By Amanda Barroso, NerdWallet

Here’s how things typically work in my household: I plan the meals each week and my husband cooks. Shopping for the ingredients is left to the person with the most time or energy. I used to write our grocery list on a notepad. But if my husband went to the store, or I forgot the list at home, it became useless. Not to mention that I felt like the burden of making the list fell solely on me.

Why a grocery list app was a game changer

To solve our problem, we decided to try a grocery list app, and it was a total upgrade. We could make and share multiple lists, and add items. Because everything was on our smartphones, it didn’t matter who got stuck with the weekly grocery shop — we always had our list.

Grocery list apps like Bring!, AnyList, Out of Milk and OurGroceries have free versions for iOS and Android users. They sync in real time and are easy to share with other household members, friends or roommates.

Most offer a premium version, which removes ads, or puts you at the front of the customer service line if you have a problem. But the free versions are pretty good and offer a ton of features.

We settled on AnyList because it was free and seemed easy to use. I wasn’t necessarily surprised by the functionality of this grocery list app. But, as the app became more integrated into our meal planning and grocery shopping routine, what caught me off guard was how it began to make other aspects of my marriage better.

“Apps can become powerful tools for building trust, balancing workloads and fostering financial well-being in the home,” Maureen Kelley, a certified financial therapist based in Denver, Colorado, said in an email interview.

It kept us organized

The ability to make and store multiple lists in one place is really helpful. Right now, we have grocery lists for Aldi and Costco, and a separate list of things we need for an upcoming family vacation.

Most grocery list apps use “smart categorization” to group similar items. Keeping produce, dairy, meat, frozen food and pantry staples together makes in-store shopping really convenient. No more zigzagging across the store as you work your way down a paper list. I can also see which items I might want to buy in bulk, or spot overlapping ingredients.

Another benefit? You can create your own categories if the app-generated ones don’t quite fit your needs. For example, our vacation list has a “beach” category that includes sunscreen and beach toys.

It let us share the work of keeping our family fed

One of the first things I noticed after making the switch to a grocery list app is that it spread out the responsibility for list-making. If my husband used up the last of the milk, he could easily add it to the list. The mental load of remembering what we had and what we needed no longer fell all on me.

Kelley defines the mental load as “the invisible burden of organizing, planning and remembering household tasks.” She said grocery shopping is a perfect example.

“It’s not just buying food — it’s meal planning, budgeting, remembering preferences and anticipating needs,” Kelley said. “Over time, this mental burden can make the primary planner feel undervalued or overwhelmed, while the other partner may feel left out or uncertain about how to contribute.”

Some of the smaller annoyances were also gone. I was no longer getting multiple phone calls from my husband asking which item to buy, because he had the list and helped create it.

It helped us save money at the grocery store

There have been times in our marriage where every penny counted and going to the grocery store was a stressful event. It even feels like that now, with rising costs chipping away at any extra money we might have in our budget.

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“With prices on groceries having skyrocketed over the past few years, grocery apps help avoid one of the sneakiest budget-killers in family life: waste from duplicate purchases,” James Moore, deal expert at Savings.com, said in an email interview.

Out of Milk offers a pantry inventory feature. You can scan the barcodes of items in your pantry and mark if items are low. This kind of functionality can “help avoid costly accidental overstocks on eggs, meat and other expensive ingredients,” Moore says.

It’s a lot easier to take stock of your pantry when you have someone else to help. As we’re building our list each week, I call out items we need for our recipes while my husband checks the pantry to see if we have the item. The joint effort makes taking inventory less tedious.

We’ve also switched to store brands, when possible, to save money on groceries. The app lets you write details, such as your preferred brand, size and amount. Some apps, including OurGroceries, even allow you to take pictures of exact items you want, which is sure to cut down on those phone calls from the grocery store.

More than just a grocery list

I never thought switching to a grocery list app would have any sort of impact on my marriage. I was focused solely on convenience. But, there were added benefits these apps don’t advertise: happier moments. I’m less resentful about having to do all the list-making myself, and he’s empowered to add to the list whenever he wants. We’re more likely to stay on budget and share the work of keeping our pantry and fridge stocked.

The process of meal planning and prepping is also more collaborative.

“By turning grocery shopping into a shared responsibility with clear communication and thoughtful planning, couples can reduce stress, improve collaboration and align their food spending with long-term financial goals,” Kelley said.

Amanda Barroso writes for NerdWallet. Email: abarroso@nerdwallet.com.

The article How a Grocery List App Helped My Marriage originally appeared on NerdWallet.

Karen Read will face a second trial beginning Tuesday after all her attempts to throw the charges out have failed.

Here’s what you need to know before it all begins. The Herald also has a guide to who’s who in the retrial.

