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Apple’s upcoming AI-powered wearables highlight growing privacy risks as the right to record police faces increasing threats. The death of Alex Pretti raises urgent questions about surveillance, civil liberties, and accountability in the digital age.
Getty Images, aislan13
AI Wearables and the Rising Risk of Recording Police
Mar 30, 2026
Last month, Apple announced the development of three wearable smart devices, all equipped with built-in cameras. The company has its sights set on 2027 for the release of their new smart glasses, AI pendant, and AirPods with built-in camera, all of which will be AI-functional for users. As the market for wearable products offering smart-recording capabilities expands, so does the risk that comes with how users choose to use the technology.
In Minneapolis in January, Alex Pretti was killed after an encounter with federal agents while filming them with his phone. He was not a suspect in a crime. He was not interfering, but was doing what millions of Americans now instinctively do when they see state power in motion: witnessing.
Pretti’s death is still under investigation, and the legal facts will be contested. But the moral and political question it raises is already clear. In an era when nearly every citizen carries a camera, the act of observing government force has become both easier and more dangerous. Technology has democratized documentation, but it has also transformed the witness into a perceived threat. The result is a troubling pattern: the very tools that were supposed to make power more accountable are increasingly met with intimidation, targeting, and, in the most extreme cases, lethal force.
This is not an isolated dynamic. The bystanders who filmed George Floyd were initially threatened with arrest. Journalists covering the Atlanta “Cop City” protests have been detained and charged under expansive domestic terrorism statutes. In Portland during the 2020 protests, federal officers repeatedly seized and questioned individuals whose primary “offense” was recording. Abroad, reporters in Gaza and the West Bank have been shot while clearly marked as press. The specifics differ, but the logic is consistent. When cameras proliferate, the state begins to treat the act of seeing as subversive.
Pretti’s case brings that logic home. Federal agents operating in an American city confronted a civilian whose only apparent act was observation. Whether through panic, misjudgment, or institutional culture, the presence of a recording device was treated not as a protected exercise of constitutional liberty, but as a provocation. This is the quiet inversion taking place. The First Amendment once stood as a shield for those who spoke and those who watched. Today, in moments of tension, it is increasingly treated as an obstacle.
Technology has changed the architecture of accountability. In the twentieth century, oversight flowed primarily through institutions: courts, legislatures, and professional media. In the twenty-first century, it flows through networks. A single video can expose misconduct, contradict official statements, and mobilize public scrutiny within hours. For communities that have long experienced disproportionate policing and surveillance, the smartphone has become a tool of self-defense in the civic sense. It is how power is checked when formal channels fail or move too slowly.
But this shift has also created a perverse incentive. When documentation becomes ubiquitous, those who wield force know that every action may be dissected and judged. In that environment, the witness is no longer neutral but becomes a liability. The danger is not only the tragic loss of life in cases like Pretti’s, but the chilling effect that follows. If observing police activity can get you detained, pepper-sprayed, or worse, rational citizens will think twice before lifting their phones. The public square grows quieter, and misconduct becomes easier to hide. This is how a democracy drifts, not quite through the abolition of rights on paper, but through the normalization of fear around exercising them.
If the act of witnessing is now central to how constitutional accountability functions, then the law must evolve to protect it explicitly.
First, Congress should enact a clear federal “Right to Witness” statute. Courts have recognized a First Amendment right to record police, but doctrine alone is insufficient when agents on the ground operate under stress and ambiguity. A statute should make plain that recording or observing law enforcement, including federal agents, is presumptively lawful, and that detention, seizure of devices, or use of force solely on that basis is prohibited. Retaliation against witnesses should carry enhanced civil and criminal penalties, and evidence obtained after unlawful interference with recording should be subject to automatic suppression, much as statements taken in violation of Miranda are.
Second, qualified immunity should not shield officers who use force against individuals engaged in clearly lawful observation. The doctrine was designed to protect reasonable mistakes in fast-moving situations, not to insulate retaliation against constitutional oversight. When the conduct at issue is the suppression of a core First Amendment activity, the legal system should err on the side of accountability.
