Data Center Protests | How To Stop Data Centers

The Numbers That Explain Why Your Grandchildren Will Be Fighting Wars Over Water (But With Robots)

Over the next four years, they’re planning to build more than 12,000 data centers in the United States. Currently there are 5,500. They’re going to MORE THAN DOUBLE them in four years. Total investment: $5.2 trillion.

 

Protesters rally against STAMP data center plan during Hochul visit in Buffalo

The demonstration called for a moratorium on new data center development across the state.

Tommy Gallagher (WGRZ)  May 22, 2026

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Environmental activists, local organizations, and members of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation gathered outside the Buffalo Irish Center to protest proposed data center development in New York State.

Specifically, they targeted plans for the STAMP site in Genesee County while Gov. Kathy Hochul attended a fundraiser inside on Thursday evening.

The demonstration, organized by several local groups and environmental advocates, called for a moratorium on new data center development across the state. Protesters focused their concerns on the proposed project at the Genesee County STAMP site.

Although Hochul did not directly address demonstrators outside the event, she discussed the Genesee County STAMP plant earlier in the day, saying New York has some long-term interest in data centers, but only with certain standards.

Stream Data Centers, the company behind the proposed project, says the development would create 125 permanent jobs at the STAMP site and approximately 1,200 construction jobs during the buildout.

RELATED: Litigation aims to stop latest STAMP project in Genesee County 

According to Honor the Earth, there are currently at least 106 proposed data center projects near or on Native lands. In western New York, a proposed $19.46 billion data center project would sit adjacent to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s territory, threatening an old forest that tribal citizens use for hunting, fishing, and gathering traditional medicine. 

STOP DATA SURVEILLANCE CENTERS 

The Underground Blueprint to Destroy the Tech Bro Plan to Enslave the Planet With AI Data Centers by 🐺The Wise Wolf

OR: How a Broke Hobojournalist With No Car Weaponized a Zero-Budget Strategy to Kill the Coming AI Dystopia Before It Starts

Read on Substack

**

TRICKS:

Step one: Corporation identifies land it wants. (”That subdivision would make a great server farm!”)

Step two: Corporation identifies local politicians who appear purchasable. (This step is easier than you’d think. Most politicians advertise their availability through campaign finance disclosures.)

Step three: Campaign contributions flow. (Legally! It’s all very legal! Just structured donations that definitely don’t constitute bribery because we’ve defined bribery in a way that excludes all the ways rich people buy politicians.)

Step four: Local politicians create or gain control of a “development authority” or similar governmental body. (Every state has slightly different names but they all do the same thing: provide legal cover for theft.)

Step five: Corporate executives or their proxies sit on that authority. (Just like how Pfizer’s VP George Milne sat on New London’s development board. Totally normal. No conflict of interest here. Just government officials who happen to work for the corporation benefiting from the government decisions they’re making.)

Step six: The authority declares the project serves “economic development” and therefore provides “public benefit.” (Jobs! Tax revenue! Economic growth! Never mind that a Costco also provides all those things.)

Step seven: Eminent domain gets deployed. (This is the part where armed government agents show up to inform you that your family home of 30 years now belongs to people who own more money than your town’s entire assessed property value.)

Step eight: Properties get seized. (The government takes your house. You get “fair market value” which is determined by the government. You cannot negotiate. You cannot refuse. You leave or they arrest you.)

Step nine: Land transfers to the corporation. (Usually for $1 or some other nominal fee because why pay market rates when you’ve captured the government.)

Step ten: Corporation gets massive tax exemptions for 10 to 20 years. (Because obviously a multi-billion-dollar data center needs tax breaks. How else will the investors afford their fourth vacation homes?)

Step eleven: The public pays for all the infrastructure upgrades. (New roads to the facility? Public expense. Upgraded power lines? Public expense. Water infrastructure? Public expense. The corporation pays for none of this.)

Step twelve: Corporation keeps all the profits. (Shocking twist: the economic benefits that supposedly justified the taking don’t actually benefit the public whose property and tax dollars funded everything.)