Read, 45, is accused of striking John O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years and a 16-year Boston Police officer, with her car and leaving him to die in a major snowstorm on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton on Jan. 29, 2022.

She was tried last year on charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death, but that ended in mistrial on July 1, 2024, after the jury reached an impasse.

Efforts to dismiss

Read’s defense team, however, soon argued that the jury was not hung, as five of them had surfaced to say that the jury was ready to acquit on both the murder and leaving the scene charges and was only in disagreement over manslaughter. This, the defense argues, means that to try Read again on anything other than the manslaughter charge would violate Read’s constitutional Double Jeopardy protection rights.

So far, the courts have disagreed. The argument failed with trial Judge Beverly Cannone, who will also preside over the retrial; the Supreme Judicial Court, which upheld Cannone’s ruling; and U.S. District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, who in a nuanced opinion came to the conclusion that the argument did not rise to the level of the federal courts interjecting into state courts.

The defense then appealed to the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled Thursday to uphold Saylor’s ruling.

Cannone also denied a separate defense effort to dismiss for “extraordinary governmental misconduct.”

The quest for a jury

The retrial begins with the start of empanelment for a jury.

“The lawyers should get comfortable for the long haul because this is going to take a while,” retired Superior Court Judge Jack Lu told the Herald about his predictions for jury selection.

The “unprecedented pretrial publicity,” as prosecutor Laura McLaughlin called it in a recent hearing, could make seating an impartial jury an onerous task.

A trial court spokeswoman said 275 potential jurors will be called each day of the first week, with that dropping a bit to 243 a day thereafter. Ahead of the first trial, roughly 90 potential jurors showed up to court each day over five days before a jury was seated.

Boston-area defense attorney William Kickham told the Herald that seating a jury will be “quite challenging to say the least,” spurred on by social media and internet journalism that creates a much different environment than years ago.

“Now, information travels at the speed of light, and almost simultaneously across multiple social media and a variety of internet sources,” Kickham wrote in an email.

“The pretrial publicity, combined with the new documentary series, is going to make empaneling a jury that has no knowledge, bias, or opinions about this case complex at best. This case … could easily rival Sacco & Vanzetti and the Boston Strangler cases, in terms of widespread recognition,” Kickham continued.

Lu said he thinks the obstacle to seating a jury isn’t the publicity and the opinions still festering, but the expected length of the trial. He said while he appreciates companies like Verizon that pay their employees who are jurors their normal rates, that is rarely the case, and a multi-week commitment to the trial is a burden a lot of working people can’t bear.

Lu and Suffolk University Law School Clinical Professor of Law Christopher Dearborn agreed that it’s unrealistic to expect jurors to know nothing about the case.

“The goal is not to seat a jury that knows nothing about the case — a virtual impossibility given the breadth of the media coverage — but rather a jury that the judge is convinced can set aside any prior knowledge of the case and still be impartial,” Dearborn told the Herald in an emailed response.

He said that while “Read’s team has a legitimate concern about their ability to receive a fair trial in Norfolk County,” recent cases show it can be done.

“You don’t have to go very far geographically or very far back in time to find instructive analogs,” he added, saying that the James “Whitey” Bulger mob trial and that of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev “were both cases that had extraordinary levels of regional and national prominence, raising similar concerns, but after a lengthy and exhaustive process, a jury was seated in both cases.”

Flurry of legal activity

While the defense team’s multi-pronged efforts to have the case thrown out made up for a huge number of pre-trial publicity — it wasn’t everything.

“Both sides have filed too many motions,” Lu said.

Kickham said that “both sides are doing what they are professionally obligated to do: secure the best legal footing they can … through exclusions of evidence and expert witnesses — which this case leans very heavily to.”

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While Lu believes that a bulk of the defense motions and challenges are probably to “protect the record” for further appeals down the road, they still reveal a lot of strategy. Other experts agreed.

“Any tactical advantages for either side that existed from their adversary not knowing everything that was coming has been almost completely eliminated as virtually their entire playbooks have been revealed,” Dearborn said.

Lu said that the new lead prosecutor, Hank Brennan, challenging so many of the defense experts allowed him to get transcripts, “but exposed details of his theory of the case so that they can prepare.”

“I would have suggested that Mr. Brennan, a longtime defense lawyer, lay low, and use his defense-honed tactics to overwhelm the defense at trial, rather than by pretrial motion,” Lu added.

All three experts the Herald spoke with said that variously, statistics, experience, and “conventional wisdom” say a retrial favors the prosecution. Lu said he gives the prosecution “a whisker of an edge.”

“Given the straightforward and very linear nature of the Commonwealth’s case the first time around and the more creative and nuanced attack by the defense, I think that reality, in this instance, favors the Commonwealth,” Dearborn said.

Competing theories

The first trial offered jurors two completely different versions of events.