Third, states and cities should assert their role as constitutional backstops when federal operations occur within their borders. “Sanctuary for witnesses” laws could limit cooperation with federal agencies in cases where force is used against civilians engaged in protected recording, and require automatic review by state attorneys general whenever such incidents occur. Federalism should not mean abdication when fundamental liberties are at stake.
Fourth, the legal system should treat bystander footage with the same seriousness as official body-camera recordings. Preservation requirements, chain-of-custody rules, and penalties for destruction or suppression should apply equally. The public’s camera is now part of the evidentiary infrastructure of justice. It deserves institutional protection.
Finally, there should be a clear civil cause of action for obstruction of lawful civic observation. When individuals are targeted, injured, or killed because they were documenting state conduct, they and their families should not have to rely solely on discretionary prosecutions or protracted constitutional litigation. The law should recognize interference with witnessing itself as a distinct and grave harm.
Some state laws already recognize parts of what a federal ‘Right to Witness’ statute would codify. For example, New York’s Civil Rights Law § 79-p explicitly protects the right to document police activity and allows those whose rights are violated to seek damages, a civil remedy that goes beyond mere constitutional claim-making. Several states, such as Colorado, Hawai‘i, and Illinois, also independently protect the right to record police in public in their statutes or constitutions. Yet even in these jurisdictions, officers sometimes detain or seize recording devices, and courts are left to sort out the violations later. This patchwork shows that while recording rights are increasingly recognized, they lack the clear, uniform statutory safeguards against interference, force, and impunity that a federal law would provide.
Beyond statutes and doctrines, there is a cultural shift that must occur. Filming police is often framed as antagonistic, as if the camera were an insult rather than a safeguard. In reality, it is an expression of the same civic impulse that underlies jury service, public trials, and a free press. It is how ordinary people participate in the maintenance of lawful government.
Alex Pretti did not set out to be a symbol. He was a citizen with a phone, recording in a community that promises freedom of speech and freedom of the press. That those freedoms can now place someone in mortal danger should trouble anyone who cares about constitutional democracy. The question his death forces is not only what happened in one encounter, but what kind of political order we are becoming when seeing is treated as a threat.
David M. Hatami is an Offensive Security Project Manager and a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest with The OpEd Project. He previously managed cybersecurity and penetration testing operations at Amazon Web Services and was a fellow with Youth for Privacy.
Editor's Note: This story was updated on 3/30 to accurately reflect the timeliness of past events.
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CONNECT for Health Act of 2025
Mar 30, 2026
How does a bill with no enemies fail to move? That question should trouble anyone who cares about Medicare, about rural health care, and about whether Congress can still do straightforward things.
In plain terms, the CONNECT Act would permanently end the outdated rule that limits Medicare telehealth to patients in rural areas who travel to an approved facility. It would make the patient's home a covered site of care. It would protect audio-only services, critical for seniors without broadband or smartphones, especially for behavioral health. It would ensure that Federally Qualified Health Centers can be reimbursed for telehealth, and it would lock in the pandemic-era flexibilities that Congress has been extending on a temporary basis since 2020. In short, it would turn five years of emergency workarounds into permanent, accountable policy.
The real obstacles have nothing to do with evidence or ideology. The first is cost scoring. The Congressional Budget Office has not yet scored the 2025 version of the bill, but projections typically show increased Medicare spending, perhaps $200 or more per beneficiary per year, because patients who would not have sought in-person care now access services remotely. That projected increase frightens budget hawks in both parties, regardless of whether those members have cosponsored the bill. Until a CBO score exists, no financing solution can be designed, and without one, the Senate Finance Committee has little reason to schedule a markup.
The second obstacle is structural. The CONNECT Act sits in three committees simultaneously: the Senate Finance, House Energy and Commerce, and House Ways and Means. No single committee chair owns it. That fragmentation creates a coordination problem that no amount of lobbying has solved, despite the healthcare sector spending a record $867.5 million on federal lobbying in 2025. On top of that, each short-term extension of telehealth flexibilities reduces the political urgency for permanent reform. The most recent extension, through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026, pushed the deadline to December 31, 2027, giving every member of Congress permission to wait another 21 months. The pattern is familiar: extend, delay, repeat.
