A new report claims that many of the local protests springing up against AI data centers and Flock license-plate cameras — from Denver to Charlotte, N.C., to Tucson, Ariz., to Detroit — are being driven by the same activist network responsible for the “No Kings” and “Hands Off” demonstrations against President Donald Trump, as well as past protests targeting Israel, Elon Musk, Tesla and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The report, titled “The Compute War at Home,” was commissioned by Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free-market nonprofit based in Alexandria, Va., and drew on social-media analysis from Arken Intelligence, a Washington, D.C.-based technology firm. It was shared with Fox News Digital, which has also reported separately on the network’s activities.
The report ties the organizing to groups connected to Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based tech financier whose nonprofit and media network has drawn scrutiny from Congress and federal investigators over its funding and ties abroad. Singham and the organizations he has funded have denied acting on behalf of any government or political party and have not been charged with any crimes.
A Three-Phase Pattern
According to the report, the organizing follows a repeatable pattern: activists find a local grievance, connect it to a national ideological argument, then spread it through allied media outlets and organizing networks into new cities.
The first phase, the report says, began with “Tesla Takedown” protests in January 2025 and grew into the infrastructure behind “No Kings” and “Hands Off” demonstrations, along with campaigns supporting the governments of Cuba, Iran and Venezuela. Groups named in the report include the Party for Socialism and Liberation, CodePink, the People’s Forum and the ANSWER Coalition, which the report says worked alongside groups more closely aligned with the Democratic Party, such as Indivisible, a network partly funded by Democratic donor George Soros. These groups have denied wrongdoing and say they are responding to legitimate community concerns.
The second phase, the report says, involved CodePink launching a national campaign against data centers over the past year, echoed by roughly 70 chapters of the Party for Socialism and Liberation using similar messaging. Liberation News, described as the party’s newspaper, and the outlet BreakThrough News promoted local wins nationally, according to the report.
The third phase, per the report, merged that data-center opposition with concerns about Flock license-plate cameras, connecting local privacy worries to the broader national debate over artificial intelligence, cloud computing and energy use.
City-by-City Examples
The report cites a string of local examples. In Denver, People’s Dispatch — now merged into BreakThrough News — covered an anti-data-center campaign in October, using imagery and a quote from the local Party for Socialism and Liberation chapter. By May, that Denver chapter had partnered with Indivisible and the Sunrise Movement for a forum on the “connections between mass surveillance and data centers.” On May 19, the chapter circulated a petition urging the Denver City Council to block data-center construction, stating: “FIGHTING BACK AGAINST DATA CENTERS MEANS FIGHTING FOR SOCIALISM!”
In Charlotte, N.C., the local party chapter published a July 11 post on “AI mass surveillance” and policing that directed readers to a petition against data-center construction hosted at nodatacentersnc.com, a website anonymously registered on June 19, according to online records.
In Tucson, Ariz., the local chapter joined groups called “deFLOCK Tucson” and the “No Desert Data Center Coalition” on July 25 for an event titled “It’s ALL Connected,” which argued that mass surveillance, data centers and electric power are linked.
In Detroit, CodePink’s local chapter published material in July describing data centers as infrastructure for mass surveillance, connecting them to OpenAI, Palantir Technologies, military contractors and ICE. CodePink has also launched a broader campaign page called “DATA CENTERS AND THE WAR ECONOMY,” arguing that such projects “must be halted wherever they are.”
The Numbers Behind the Surge
Arken Intelligence’s analysis, cited in the report, found that social-media posts mentioning both Flock cameras and data centers jumped from 639 in the ten weeks before May 19 to 9,009 in the ten weeks after — a 14.1-fold increase. Among posts where a political leaning could be identified, 81% came from right-wing, conservative or libertarian accounts, the report found.
“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.
Rob Joyce, former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, told Fox News Digital that such campaigns amount to a form of influence operation. “These influence actions are cognitive warfare. Foreign actors don’t need Americans to become pro-China,” Joyce said. “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.”
Bipartisan Concerns, Different Motives
The report is careful to note that not everyone opposed to Flock cameras or data centers is part of this network, and that concerns about privacy, data retention and government contracts are shared across the political spectrum. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently ordered license-plate readers removed from state highways, Texas has also pulled back from the technology, and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has opened an investigation into Flock cameras.
Flock’s chief strategy officer, Rahul Sidhu, said the company’s actual computing footprint is minimal — less than 0.1% of the capacity of a single data center. The report argues, however, that Flock’s cameras serve as an effective political symbol regardless of their technical scale, giving organizers “a much larger infrastructure buildout” to point to as a threat.
Federal Scrutiny Continues
The report’s release comes as Singham’s network faces mounting federal and congressional scrutiny. The Senate Judiciary Committee has asked the Justice Department and FBI to assess whether CodePink and the People’s Forum should register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The House Oversight Committee has sought records on Singham’s funding relationships, and the House Ways and Means Committee has subpoenaed BreakThrough News, Tricontinental and the People’s Forum, all of which have declined to comply, calling the inquiries a “witch hunt.”
As Fox News Digital previously reported, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York opened a grand jury investigation earlier this year examining possible money laundering, wire fraud and bank fraud by Singham and the nonprofits he has funded.
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