The prosecution’s view was that Read, perhaps nine drinks deep, got into yet another fight with O’Keefe in their fraught relationship just before O’Keefe exited her SUV to go to an afterparty at the Albert residence at 34 Fairview Road. She began a three-point turn, prosecutor Adam Lally argued, and then slammed the vehicle in reverse, striking O’Keefe and spinning his body around where he lay to rest on the frozen lawn where he would freeze and die.

The defense countered the physical and social evidence of that theory, as expected, but said that not only does the evidence not show Read struck O’Keefe with her vehicle but that the evidence suggests that someone else — or multiple other people — killed O’Keefe and then engaged in a conspiracy with local and state police to make Read the patsy.

Under Brennan, the prosecution’s theory appears to remain intact for the second trial, but he has shown that he may be taking a different approach. For one, he announced in a pretrial hearing that he doesn’t intend to bring up the trip Read and O’Keefe took to Aruba just weeks before O’Keefe would die.

That trip was a centerpiece of Lally’s presentation that the relationship between Read and O’Keefe was splintering. On that trip, Read accused Marietta “Etta” Sullivan of “making out” with O’Keefe and it led to a blow-up where yelling and swearing were exchanged between the two women.

Yannetti named three people whom he said had motive and opportunity to kill O’Keefe: Brian Albert, Brian Higgins and Colin Albert. There’s also Brian Albert’s dog, Chloe, who the defense has said could have contributed to scratches and puncture wounds to O’Keefe’s arm.

Neither story completely convinced the jurors, who returned multiple notes indicating a deadlock. Upon the third note, Judge Cannone declared a mistrial.

If the defense’s argument that the jury was actually ready to acquit on all but the manslaughter charge is true, Lu said that still wouldn’t be a win if that happens in trial two: “Conviction of any charge is a loss to the defense in this case.”

Dearborn said that the conclusion suggests “both sides should consider simplifying and streamlining their cases considerably.”

“The message from that first jury seemed clear to me: ‘We don’t believe Karen Read should be found guilty of the most serious charges because we had clear disagreement about her intent,’” Dearborn said. “‘However, we believe she did hit John O’Keefe with the car.’”

“Oversimplified, that jury did not seem to be swayed by the defense theory about a 3rd party culprit, but rather they were trying to decide if it was accidental or not,” he said.

The evidence and figures

Given the wide gap between the two theories on what happened, there is a wider than usual amount of evidence for the jury to look at: both the evidence for or against a vehicle strike and the same for the third-party killer idea.

The defense’s theory of a conspiracy is based on the when a Google search for “hos long to die in cold” from Jennifer McCabe, homeowner Brian Albert’s sister-in-law, was performed. The defense expert says that she made the search at around 2:30 a.m. the day O’Keefe died. If she did, then that would indicate knowledge that something bad had happened to O’Keefe hours before his body was discovered.

The prosecution, and McCabe herself, says that she actually made that search in the 6 a.m. hour, at the request of Read, after the two women and a third, Kerry Roberts, found O’Keefe’s body in the heavy falling snow.

Whether the jury buys the conspiracy will hinge on whether it trusts the defense or prosecution’s computer forensics experts.

“Armed with hindsight, time, and transcripts, both sides should be even more (effective) in blunting the impact of their adversaries’ experts the second time around,” Dearborn said.

The prosecution’s case will rest on the state of Read’s SUV’s taillight and when it shattered. In the days following O’Keefe’s death, taillight pieces were discovered in the area where O’Keefe’s body was found on the lawn. Surveillance footage from around Canton will suggest that Read’s taillight was intact until the drop-off and then was shattered. A State Police trooper will also testify that Read’s vehicle’s system tracked a sudden backward acceleration at the time the prosecution says O’Keefe was hit.

The defense, like last time, has indicated that it will challenge when Read’s taillight was shattered. In the last trial, camera footage from O’Keefe’s home showed that Read backed into O’Keefe’s parked car when she left to go to search for O’Keefe when he didn’t come home that night.

The defense says this is what cracked the taillight — and footage from the Canton Police Department’s sallyport garage, they say, will show that the case’s lead investigator was hanging around the taillight, possibly messing with the evidence.

The lead investigator is Michael Proctor, who was relieved of duty hours after the mistrial. He was fired earlier this month. His downfall came when he was forced during trial to read text messages he sent to friends and family in the early days of the Read case that he admitted on the stand were “inappropriate.”

They included reporting he found “No nudes so far” in Read’s phone and calling Read both a “babe” and a “whack job.” He also texted his sister that he hopes Read “kills herself.”

Proctor became a touchstone for those who believe Read is innocent and that the investigation was flawed. The disgraced Proctor, as the “case officer” in the investigation, is expected to take the stand again in the retrial.