Pennsylvania illustrates what is at stake when Congress delays. In 2024, the Commonwealth passed Act 42, a strong telehealth parity law that requires private insurers and Medicaid managed care organizations to cover telehealth at the same standard as in-person care. It passed the state Senate 49 to 1. But Act 42 has a fundamental limitation: it does not — and cannot — cover Medicare. Pennsylvania has roughly 2.8 million Medicare beneficiaries, and not one of them is protected by the state's own telehealth law. Meanwhile, the state faces a projected shortage of more than 6,300 mental health professionals by 2026. For rural seniors in Pennsylvania, telehealth is not a convenience; for many, particularly those relying on audio-only phone calls for behavioral health visits, it is the only realistic way to see a provider. Without permanent
Medicare telehealth coverage, that lifeline, depends on whether Congress remembers to renew it every couple of years.
The stakes go beyond individual patients. In late 2025, Governor Shapiro's administration secured $193 million from CMS as the first tranche of Pennsylvania's Rural Health Transformation Plan, a program designed to build broadband-connected telehealth infrastructure across rural hospitals and clinics, expand remote psychiatric consultations, and create maternal health telehealth hubs. Those investments are built on an assumption: that Medicare will reimburse the telehealth services delivered from those new sites. If Congress does not pass the CONNECT Act, a significant portion of that $193 million will be effectively stranded, and infrastructure built for a reimbursement framework may never be delivered. Pennsylvania is not the only state in this position, but it is a vivid example of how federal inaction can undermine state investment.
The CONNECT Act's problem is not the evidence; rather, the clinical data on telehealth equivalency are mature and broadly accepted. It is not an ideology. The bill has genuine bipartisan support that crosses every conventional political line. The problem is process and path: an unscored bill, fragmented committee jurisdiction, and a Congress that finds it easier to extend than to reform. None of these are reasons to let 2.8 million Pennsylvanians, and tens of millions of Medicare beneficiaries nationally, live with permanent uncertainty about whether their telehealth access will survive the next appropriations cycle. Congress, particularly Pennsylvania's delegation, should push the CONNECT Act to markup and vote well before the December 2027 cliff. The votes are there. The evidence is there. What is missing is the will to use them.
Akshaya Sahasra Ganji is a student at Penn State.
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Voters line up at the Oak Lawn Branch Library voting center on Primary Election Day in Dallas on March 3, 2026. Republicans' decision to hold a split primary from the Democrats and to eliminate countywide voting forced Dallas County voters to cast ballots at assigned neighborhood precincts, leading to confusion. Republicans have now decided to use countywide polling locations for the May 26 runoff election.
Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune
Dallas County GOP Will Agree To Use Countywide Voting Sites for May 26 Runoff Election
Mar 30, 2026
Dallas County Republicans will agree to allow voters to cast ballots at countywide voting sites for the May 26 runoff election after a switch to precinct-based voting sites caused chaos, the county party chair said Tuesday.
Dallas County Republican Chairman Allen West supported the use of precinct-based sites earlier this month, but said using precincts again for the runoff would expose the county party to “increased risk and voter confusion” because the county is planning to use countywide sites for upcoming municipal elections and early voting.
“To then shift for the one day runoff election to precincts would bring about large scale disruption,” West said in a statement.
That’s what critics say resulted from the Dallas GOP’s decision to use precinct sites on Election Day for the primary on March 3.
Under Texas state law, county political parties have the authority to choose how they administer their elections. During the primary, Dallas County Republicans wouldn’t agree to participate in the countywide polling place program, which the county has used for years.
Because both parties must agree in order for countywide sites to be used, both Democrats and Republicans in the county instead had to cast ballots at assigned neighborhood precincts on the day of the election, though the county was still able to offer countywide sites during the early voting period.