 

More on data centers: Almost Half of US Data Centers That Were Supposed to Open This Year Slated to Be Canceled or Delayed 

 Futurism

https://futurism.com › artificial-intelligence › data-centers-tribal-communities

Tech Companies Are Using Insidious Tactics to Build Data Centers on Native Lands...

Apr 24, 2026 Data center developers are using NDAs and bait-and-switch tactics to force Tribal leaders into building data centers on Native lands.

 

VISIT: 

 

https://www.instagram.com/stopdatacolonialism/ 

Demands for action grow as details of Indigenous surveillance program surface

 

Nearly 6,000 pages of documents reveal the Security Service was casually monitoring Indigenous political activity as early as 1968, amid concerns about outside influences from radicals and communists. Its posture changed in 1973, after 200 non-violent youth activists occupied the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa for 24 hours and made off with duffel bags full of documents. 

CBC Indigenous obtained nearly 6,000 pages of RCMP Security Service documents through access to information requests. They include intelligence dossiers compiled between the late 1960s and early 1980s. (Alex Lupul/CBC)

READ: https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/rcmp-spies-1970s-indigenous-rights-9.7134112

NATIVE AMERICA CALLING:

First Nations, Inuit, and Métis leaders across Canada are calling for an investigation into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). That’s following a report by CBC Indigenous that uncovered evidence of a secret surveillance program targeting Indigenous organizations and individuals using wiretaps, informants, and counter subversion tactics from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The report confirms what many Indigenous communities long suspected.

We’ll also reflect on 150 years of the Indian Act, the Canadian federal statute that defines First Nations membership or “Indian Status”. A new bill in Canada’s parliament could significantly expand status eligibility for thousands of individuals and their descendants.

GUESTS

Russ Diabo (Kahnawake Mohawk), First Nations policy analyst

Daniel Sims (Tsay Keh Dene First Nation), associate professor of First Nations Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia

Family Surveillance by Algorithm

Janice Howe's grandchild Derrin Yellow Robe, 3, stands in his great-grandparents' back yard on the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota. Along with his twin sister and two older sisters, he was taken off the reservation by South Dakota's Department of Social Services in July of 2009. READ

It took over a year and a half for Erin Yellow Robe, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, to be reunited with her children. Based on an unsubstantiated rumor that Erin was misusing prescription pills, authorities took custody of her children and placed them with white foster parents — despite the federal Indian Child Welfare Act’s requirements and the willingness of relatives and tribal members to care for the children.

For white families, these scenarios typically do not lead to child welfare involvement. For Black and Indigenous families, they often lead to years — potentially a lifetime — of ensnarement in the child welfare system or, as some are now more appropriately calling it, the family regulation system.

Child Welfare as Disparate Policing

Our country’s latest reckoning with structural racism has involved critical reflection on the role of the criminal justice system, education policy, and housing practices in perpetuating racial inequity. The family regulation system needs to be added to this list, along with the algorithms working behind the scenes. That’s why the ACLU has conducted a nationwide survey to learn more about these tools.

Women and children who are Indigenous, Black, or experiencing poverty are disproportionately placed under child welfare’s scrutiny. Once there, Indigenous and Black families fare worse than their white counterparts at nearly every critical step. These disparities are partly the legacy of past social practices and government policies that sought to tear apart Indigenous and Black families. But the disparities are also the result of the continued policing of women in recent years through child welfare practices, public benefits laws, the failed war on drugs, and other criminal justice policies that punish women who fail to conform to particular conceptions of “fit mothers.”

Turning to Predictive Analytics for Solutions

Many child welfare agencies have begun turning to risk assessment tools for reasons ranging from wanting the ability to predict which children are at higher risk for maltreatment to improving agency operations. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania has been using the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) since 2016. The AFST generates a risk score for complaints received through the county’s child maltreatment hotline by looking at whether certain characteristics of the agency’s past cases are also present in the complaint allegations. Key among these characteristics are family member demographics and prior involvement with the county’s child welfare, jail, juvenile probation, and behavioral health systems. Intake staff then use this risk score as an aide in deciding whether or not to follow up on a complaint with a home study or a formal investigation, or to dismiss it outright.

