the city's street redesigns, both those that are underway and those that are in the works, are helping make streets safer. And he doesn't stick to a sunshine-and-roses view of Minneapolis, either, taking viewers to areas like 38th & Chicago, the Portland Avenue intersection where Renee Good was killed, and the site of Alex Pretti's killing on Nicollet Avenue, "open wounds in the city's fabric" where residents have been executed by law enforcement.