A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Podcast: The Varsity featuring host John Ourand interviewing Ted Leonsis, a Lowell High Distinguished Alumni. Leonsis gained fame and fortune as an executive with America Online (AOL). In 1999, he purchased the NHL’s Washington Capitals and since then has acquired the NBA’s Washington Wizards, the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, and Washington DC’s Capital One Arena which is in the midst of a multi-year, billion dollar renovation. Leonsis explained that when he bought the Capitals, teams placed extremely high value on cable TV rights and saw the sports venue as an unwelcome but necessary expense. All that has changed with the highest value coming from the experiential value of the event, of attending a game in person. Hence, the big renovation to the arena. Some of what Leonsis said was welcome: like the attention they pay to the cleanliness and functionality of the arena’s bathrooms, something often an afterthought to management but important to fans. But some of the things he said were creepy, like they use facial recognition software to identify people coming to the game, match it up with another database of people’s birthdays and, if that happens to be a particular fan’s birthday, they highlight it on the jumbotron. I’m sure it’s well meaning, but it sounds awfully intrusive to me. I’m not surprised these your privacy but I was surprised an owner talked about it like it was a great thing. As for his future goals, Leonsis said he wants to make Washington DC the women’s sports capital of the world. Having seen the Mystics play in the Capital One Arena a few years ago, I can attest that WNBA games are exciting and worthy of the attention Leonsis hopes to give them. 

Book Review: “Panic at the Pump” by Meg Jacobs. The full title of this 2016 book is “Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s.” It caught my attention because I vividly recall both gas crises – one in 1973, the other in 1979 – that are discussed in this book. The first followed the Yom Kippur War while Richard Nixon was president; the second followed the Iranian Revolution when Jimmy Carter was president. The book mostly relates the political struggle between the remaining New Deal era Democrats who wanted price controls and gas rationing if needed, and the free market Republicans who wanted no regulation so the market could take its course. With help from Jimmy Carter, a moderate who believed in deregulation, the Republicans prevailed. The free market caused US dependence on oil from the Mideast to rise until the formal US government policy became using military force to ensure the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. We can see how that’s working out today. 

Article: “(Boston) City councilor takes aim at surveillance ‘loophole’ police use without approval, by Yogev Toby, Boston Globe, September 23, 2026. The city of Boston enacted a “surveillance ordinance” in 2022 that purportedly gave the city council oversight of surveillance technology and use by the Boston Police Department. However, in two recent instances, councilors have learned that the BPD has employed two different surveillance technologies before first coming to the council. In the first case, the BPD replaced existing Flock cameras with cameras made by Axon. The police argued that just replacing an existing system does not trigger notification since the council had OK’d the original system. But because different vendors offer different capabilities and policies, councilors believe new approval from the council was needed. The second surveillance tool used by BPD monitors social media use. There was no approval sought but BPD argued that “exigent circumstances” allowed the acquisition and use of the technology without prior approval. The BPD didn’t explain what those exigent circumstances were. Councilors maintain that the exigent exception is temporary and not ongoing, which is how the BPD is using the social media monitoring tool. 

Op-Ed: “How Flock Cameras Became the Enemy” by Evan Greer in New York Times, September 21, 2026. The writer of this op-ed is the director of Fight for the Future, a group that organizes against censorship and surveillance. He asks why more than 350 cities and towns across the United States have ended their contracts with Flock Safety, the company that provides AI enhanced license plate reading cameras and software. The Lowell City Council recently voted to suspend its contract with Flock which I’ve written about several times in my Sunday newsletter. The writer suggests Flock cameras have become emblematic with mass surveillance although Flock is not alone in providing this kind of service. It’s competitor, Axon, does the same thing and other companies like Palantir and Clearview AI make surveillance products. The essay ends with this: “Ending a Flock contract won’t stop high-tech surveillance. But this kind of community-level organizing is nevertheless showing it’s possible to challenge the rapid creep of technology that’s often forced upon us, even during a time of immense political gridlock. People do care about their privacy. They just need to be shown a viable path toward reclaiming it.”