By McKenzie Romero | Editor
Concern is flying around the country and on both sides of the aisle about how data from license plate readers like Flock cameras is being used.
That includes in Utah, where a concerned civic group found that in Weber County, almost 97% of searches for the information collected by its 10 cameras were made by law enforcement from outside the state.
In today’s Dispatch we lay out the findings about who is accessing Utah’s Flock data, ongoing negotiations over sharing the shrinking Colorado River’s water, and the GOP party platforms denouncing IVF.
“The more that we dive into this issue, the more we’re learning that these cameras and this technology and the data is being utilized to surveil people who either live, work, or visit Utah.” — Clark Dice, Utah Civic Compact communications director, on the group’s concerns about license plate reader data collection and use.
A Flock Automated License Plate Reader on Overland Road in Boise, as captured on Aug. 5, 2026. (Valentin Termite/Idaho Capital Sun)
By Alixel Cabrera
The records of Weber County’s license plate cameras from the Flock Safety network were searched 5.1 million times between February 2022 and July 2026, the Utah Civic Compact found. The No. 1 searcher of the county’s data was the Houston Police Department, which accounted for over a third of all activity.
Utah law limits searches to active criminal investigations, outstanding warrants, or to search for a missing or endangered person or a stolen vehicle, but it’s not clear whether out-of-state agencies accessing Utah data are following those laws.
John Entsminger, Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager and Nevada’s lead negotiator on the Colorado River. (Photo Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)
NEVADA CURRENT
By Jeniffer Solis
Nevada’s top Colorado River negotiator said lower-basin states are still pressing for adjustments and attempting to forge consensus-based alternatives before federally mandated water cuts announced by the Bureau of Reclamation last month are finalized.
Arizona and Nevada criticized the framework for placing a disproportionate burden on the lower basin while sparing upper-basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — from mandatory water cuts.
Idaho Democratic state Rep. Brooke Green, her toddler Bridger Byington, and her baby Bryson Byington at the Boise River in Boise, Idaho, on August 6, 2026. Opposition to the two ways that Green had her children, IVF and surrogacy, is rising. (Photo by Otto Kitsinger for Stateline)
STATELINE
By Kelcie Moseley-Morris
Several years before a cancer diagnosis made pregnancy too dangerous for her, leading her to a surrogate to give birth to her baby, Brooke Green, a Democratic state representative in Idaho, cosponsored bipartisan legislation codifying the best practices already in use by surrogacy agencies in the state that has been called the unofficial capital of surrogacy in the United States.
In the past two years, Republicans in Idaho and four other states have added specific anti-IVF language to their state party platforms, and some anti-abortion groups, including Students for Life of America and Live Action, have become increasingly outspoken in their opposition to both IVF and surrogacy.
RECENT DISPATCHES
MORE UTAH NEWS
Thanks for reading Your Daily Dispatch. Did you know our weekend digest is also free? Sign up here. And if you enjoyed today’s edition, please forward to a friend. Increasing our readership helps us cover more news.