For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention, passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an understanding of who in my city is down with building the surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all. I lightly polished each email and fired 'em off. Already got some replies back. Plenty more in the quiver too (pulled and analyzed CSVs of FOIA'd datasets).
If they're gonna spy on me with AI cameras, I can oppose them with AI research. :)
Did you use some stuff like https://github.com/CouncilDataProject or roll your own? Been curious about how to integrate local knowledge like this since local news seems to have lost the niche.
I rolled my own. I hadn’t heard of this one, but I looked into stuff like OpenStates (now privately for-profit owned, ugh). My city just uses a Wordpress site so it’s structured enough. I’m looking at building something to ingest cities with Granicus and one other big local government meeting recorder via API whose name I forget. That should get decent coverage. There’s no way to catch the long tail of every local government’s recording process. Some cities people will just have to do manually. But it’s easy enough with LLM help.
> I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all.
Please tell me you did the work to validate that the quotes and figures were not made up by the cheap model. These things make stuff up all the time, you absolutely cannot rely on them without validating the output yourself.
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...
https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-happened-...
Yep, I manually listened to the meeting recordings (easy to find the spots based on the transcript timestamps) for any quotes. There are also meeting minutes and agendas with supporting docs to corroborate against (e.g. for dollar amounts). They really don’t make stuff up all the time if you root them in data.
Love this. Thanks :)
You created the surveillance state to fight the surveillance state lol
Edit: it's a joke people
Nope, I used a minute fraction of the technology they have, along with open records as is my right in this country, to stand up for my Fourth Amendment right to travel without creeps stalking my every move. I need to make my specific framework a bit more generic and then I'll put it here on HN. Or just offer a platform where people can bring an OR key and it can run on their city.
I grant the lol-concept, but citizens monitoring their government is extremely different from governments monitoring their citizens.
Citizens monitoring their government is literally THE foundation of democracy (ok, maybe voting comes before it, but then you have to monitor who you voted for to see if they’re doing what you voted for).
THE foundation of democracy...
...is "Rule of Law" IMO
Indeed. One is expected in a healthy democracy, the other is essential for a totalitarian state.
It used to be called journalism