Early voting in Frederick County’s June 23 primary began on June 11. On that same day, a political action committee calling itself Momentum Maryland made a $6,425.51 expenditure on behalf of County Council District 1 candidate Jenn Alcorn. The next day it spent $8,621.10 each on behalf of at-large incumbents Brad Young and Renee Knapp. None of those candidates reported receiving any of this money. They did not have to. Under Maryland law, a Super PAC can spend unlimited amounts independently on behalf of candidates without their knowledge or coordination. The candidates do not have to disclose it. Momentum Maryland does.

What those disclosures reveal is a story that Frederick County voters are not supposed to notice before they cast their ballots.

A Super PAC that raised nearly $342,000 in three weeks, spent it all through national Democratic political vendors, and listed a Seattle PO Box as its address wants Frederick County to believe it is a local civic organization.

Momentum Maryland’s public website was registered on May 28, 2026, less than two weeks before early voting began. Its public mission statement is the kind of language that sounds like a Frederick County neighbor wrote it: foster informed conversation, encourage citizens to participate, support policy solutions that strengthen communities. There is no address listed. There is no staff listed. There is no funding disclosed.

What the Maryland campaign finance system shows is a different picture entirely. Momentum Maryland is registered as a Super PAC, giving it the legal ability to raise and spend unlimited money. Its official mailing address on file with the state is a PO Box in Seattle, Washington. Its two officers are listed at an address in a Burtonsville, Maryland strip center with no visible signage.

The committee’s first campaign finance report covers the period from May 21 through June 7, 2026. In that window, Momentum Maryland reported a bank balance of $190,000. Its total documented expenditures to date are $194,690.66. As of its most recent filing it still held $146,905.52 in cash with $5,000 in outstanding obligations. That means this organization raised somewhere in the range of $341,596 in approximately three weeks, from sources it has not yet been required to disclose, and has spent nearly $195,000 of it on three Frederick County Council candidates during the early voting window.

The three candidates receiving Momentum Maryland’s support are not random. Brad Young is the President of the Frederick County Council. Renee Knapp is an at-large member of the same body. Jenn Alcorn is the Democratic candidate for the District 1 seat that covers the Adamstown area where Quantum Loophole acquired 2,100 acres for a gigawatt-scale data center campus.

On December 23, 2025, the Frederick County Council voted 5 to 2 to approve a 2,600-acre Critical Digital Infrastructure Overlay Zone north of Adamstown, more than 1,000 acres larger than the planning commission had recommended. The vote came over the fierce objections of residents who packed public hearings in Save Our Rural Legacy shirts. Brad Young supported the expanded zone. Renee Knapp voted for it.

Jenn Alcorn’s campaign platform describes a balanced approach to data centers while accepting endorsements from the Mid-Atlantic Pipe Trades Association and IBEW Local 24, both of which have direct financial interest in data center construction. She also received a $6,000 contribution from a pipefitters union with a Baltimore address. The two council members who voted against the data center zone, Jerry Donald and Steve McKay, are not receiving Momentum Maryland money.

The pattern is not subtle.

The Seattle, Washington PO Box listed as Momentum Maryland’s address is unexplained by anything on the committee’s public filings. Seattle is not a Maryland city. It is not the address of either of the committee’s two officers, both of whom list Maryland addresses.

The committee’s treasurer is Andrea R. Selkirk, a Compliance Coordinator at Ballard Spahr LLP, one of the nation’s 100 largest law firms. Ballard Spahr has a dedicated Data Centers practice group and a Government Relations and Public Policy practice with Maryland lobbying capabilities. In January 2025 the firm completed a merger with Lane Powell PC, a Seattle-based law firm, creating a direct organizational bridge between the firm’s infrastructure and the Pacific Northwest. Ms. Selkirk, whose professional background also includes a previous role as Conflicts Branch Supervisor at Squire Patton Boggs, is the legally responsible party for every financial filing Momentum Maryland submits to the state of Maryland.

The committee’s chair is identified in state filings as John Sterne. Public records indicate a John H. Sterne Jr., who goes by Jay, is a registered federal lobbyist operating through Windward Strategies in Bethesda, Maryland, with addresses in Annapolis, Washington DC, Alexandria, and other locations. The Frederick Conservative has not independently confirmed that the John Sterne listed as Momentum Maryland’s chair and Jay Sterne the federal lobbyist are the same individual, and we invite any clarification.

Every dollar Momentum Maryland spent went to three vendors. Not one was a Maryland company. Not one was a Frederick County media outlet.

Stagwell Global, headquartered at One World Trade Center in New York City, is a publicly traded global marketing services network whose political division includes SKDK, described in industry publications as a Democratic mega-firm that worked on the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign. Stagwell received $91,004.01 from Momentum Maryland across five separate disbursements between May 30 and June 12. Beyond its media placement fees, Momentum Maryland’s most recent filing also lists a $5,000 outstanding obligation to Stagwell described only as “purpose consulting fees, general,” bringing the firm’s total compensation from this operation to more than $96,000.

DSPolitical LLC, headquartered at 1133 15th Street NW in Washington DC, describes itself in its own words as pioneering the best integration of data and technology to deliver wins for progressive candidates, causes, and issues. DSPolitical received $95,843.48 from Momentum Maryland on June 9 for what the filing describes as media online advertising targeting all three candidates.

Meta Platforms received $7,852.17 from Momentum Maryland on June 9 for Facebook and Instagram advertising targeting Frederick County voters.

