Across the United States, dozens of law enforcement officers face accusations of misusing Flock, a surveillance network of 120,000 cameras that track license plates. Flock’s proponents claim that the technology does far more good than harm; one investor tells the Washington Post that abuse is “truly a nonissue.” But fear isn’t a statistic. Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer structure their investigation of Flock’s misuse by law enforcement around the story of a woman in suburban Atlanta who had her whereabouts tracked hundreds of times by her ex, the local chief of police. Their report telescopes between the tradeoffs of a “transformational” technology and a few nightmarish cases of misuse.

Bakely said the cameras had left her feeling powerless to stop her ex-boyfriend from tracking her life. She didn’t feel safe asking the police agency he led, she said, and she couldn’t get access to records that would have shown the surveillance was happening in real time. After Steffman told her about his Flock searches, she filed for a restraining order, but a judge denied it on the basis that she couldn’t prove ongoing abuse, court records show.

He “watched every single move I made,” she said. But “who do you turn the chief of police in to?”

The war in Iran began five months ago. Headline news about the conflict tends to focus on when and how it might end. In the meantime, the impacts of the conflict are felt worldwide—by drivers, farmers, business owners, and families. The Associated Press shares the stories of seven people suffering because of the war. Among them is Edgar Funelas, a jeepney driver in the Philippines who lives with his ten-year-old daughter:

He uses laundry soap—harsher, but cheaper—to wash his body and his clothes in the same motion, stretching what little money he has. Even before the war in Iran, he was living on the margins. A fire took their home and their belongings, forcing them to move into the brightly colored minibus he drove.

He’d hoped to be able to rent a room by now. Then diesel prices surged, and he could no longer afford the fuel to run his jeepney.

He hasn’t earned a single peso in days. There will be no breakfast. Hunger gnaws, but it’s the small rituals of privacy that he misses most: to be able to wash out of sight, to sleep behind walls, to keep his desperation from being laid bare.

Mark Seal is very fond of the phrase “Who Ya Gonna Call? Scam Busters!”—he uses it three times in this piece. Yet it’s still refreshing, despite being from last year, to read a story that focuses on the painstaking effort to trace scammers rather than lingering on the victim’s humiliation (looking at you, Netflix). Seal does explain how a French woman named Anne fell for “Brad Pitt” online and subsequently lost her fortune to the scammers, but her supposed savior, cyber‑detective Marwan Ouarab—sporting a cat‑in‑a‑trench‑coat T‑shirt—gets most of the page time here. Ouarab apparently found the scammers within 48 hours, but no charges have been made, and Anne is still fighting to recover any of her money. You can call the scam busters, but you’re still in for a long wait.

“All during the scam, Anne was suspecting something,” he says over a vanilla flan, a sweet treat for a very determined guy. “But every time, the crooks had fine words, the right words. They were really poetic. They knew what words were right for her. They really understood Anne’s psychological profile.”

It was a classic “sentimental scam,” says Ouarab—a carefully produced, all-encompassing “theatrical event” that uses love as the bait to hook the target and then envelops them completely in the con. (In this case, the divorced interior designer, Anne, whose last name has not been made public, and a convincing facsimile of Brad Pitt, achieved via A.I., deepfake technology, and, according to Ouarab, “ridiculous photoshop tools to create pictures of the fake Brad in his hospital bed.”)