Aidan “Turtleboy” Kearney speaks to supporters of Karen Read and Sandra Birchmore at a rally outside the State House last September. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)

Here are the people you should know ahead of the Karen Read retrial starting with jury empanelment on Tuesday.

Also read: The Herald’s guide to the major developments ahead of the retrial.

The victim: John O’Keefe was a 16-year Boston Police officer when he died at 46 in the early hours of Jan. 29, 2022. He was “not only a dedicated police officer, he was an exemplary guardian, son, brother, uncle and friend and we were so fortunate to have him as a part of our lives,” stated a GoFundMe to support his niece and nephew financially after O’Keefe’s death. The reason for the drive was because O’Keefe took the children in when his older sister and her husband, Kristen and Stephen Furbush, both died in 2013 and 2014. O’Keefe’s mother, Peggy O’Keefe, and younger brother, Paul O’Keefe, are mainstays in the prosecution gallery of the courtroom.

The accused: Karen Read, 45, is accused of backing her Lexus LX570 SUV into O’Keefe, her boyfriend of nearly two years at the time, at perhaps 24 mph ahead of a major snowstorm and leaving him to freeze and die on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton. The Mansfield financial analyst and Bentley College lecturer was first charged in Stoughton District Court on Feb. 2, 2022, just days after O’Keefe’s death. She was indicted for O’Keefe’s murder that June. She has pleaded not guilty and has been out on bail the full time. Her parents, William and Janet Read and brother Nathan Read attend every hearing.

The defense

Karen Read, seated left, with defense team Alan Jackson, Elizabeth Little and David Yannetti discuss jury selection. (Greg Derr/Pool photo)

Boston attorney David Yannetti has represented Read from the beginning and remains at the defense table. Read hired Los Angeles attorneys Alan Jackson and Elizabeth Little, famous for defending Kevin Spacey in Nantucket, to the team in September 2022.

The defense team has expanded even further after the first trial. It added Boston attorney Martin Weinberg, usually a federal court specialist, as “limited appearance counsel” for Read a week after the mistrial to argue the dismissal motions and federal appeals. Read then added New York City-based Robert Alessi to the team last November and he has already been a regular motions arguer in pre-trial hearings and Yannetti says will “be with us for the re-trial, from start-to-finish.” Finally, on Wednesday, the team added attorney Victoria George, a controversial pick as she was an alternate juror in the last Read trial.

The prosecution

Special Prosecutor Hank Brennan, left, makes a note in court as trial prosecutors Adam Lally and Laura McLaughlin look on during a hearing in November. (Greg Derr/Pool)

The two prosecutors from the first trial, Adam Lally and Laura McLaughlin, are still part of the team for the retrial but there is a new leader on the prosecution team: longtime defense lawyer Hank Brennan. He famously defended infamous Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger in his 2013 federal criminal case after which Bulger was sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

Norfolk DA Michael Morrissey, who is himself listed on the defense witness list because they accuse him of meddling in the case by issuing a public statement decrying their theory, appointed Brennan as special prosecutor last September.

Finally, Caleb Schillinger represented the prosecution during the defense’s appeals to the Supreme Judicial Court and the federal courts.

Judge Beverly Cannone (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)

The judge: Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly J. Cannone is returning for round two. The Quincy native and longtime public defender was first appointed as a Quincy District Court judge in 2009 and was appointed to the Superior Court by by Gov. Deval Patrick in 2014.

Third-partiers: The defense has mounted what is called a “third party culprit” defense, at least in practice. Yannetti has named three people as possible alternative culprits: Brian Albert, a BPD sergeant who owned the property that was the site of O’Keefe’s death; Brian Higgins, an ATF agent and Albert’s friend who was there that night and has romantic interest in Read; and Colin Albert, Brian Albert’s nephew, who the defense argues had beef with O’Keefe. The theory hinges largely on another person they say is involved in the conspiracy: Jennifer McCabe, who made a web search for “hos long to die in cold” at a hotly contested time.

Aidan Kearney, aka Turtleboy at a rally outside the Massachusetts State House. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)

The blogger: Holden-based Aidan Kearney blogs, produces videos and runs a social media empire under the “Turtleboy” brand that since the defense first unveiled their theory has become a hotbed of zealously pro-Read content. He serves as the de facto leader of the “Free Karen Read” movement and is indicted himself on more than a dozen counts of witness intimidation in the Read case. Kearney covers the trial and his followers will likely be seen — wearing Read-support pink — just outside the “buffer zone” around the courthouse.

Editor’s Note: This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network.

Over the past several years, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has quietly built out an expansive surveillance apparatus—one that’s increasingly powered by artificial intelligence. Many of these technology acquisitions have been made under the auspices of Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, an $11 billion program that has supercharged the state’s decades-long border militarization. 