Like their criminal justice analogues, however, child welfare risk assessment tools do not predict the future. For instance, a recidivism risk assessment tool measures the odds that a person will be arrested in the future, not the odds that they will actually commit a crime. Just as being under arrest doesn’t necessarily mean you did something illegal, a child’s removal from the home, often the target of a prediction model, doesn’t necessarily mean a child was in fact maltreated.

We examined how many jurisdictions across the 50 states, D.C., and U.S. territories are using one category of predictive analytics tools: models that systematically use data collected by jurisdictions’ public agencies to attempt to predict the likelihood that a child in a given situation or location will be maltreated. Here’s what we found:

• Local or state child welfare agencies in at least 26 states plus D.C. have considered using such predictive tools. Of these, jurisdictions in at least 11 states are currently using them.
• Large jurisdictions like New York City, Oregon, and Allegheny County have been using predictive analytics for several years now.
• Some tools currently in use, such as the AFST, are used when deciding whether to refer a complaint for further agency action, while others are used to flag open cases for closer review because the tool deems them to be higher-risk scenarios.

The Flaws of Predictive Analytics

Despite the growing popularity of these tools, few families or advocates have heard about them, much less provided meaningful input into their development and use. Yet countless policy choices and value judgments are made in the course of creating and using the tool, any or all of which can impact whether the tool promotes “fairness” or reduces racial disproportionality in agency action.

Moreover, like the tools we have seen in the criminal legal system, any tool built from a jurisdiction’s historical data runs the risk of continuing and increasing existing bias. Historically over-regulated and over-separated communities may get caught in a feedback loop that quickly magnifies the biases in these systems. Who decides what “high risk” means? When a caseworker sees a “high” risk score for a Black person, do they respond in the same way as they would for a white person?

Ultimately, we must ask whether these tools are the best way to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, when such funds are urgently needed to help families avoid the crises that lead to abuse and neglect allegations.

What the ACLU is Doing

It’s critical that we interrogate these tools before they become entrenched, as they have in the criminal justice system. Information about the data used to create a predictive algorithm, the policy choices embedded in the tool, and the tool’s impact both system-wide and in individual cases are some of the things that should be disclosed to the public before a tool is adopted and throughout its use. In addition to such transparency, jurisdictions need to make available opportunities to question and contest a tool’s implementation or application in a specific instance if our policymakers and elected officials are to be held accountable for the rules and penalties enforced through such tools.

In this vein, the ACLU has requested data from Allegheny County and other jurisdictions to independently evaluate the design and impact of their predictive analytics tools and any measures they may be taking to address fairness, due process, and civil liberty concerns.

It’s time that all of us ask our local policymakers to end the unnecessary and harmful policing of families through the family regulation system.

Read the full white paper:

https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/family-surveillance-algorithm

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The Surveillance of Cindy Blackstock

Surveillance. Turns out, we’ve invited it into our homes through digital assistants, connected toys and baby monitors.
LISTEN: I Spy With My Digital Eye

In this podcast episode, Dr. Cindy Blackstock who advocates for Native children in Canada is featured.
We have posted many articles on her on this blog.

READ:
Cindy Blackstock, Canada's Warrior for Children
CBC 8th Fire: Profile: Cindy Blackstock
Child Advocate Cindy Blackstock awarded damages

Government spies on advocate for Native children
Why is the federal government spying on Cindy Blackstock?
When does a life-long advocate for aboriginal children become an enemy of the state?
The answer, it would seem, is when you file a human rights complaint accusing your government of willfully underfunding child welfare services to First Nations children on reserves.
Accusing your government, in other words, of racial discrimination.
That’s what Blackstock, as executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, did in 2007.