Experts and election officials warned the change was likely to confuse voters, and on Election Day, hundreds, potentially thousands, of voters had to be redirected after finding out they were at the wrong polling locations. As polling hours were extended in the wake of the confusion, at least 1,756 Democratic primary voters in Dallas cast late ballots that ultimately weren’t counted. It’s not clear how many Republican primary voters were impacted by the shift. West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Republicans still want a separate primary — which means the parties won’t share poll workers and voting equipment — so runoff voters will likely still see separate lines for Republicans and Democrats, according to West’s statement. West said he plans to sign a contract with the county elections department this week to make the change official. He also signaled it isn’t permanent, saying the party successfully executed the primary and can assess lessons learned “and improve upon the process and procedures for March 2028.”
The move by Dallas Republicans and other county parties to eliminate the countywide polling place program for the primary follows a years-long push by Republicans to ditch it entirely.
Republican critics of countywide voting claim it makes elections less secure because it could allow people “to double or triple vote,” though there’s no evidence that countywide voting is less secure. In addition, Texas election officials have procedures in place to prevent double voting, including the use of technology that helps officials know in real time who has voted and where.
The countywide voting program, which has been in use in Texas for more than 20 years, has allowed counties to save money by using fewer polling locations (and fewer workers and equipment) that are centralized for all voters to use.
Dallas County GOP Will Agree To Use Countywide Voting Sites for May 26 Runoff Election was originally published by Votebeat Texas and is republished with permission.
Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
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Profits over Patients
Mar 29, 2026
The U.S. is entirely alone among major developed countries, its healthcare system functioning like a business.
- Berkeley Economic Review, 2025
Profit maximization has become a dominant organizing principle in U.S. health care.
- HealthCare, 2026
A stunning 77% of Americans believe it is harder now than a generation ago to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, and 65% are so pessimistic that they believe a middle-class lifestyle is “out of reach for most people,” and the American Dream is dead. These grim sentiments primarily reflect the nearly half-century-long stagnation of inflation-adjusted wages and benefits for 111 million working- and middle-class employees - stagnation that has sharply redistributed incomes upward. It has caused the middle class to shrink from 61% of all families in 1971 to just 51% in 2023, while the share of upper-income households nearly doubled from 11% to 19%. Some 30% of all American households are now considered low income, with America’s income disparity more severe even than Russia.
Coupled with inflation, the struggle to achieve a middle-class lifestyle has made affordability a major household concern, especially the cost of health care. Kaiser polling finds that 36% of Americans delayed or skipped needed health care in 2025 due to high costs. And at least before the Iran war spiked gasoline prices, 66% consider health costs more concerning than groceries, housing, or gasoline.
Health care is expensive – embarrassingly expensive. The U.S. is an international outlier. At $14,885 per capita (2024), it is by far the most expensive care on earth, double the $7,371 average of the next 14 richest nations like Australia, Canada, Japan, France, and Germany. Its high cost reflects high prices, not better care – American patients actually average shorter hospital stays and fewer physician visits per capita than abroad.
The U.S. has a few strengths, such as medical research. Yet, despite spending twice as much, the U.S. rationed health care implicitly by cost, resulting in mediocre national outcomes. It is 47th in life expectancy, nearly 4 years shorter on average than other rich nations.
Strong Democracies = Strong Health Systems
While foreign health systems vary in structure, all provide relatively inexpensive, generally high-quality, near-universal public health care. Their lower costs and superior outcomes reflect four seminal differences with America: they do not ration health care by price, they do not trust profit-maximizing firms to supply health care, they have uniform, rigorous regulation of health providers, and their public policies treat health care as a basic human right akin to safe food and water or fire stations. These four differences are a consequence of the higher quality of their democracies - higher quality because their political systems respond effectively to public desires.
In contrast, donor-dominated pay-to-play American politics means policy goals of wealthy elites unsympathetic to workers or government are disproportionately reflected in law. Unlike other rich nations, pay-to-play tarnishes the U.S. as a low-quality, faux democracy on a par with India, Oman, Panama, or Namibia. It is what economists call a Functional Oligarchy.