The powerful and well-funded state police agency has not just expanded its existing surveillance capabilities, which include a fleet of spy planes, unmanned drones, and a network of wildlife game cameras that are deployed all across the borderlands of Texas, but it also is increasingly using AI-powered software to perform intelligence gathering. 

DPS records obtained and reviewed by the Texas Observer in recent months shed new light on the scope of the state police’s surveillance toolbox. The agency has spent millions acquiring an array of powerful—and controversial—artificial intelligence software tools that can mine billions of images to provide facial recognition, track vehicle locations from automatic license plate readers, monitor phone conversations of inmates in Texas prisons and jails, break into and search for data evidence from seized cell phones and computers, and even track cell phones without a warrant. 

This all comes as Texas lawmakers are considering how to regulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the private sector and by state government. It’s not clear, though, whether any currently proposed legislation would restrict DPS’ use of AI tools for policing or provide meaningful transparency or oversight.

Lawmakers took a first step last legislative session by establishing an AI advisory council to review how Texas state agencies are deploying artificial intelligence. Under the law, agencies were required to produce an inventory of their automated decision systems and an overview of how each tool is used. DPS’ inventory, which the Observer obtained through an open records request, provides a rare glimpse of its full AI arsenal. 

Various AI-powered software programs were purchased under the governor’s border disaster declaration or in response to Abbott’s executive orders to prevent mass attacks, agency records show. Already this year, the state police force has shelled out several million more on contracts that extend its access to these tools for several more years.

The Legislature has supported this expansion with ample new funding for DPS. Last session, the biennial budget gave DPS $22.2 million to acquire “Advanced Analytics & Threat Detection Software”; over $6 million for Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division (ICT) “technology projects”; and $17 million to expand its Operation Drawbridge network of surveillance cameras along the border.

This session, DPS is set to possibly receive around $10 million to fund “contract services to improve investigative capabilities” and acquire “four cellular tracking vehicles,” and $10 million more to continue expanding the Drawbridge network.

As the Observer first reported last year, one of DPS’ key tools is an AI-powered intelligence software called Tangles, which scrapes information from social media platforms and the open, deep, and dark web and includes an add-on that gives police the ability to conduct warrantless cell phone location tracking using commercial data. DPS first acquired Tangles in 2021 through an emergency purchase order issued under the governor’s border security declaration; in total, the agency spent over $900,000 for Tangles licenses in three years. 

Last month, the agency signed a $5.3 million contract to use the Tangles software for the next five years. Per that new contract, the software is needed to “identify and disrupt potential domestic terrorism and other mass casualty threats,” in response to the governor’s executive orders issued after the 2019 mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa.  

Tangles gives the DPS ICT division the “ability to identify potential threats and … to create leads to forward to law enforcement partners for further investigation and actions,” an agency contract acquisition document states. 

A screenshot image, included in a DPS presentation on AI tools, from the Drawbridge border surveillance program. (DPS)

It is unclear how exactly DPS has used the software, including its cell phone tracking powers; in testimony to the AI advisory council last year, DPS officials said the platform is used for “lead generation on active law enforcement investigations” but did not provide any specific examples. 

DPS did not respond to the Observer’s questions regarding the agency’s use of Tangles and other AI investigative tools. 

Civil liberties advocates warn that DPS’ use of Tangles and other tools without a warrant may violate constitutional privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment. 

When used in concert, DPS’ current tech capacity for open-source web intelligence gathering, license plate reading, facial recognition, and phone location tracking gives the agency the ability to look up a person or a car, figure out who they are, what they’re doing, where they’ve been, and who they associate with—all without a warrant, said Savannah Kumar, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas. 

“Many of these technologies are eroding that reasonable expectation of privacy that people have, and [are] kind of leading to this police surveillance state, where the government ends up having … information about people without having to get a warrant,” Kumar told the Observer. 

In Texas, and around the country, advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum have sounded the alarm about how the creeping expansion of police surveillance, coupled with powerful artificial intelligence systems, poses a risk to privacy and civil liberties. 

“We’ve kind of forgotten about how big a behemoth the government has become as a surveiller of its populace,” said David Dunmoyer, a tech policy director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), the state’s influential right-wing think tank. “We’re not by any stretch of the imagination anti-technology, but we’re seeing more and more evidence that technology is not serving the benefits of humanity and, long term, national security and trust in the agency authorities overseeing that.”

One of DPS’s other key artificial intelligence tools is biometric facial recognition software from Clearview AI, a company that works closely with law enforcement. The company’s facial recognition system operates by drawing on “over 40 billion publicly available images”, per the DPS inventory report, that police can search against their own images.

Clearview “enables law enforcement investigators to more quickly and effectively generate investigative leads that can potentially lead to the arrest of criminals,” the DPS report says, and its use “is strictly limited to open investigations.” 

