Principal Product Manager

Boulder is putting mass surveillance technology before civil liberties. As Boulder considers a long-term contract for automated license plate readers, city officials should establish stronger safeguards, public oversight and vendor accountability before selecting a provider. August 12, 2026 This commentary is by Olivia Mendoza, executive director of the ACLU of Colorado. Cities across the state and nation are quietly building a mass surveillance infrastructure, one unregulated contract at a time. Its most vulnerable communities are falling victim to this rapidly advancing technology, which threatens the constitutional rights of people across Colorado, including in Boulder. This mass surveillance infrastructure has the power to track where you go, who you are with and what you do, with almost no legal guardrails. These technologies are not being used in isolation. Corporations implementing mass surveillance systems may offer several tools, including drones, body cameras and automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. Data from these systems can be integrated and, depending on an agency's policies and settings, shared across jurisdictions. The surveillance technology market is exploding, and law enforcement and government agencies are among its biggest customers. The City of Boulder is currently reviewing several proposals for a new long-term ALPR contract. City officials have declined to name the bidders, and there is no public comment period dedicated to the decision. The city initially expected to select a vendor in September, but the timeline is now unclear. Officials are expected to make the decision without a council vote or any formal mechanism for Boulder residents to weigh in. Currently, Boulder holds a contract with Flock Safety for more than 30 cameras at key intersections. Until June 2025, Boulder's license plate data was searchable by thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide. According to city records, U.S. Border Patrol searched Boulder's data more than 100 times before the city cut off national sharing. One likely bidder in Boulder's procurement process is Axon. The city already uses other Axon products, including an AI tool that transcribes body-camera footage, and requires the selected ALPR system to integrate with its existing Axon technology. A major federal law enforcement contractor, Axon has rapidly expanded from manufacturing Tasers and body cameras into ALPRs, drone fleets and real-time streaming capabilities that stitch together a continuous picture of people's movements through public space. This escalation in surveillance was predicted years ago, not by outside critics, but by Axon's own Artificial Intelligence and Policing Technology Ethics Board. In 2019, that board warned that without regulatory intervention, market competition would encourage "a race to the bottom of more pervasive and more powerful surveillance." Three years later, nine of the board's 12 members resigned after Axon announced plans to develop Taser-equipped drones despite the board's objections. In their resignation letter, they wrote that the company had proposed surveillance so sweeping it would "undoubtedly harm communities of color and others who are overpoliced." When a company's own ethics board quits in protest, that is not a footnote. It is a warning Aclu Co should all heed. Surveillance technology is not experienced equally. Facial recognition systems, now being rebranded as "face matching," have documented error rates significantly higher for people with darker skin. People of color are disproportionately impacted by this mass surveillance technology that saturates their neighborhoods. Across the country, facial recognition errors have contributed to wrongful arrests, with devastating consequences for some of those misidentified. ALPRs build a record of movement over time: where you worship, seek medical care or attend a political meeting. Each observation may appear to be a simple data point. But aggregated over months, those observations can create a detailed map of your life, one that federal agencies can use to target immigrant communities. Some surveillance systems provide real-time or near-real-time alerts, potentially giving law enforcement the ability to track individuals as they move through the world, without a warrant, without suspicion and without their knowledge. The gap between what these tools can do and what the law regulates is not merely a matter of timing. It is, in many cases, deliberate. Vendors move fast, offering free pilots and subsidized trials that make it easy to implement their systems but costly to end them. By the time a community learns that a technology has been deployed, it may have been running for months, if not years. One of the central deceptions of the surveillance industry's marketing is the suggestion that public safety and civil liberties are competing priorities. They are not. Effective, accountable policing and robust civil liberties protections can coexist if city officials do the hard work of establishing clear guardrails before technologies are deployed. Boulder should establish binding rules, mandatory impact assessments, meaningful public input, independent oversight with real authority and enforceable vendor accountability before making its procurement decision. Every contract signed without adequate safeguards sends a clear message: Coloradans' civil liberties are not a priority. Networked surveillance represents one of the most significant expansions of government power in the history of the United States, and Boulder should treat it accordingly. Just because this technology exists doesn't mean the Constitution no longer does. By completing this form, I agree to receive occasional emails per the terms of the ACLU's privacy statement. All fields are required unless labeled optional.

Axon Enterprise shares rebounded 9.3% on Friday following a 14.3% drop the previous day, with investors reassessing the company's second-quarter 2026 results. The initial sell-off came despite strong performance — revenue rose 35% year-over-year to $904 million, marking the tenth consecutive quarter of growth above 30%. The market's concern centred on compressed gross margins in the software and services segment, driven by rising memory costs and a higher mix of counter-drone hardware sales. Axon's Dedrone division surpassed $100 million in quarterly revenue, contributing to a 123% jump in Platform Solutions revenue. Management raised full-year revenue growth guidance to 32%–34% whilst maintaining its adjusted EBITDA margin outlook at 25.5%. The company expects near-term margin pressure from component costs and hardware scaling, with software revenue anticipated to follow hardware deployments. The third-quarter results will prove whether this margin squeeze represents temporary growing pains or a more persistent challenge.