Opposition from wealthy conservatives, health care providers, and the Republican Party is why America rations health care – why it does not acknowledge health care as a basic human right. This is why 26 million Americans lack health insurance at any point in time, and 100 million lack it at some point every year. That same market ideology is why weakly regulated profit-maximizing corporations provide a majority of America’s health care. It also explains why Republicans fetishize abolishing Obamacare, reject Medicaid expansion at the state level in ten states, are privatizing swaths of the Veterans Administration, and are loosening antimonopoly laws in health care.
Profits over Patients
Profit-maximizing American health providers exhibit behaviors not found in superior health care systems. American providers and insurers, for instance, can profit by overbilling, by refusing claims and pre-authorizations for insubstantial reasons, by charging administrative costs five times higher per capita than in Europe, and by paying executive compensation fourfold higher than in Europe. And they exploit weak regulations to commit fraud and seek oligopoly power to create scarcity.
As the Brookings Institution notes, these rent-seeking, monopoly power, and other flaws in America’s health care markets “have contributed to rapidly rising costs in recent decades.”
In the hospital sector, horizontal consolidation of hospitals has been rapid, raising prices without improving the quality of care. Mega hospital systems now control over 90% of all U.S. hospital beds and 68% of local community hospitals. A 2025 Federal analysis found that such mergers resulted in lower wages for nurses and skilled workers but raised prices from 6% to 65%.
Vertical mergers are also commonplace, with hospitals and insurance companies like UnitedHealth acquiring physicians’ practices. The General Accountability Office (GAO) found that such mergers increased the share of doctors working for hospitals from 30% in 2012 to 47% in 2024. And such consolidation increased physicians’ service fees by 14% on average after acquisition.
Mergers have also created vast hospital deserts. Some 81% of all American counties are officially designated health professional shortage areas, with their 120 million inhabitants lacking proximity or “proper access” to health care providers.
Moreover, America has just 2.7 practicing physicians per 1,000 population compared to an average of 3.8 in Europe. The reason is a residency requirement bottleneck created by law in 1997 that constricts the number of new doctors (while raising their compensation). These pressures are predicted to persist, with estimates of a nationwide doctor shortage within the next decade ranging upward from 86,000.
Private Equity: Buy and Bust
The combination of robust profits on offer and weak regulation has led to a surge in private equity (PE) buyouts in health care. PE firms have been aggressively acquiring hospitals, emergency rooms, physician practices, nursing homes, and hospices, but also less prominent sectors, including veterinary practices and even funeral parlors.
The PE business model focuses on immediately improving profit margins following debt-heavy acquisitions. It prioritizes rapidly compensating limited partners by cost-cutting, reducing staffing, and quickly shedding or mortgaging acquired assets. Critics label the model “Buy and Bust” because acquisitions are typically downsized, dissolved, or rapidly resold – diminishing the quality of patient care in the process. The median holding period for physician practices acquired by PEs is three years.
Analyses find that when the local market share for physician specialties owned by a single PE tops 30%, prices increase an average of 18% for gastroenterology procedures, 13% for dermatology, and 16% for obstetrics and gynecology. And a JAMA article by Harvard and University of Chicago physicians found that hospitals purchased by PEs experienced a 25.4% increase in hospital-acquired adverse medical events (falls, infections), “suggesting poorer quality of inpatient care.”
The elections of 2026 and 2028
The American Health industry delivers inadequate care at exorbitant prices. That extra cost reflects its profit-maximization ethos, fundamentally at odds with superior systems abroad. Those foreign systems (and Medicare) provide lessons for reform. But first, the barrier posed by America’s pay-for-play politics must be overcome – an issue that can only be addressed at the ballot box. Americans are frustrated with their health care system. But reform hinges on the Democratic Party effectively translating that sentiment at the polls in 2026 and 2028.
George Tyler is a former deputy assistant treasury secretary and World Bank official. He is the author of books including Billionaire Democracy and What Went Wrong.
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