In response to questions from the Observer, Clearview provided an emailed statement from its general counsel Jack Mulcaire, stating: “Clearview AI is used by law enforcement for after-the-fact investigations. It is an investigative tool, not a surveillance tool. Clearview AI only collects completely public online images. Any images stored with Clearview AI by clients are not used for training algorithms.”

Contract records show that DPS acquired Clearview in 2019 and it issued purchase orders for software licenses from 2021 through 2024 under the governor’s Operation Lone Star disaster declaration, records show. In January 2025, DPS awarded Clearview a $1.2 million contract to extend its use through 2030.  

Facial recognition software has long been controversial among both privacy advocates and some public officials, including because of the way companies like Clearview mine personal data—without consent—to fuel their platforms. 

Texas also has its own laws restricting biometric data mining without consent. Google, which is being sued by the Texas Attorney General for alleged violations of that law, has used the state’s contracts with Clearview—which also uses biometric data—to argue that Texas is selectively enforcing the law. Last year, Google subpoenaed Clearview for records about its contracts with Texas. A recent report from 404 Media also revealed that Clearview attempted to purchase hundreds of millions of nationwide arrest records including mugshots and sensitive information like social security numbers and email addresses.

Critics also contend that facial recognition can reinforce existing racial inequities because it can be less accurate when identifying people with darker skin. Clearview has said that its algorithm is more than 99 percent accurate in identifying people of all demographics. Data analysis conducted by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology shows that Clearview AI’s algorithm has a higher false match rate for white women, Black men, and Black women than it has for white men, though for all those tested demographics, the false match rate was still below 1 percent. The company’s recently departed CEO has long disputed the concept of facial recognition bias, which he called a “myth.”

Clearview AI’s general counsel told the Observer that the false match rate was “below 0.00001” for all demographics tested. “Clearview AI’s software uses its facial recognition algorithm to generate law enforcement leads, which are independently verified by a human-in-the-loop process. It is not used in court, but only to help law enforcement with their investigations which include saving current and future child trafficking victims,” Mulcaire, the general counsel wrote in a statement. 

In addition to biometric facial recognition, DPS also uses Cellebrite, a mobile forensic data extraction tool that can bypass phone passwords and encryption. According to DPS’ AI inventory report, Cellebrite “uses AI to analyze images obtained by digital forensic analysis of cellular phones or other electronic devices.” DPS has used the tech for years and last year issued a $2.7 million contract to extend its license through 2027.

DPS’ AI arsenal taps into a vast surveillance network of automatic license plate readers as well. The agency pays for access to Motorola Solutions’ “LEARN” database, which allows DPS officers to “search through captured license plate information and [utilize] limited facial recognition capabilities to generate investigative leads for active law enforcement investigations,” according to the agency’s survey. DPS signed a contract in 2023 for $1.5 million to use the Motorola license plate database for five years, records show.

DPS also has an agreement with the surveillance company Flock Safety, allowing state police to search through data captured by its growing network of license plate reader cameras across Texas, per its inventory report. The company provides plate readers for several major cities; the Houston Police Department, for instance, has more than 3,800 Flock cameras throughout the city. The company’s technology can track vehicles by their license plates and also create a “fingerprint” of a car by its color, make, model, and other details, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group focused on civil liberties related to privacy and technology.

Texas state police don’t just have eyes in the skies, along major thoroughfares and highways, and on the internet. In the early 2000s, Texas also launched Operation Drawbridge to fund the installation of thousands of wildlife cameras on private ranches in South Texas. Ever since, DPS has had a constant live feed across the Texas borderlands. More than 9,000 wildlife cameras generate roughly 250,000 images daily, according to an agency PowerPoint obtained via a public records request. 

Since the program began in 2009, Drawbridge cameras have detected over 2.1 million people, and assisted with the apprehension of over 1.1 million people and with the seizure of over 640,000 pounds of marijuana, per the PowerPoint. 

For many years, Operation Drawbridge required human analysts to monitor the massive network of cameras. Now, machines do that. DPS says the algorithm correctly identifies objects 95 percent of the time. Since at least 2023, DPS has opted for automated image analysis, according to contracting records. That year, the agency signed a contract worth up to $6 million with Deloitte Consulting LLP to create and train an AI system to ingest, process, and categorize up to 175,000 images per day from DPS’ Drawbridge cameras. Deloitte’s Drawbridge AI system classifies objects including people, weapons, wildlife, and suspected drugs, and notifies DPS when it identifies images on a “watch list,” according to contracting documents.

DPS may have other plans for Deloitte’s Drawbridge system: “The algorithm could be used to find likely recurrences of potential suspects, also for predictive analysis,” the agency’s automated systems inventory reads.

“We’ve kind of forgotten about how big a behemoth the government has become as a surveiller of its populace.”

DPS also has a $4.8 million contract with Deloitte Consulting to maintain Spart-N, the agency’s own analytical platform that taps into its various intel tools, records show. DPS also has access to intel from Verus, a software that uses AI to monitor and transcribe inmate phone calls, via the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. DPS has also expanded its social media monitoring capabilities: The agency issued a contract in September 2024 for up to $7.3 million for licenses to ShadowDragon LLC’s social media investigative platform SocialNet through 2029; more than $8.5 million for licenses to use Dataminr’s FirstAlert system, which can monitor, capture, and analyze data, audio and images from social media platforms, including X (formerly Twitter). Between Tangles, SocialNet and FirstAlert, DPS’ contracts for social media surveillance tools could cost more than $20 million over the next five years.

As DPS expands the scope of its AI policing capabilities, lawmakers have put forth legislation aimed at regulating the use of the rapidly advancing technology in Texas.   

At the forefront is state Representative Giovanni Capriglione, a Southlake Republican, who was formerly co-chair of the Texas AI Advisory Council. He made waves early on in this session by filing House Bill 1709, dubbed the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA) that would create sweeping new regulations to, among other things, protect against potential discrimination or privacy violations involving AI deployed by private companies, and, to a lesser extent, state government. State Senator Tan Parker, a Flower Mound Republican and the other former AI Council co-chair, has filed Senate Bill 1964, which is more squarely directed at regulating the state government’s use of AI. 

Capriglione’s HB 1709 includes a provision that experts said could outlaw the use of facial recognition software like Clearview AI by private companies or government entities—including police—though Capriglione disputed that assessment in an interview, telling the Observer that was not the intent of his legislation. More than a dozen states have various laws about how and when police can use facial recognition—but none prohibit it altogether.

Governor Abbott at a DPS hangar in Edinburg. (Francesca D’Annunzio)

HB 1709, however, is now likely obsolete. On March 14, the bill filing deadline, Capriglione quietly filed an overhauled version of TRAIGA as House Bill 149, which removed many of the regulatory provisions aimed at the private sector and gutted many of the proposed oversight powers. The new bill retains the creation of a permanent AI council focused on state agencies’ AI use, but it would limit the council’s power to merely providing evaluations and explicitly states that it cannot “interfere with or override state agency operations.”

Capriglione also rewrote the section that could affect facial recognition technology. 

Like the original TRAIGA bill, HB 149 states that government entities may not deploy AI systems that capture biometric data “for the purpose of uniquely identifying a specific individual,” but it adds a carveout limiting the restriction to uses that would “infringe, constrain, or otherwise chill any right guaranteed by the United States Constitution, the Texas Constitution, federal law, or Texas law.”

That leaves the door open for both tech companies and state agencies like DPS to argue over when facial recognition counts as an infringement of someone’s rights, experts said. “There is no explicit ban in this bill,” said Paromita Shah, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, a legal advocacy group focused on the intersection of immigration and tech issues.

Shah said the new TRAIGA bill “removed all the meaningful guardrails” to protect average Texans against AI and seems to have been heavily influenced by tech industry lobbyists. Neither version of the bill, Shah noted, provides individuals a specific right to sue tech companies over harms caused by AI.

HB 149 was heard before the House Delivery of Government Efficiency Committee Wednesday and was left pending.   

Several AI companies, including those that sell tech to DPS, have registered lobbyists in Texas this session, according to state records, including Clearview AI, Flock Safety, and LEO Technologies, which sells the Verus surveillance software. One company also has connections to state law enforcement in Texas: Skylor Hearn, a former DPS deputy director, was a registered lobbyist for Clearview AI in 2020 and 2021 and joined the company as its government affairs director in 2022. During his tenure at the firm, he testified in other states against banning or limiting police use of facial recognition tech. This session, Clearview AI has three registered lobbyists in Texas. 

Capriglione has previously expressed concerns about law enforcement employing facial recognition and how the use of software like Clearview AI might violate Texans’ civil liberties.

“There are, in your words, billions of images that are looked at and these obviously are not people that have been found guilty,” Capriglione said, directly addressing DPS’ top data officials at an AI advisory council meeting in 2024 regarding Clearview AI. “Almost assuredly, most of them have not committed any crimes.”

The Republican lawmaker cautioned that, while he would not necessarily call the agency’s capabilities a “dragnet,” he had concerns about protecting Texans’ privacy: “It does come into question whether we are creating a wide area of study of people who have not committed a crime and trying to use that for law enforcement purposes.”

In her testimony before the Council, DPS Chief Information Officer Jessica Ballew, said:

“It’s not something we use to proactively go out and just see if the technology thinks there’s a bad actor out there or there’s a picture of somebody doing something that … they shouldn’t be doing. That’s not how it’s used.”

It is unclear whether DPS has official internal policies for how officers should—and should not—use facial recognition software like Clearview AI. 

“I don’t believe the department has one policy in place for the use of Clearview but follow our normal guidelines for using databases, tools, and resources for law enforcement purposes only,” agency employee Lexi Quinney wrote in an email to DPS chief data officer Eric Baker last May, which was obtained in an open records request. (DPS did not answer an Observer question about this email.)

DPS has withheld a memo relating to its use of Clearview AI in response to an open records request, citing attorney-client privilege. The Observer also requested audits and reports relating to how DPS uses Clearview AI and Tangles, and the agency said there were no responsive records.

In their testimony to the AI Advisory Council, Ballew and Baker said that some of the agency’s AI-powered investigative software had built-in audit logs or search histories. 

“At a very basic level, for any technology—no matter what it is—there should be a log that says who used it, when they used it, what their search parameters were, and what the reason was for doing it, and somebody could be able to come back and verify the person wasn’t using it to stalk their ex-wife,” said Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Meanwhile, Senator Parker’s bill, SB 1964, would require Texas agencies to more thoroughly report on how they use AI and what risks of “unlawful harm” these systems have. Under the bill, state agencies would be required to create impact assessments of any AI-powered tools they deploy—though the reports would be considered confidential and exempt from the Texas Public Information Act. 

Progressive and right-wing advocacy groups have found common ground lobbying for stronger civil liberty protections amid the rapid growth of AI tech—including in police surveillance—with both the ACLU of Texas and TPPF pushing legislators to sponsor anti-surveillance bills.

“Texas’ founding documents speak to liberty as its highest ideal, and I think that that is reflected on the left and right and everywhere in between,” said Nick Hudson, a policy strategist at the ACLU of Texas. “People want to make sure that the government isn’t just surveilling people who aren’t doing anything wrong just because they can. … I think that there is a lot of work to be done, and we are hopeful that we’ll see some incremental progress this session, at the very least.”

Across the political spectrum, civil liberties-minded policy wonks and lawmakers have expressed concerns about warrantless police surveillance, whether via license plate readers, facial recognition, or social media monitoring that enables cops to track phone locations. While Republicans have enthusiastically supported the multi-billion-dollar Operation Lone Star, which has helped facilitate the expansion of DPS’ high-tech intelligence network, some GOP lawmakers have also raised concerns about potential constitutional abuses as a result of mass surveillance.  

“Our founding fathers did not actually want a police state,” Capriglione said at a TPPF event in November. “They did not want cameras on every single road or on every single post. They didn’t want to have dragnets … which is what’s happening in Texas today, where there’s license plate readers everywhere … The most dangerous part of all of this is the ability for government to have their hands on this and use it against us.”

After that event, Capriglione affirmed to the Observer that his critique extends to warrantless phone tracking: “I don’t think anybody, not even companies, let alone the government, should be able to track you without a warrant for no reason whatsoever.”

In August, after the Observer published a story about DPS’ use of Tangles and the tool’s capability to engage in warrantless cellphone tracking, two other Republican state lawmakers indicated concern in response. 

State Representative Brian Harrison, an outspoken right-winger from Midlothian, publicly pledged to investigate: “Texas must lead in the defense of individual liberty, and we must never become a police state. Government actions with significant privacy implications need #Txlege involvement,” Harrison wrote on X. “I will be reaching out to [DPS] for more information.”

Harrison’s office did not respond to the Observer’s inquiries about what information he had received from DPS, though the North Texas legislator filed a bill this session that would bar police from using automatic license plate readers without a warrant or court order, along with other restrictions. “Texas must never become a police state, and I have real concern about an unholy marriage between big government and big tech,” Harrison said in a written statement to the Observer. “I appreciate local governments working to keep citizens safe. However, if they want to use these tools to collect data on innocent citizens, they should get a warrant.”

Shah, the attorney from Just Futures Law, said the dangers of surveillance technologies are easily overlooked because they are not viewed as inherently or imminently violent.

“It’s just that it’s creating the infrastructure in which you can be harmed,” Shah said. Plus, she added, many surveillance tools were originally designed for warfare, or by former military intelligence personnel, and should be viewed through that lens and not as the “soft side” of policing, which is how some AI companies market the tools. 

“These are wartime technologies that are now in the hands of local cops,” she said. “We should be really worried.”

We’re reporting on AI-powered surveillance in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with support from the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. We’re seeking tips about how police and prosecutors use automated surveillance tech tools. In particular, we’d love to hear from defense attorneys, public defenders, immigration lawyers, and police officers.

You can contact reporter Francesca D’Annunzio on Signal at +1-512-270-8604 or via email at francesca.dannunzio@proton.me or dannunzio@texasobserver.org. The Texas Observer’s mailing address is: P.O. Box #11554 Austin, TX 78711.

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