The complete spending timeline shows a professionally coordinated escalation. Money began flowing on May 30. A third candidate was added on June 2. A massive single-day deployment of $120,937.85 occurred on June 9. On June 11, the first day of early voting, Jenn Alcorn received another disbursement. On June 12, Young and Knapp received another round. Every payment went to Stagwell, DSPolitical, or Meta. The operation has $146,905 remaining and seven days of voting left.

Momentum Maryland has not yet filed a report disclosing where its nearly $342,000 came from. Under Maryland law, that disclosure will come. The question is whether it comes before or after Frederick County voters finish casting their ballots on June 23.

Until that disclosure arrives, voters are entitled to ask some straightforward questions. Who funded a Super PAC that appeared three weeks before early voting and immediately began spending six figures on three candidates who supported the data center overlay zone? Why does a Maryland civic organization use a Seattle PO Box? Why are its two officers a federal lobbyist and a compliance coordinator at a law firm with a data centers practice? Why did every dollar spent go to a Democratic presidential campaign advertising network and a firm that explicitly describes its mission as delivering wins for progressive candidates?

These are not partisan questions. They are accountability questions. Frederick County residents of both parties packed public hearings in Save Our Rural Legacy shirts because they believed decisions about their land, their water, their roads, and their community were being made without them. The pattern of money documented in this article suggests that effort to bypass the public did not end when the council voted in December.

It moved to the next election.

You may have noticed them appearing on poles at intersections near you. Small cameras, often mounted discreetly, marketed to local governments as traffic safety tools or license plate readers for stolen vehicle recovery. The pitch is always the same: safer streets, faster response times, better outcomes for your community.

The company most aggressively selling this product to municipalities across America is Flock Safety, based in Atlanta. Their cameras photograph every license plate that passes, day and night, and store that data in a searchable cloud database accessible to law enforcement across jurisdictions. They do not just photograph vehicles involved in crimes. They photograph every vehicle. Every trip to the grocery store, the doctor, the church, the political meeting, the gun shop. All of it. Logged. Searchable. Shareable.

They call it traffic safety. What they have built is a national vehicle movement surveillance network, marketed one small town at a time.

Most of us do not need a political science lecture to understand what government overreach feels like. We lived it. Beginning in 2020, Americans were told they could not attend church, could not visit dying relatives in hospitals, could not keep their businesses open, could not send their children to school, and in some jurisdictions could not leave their homes without a government-approved reason. The people who imposed those restrictions did not ask permission. They did not put it to a vote. They declared emergencies, issued mandates, and enforced compliance through fines, license revocations, and public shaming. And when Americans pushed back, they were told that questioning the authorities managing the crisis was itself dangerous.

The lockdowns ended. The instinct that produced them did not. What changes now is the infrastructure available to act on that instinct. A government that was willing to close your church and fine you for sitting in a park did not become less interested in controlling your behavior when the emergency declarations expired. It became better equipped.

To understand what is happening in Frederick County and communities like it across America, you need to understand that the data center, the surveillance camera, and the artificial intelligence system are not three separate things. They are three parts of one system, and they only work together.

The camera is the collection point. It gathers data constantly, on everyone, whether or not anyone is suspected of anything. The data center is the warehouse. It stores that data, indexes it, makes it retrievable in milliseconds, and keeps it indefinitely. The artificial intelligence is the analysis engine. It finds patterns, makes predictions, connects individuals to behaviors, and flags anomalies for human review.

Alone, a camera on a pole is just a camera. Alone, a data center is just a building full of servers. But connected through fiber optic networks and powered by artificial intelligence, they become something that no government in human history has ever had before: the ability to monitor the movement, behavior, and associations of an entire population in real time, at scale, at low cost, with no practical limit on retention.

Frederick County residents fought the data center overlay zone because they were worried about their farmland, their water, their power bills, and their roads. Those concerns are legitimate and serious. But there is a larger question underneath all of them that has not yet been asked publicly in any county council hearing, any planning commission meeting, or any candidate forum.

What is this infrastructure actually going to be used for?

Frederick County sits in a geography that is not accidental. The QLoop fiber network built by Quantum Loophole runs 40 miles from the Adamstown site, tunneling under the Potomac River, connecting directly to Ashburn, Virginia, known as Data Center Alley, the largest concentration of data centers on earth and home to significant facilities serving the NSA, the CIA, and the broader federal intelligence community. Frederick County farmland is now in direct fiber reach of that infrastructure in under one millisecond.

Scott Noteboom, who served as Chief Technology Officer of Quantum Loophole, previously ran operations at Yahoo and Apple, two of the world’s largest clouds. During his tenure at Yahoo, the company was reported to have built custom software at the direction of United States intelligence agencies to scan hundreds of millions of incoming customer emails in real time. Yahoo’s chief information security officer resigned over the decision. Civil liberties attorneys called the program unprecedented and unconstitutional.

None of this proves that the data center campus planned for Frederick County farmland is an intelligence community project. What it establishes is that the people who built it, the infrastructure that connects it, and the geography in which it sits are deeply embedded in the world where commercial cloud computing and government surveillance have long shared the same servers.

The camera on the corner records where your body goes. That is the surveillance most people can picture. What is harder to picture, but far more consequential, is the surveillance that records where your mind goes and then works to change it.

Every search you conduct, every article you pause on, every video you watch past the first ten seconds, every post you linger over, all of it is logged, analyzed, and fed into systems designed to learn what moves you. Not to understand you. To influence you. The algorithm does not care what you believe. It cares what will make you keep scrolling, what will make you angry enough to share, what will make you afraid enough to click. It optimizes for engagement, and it has learned that the most reliable path to engagement runs through outrage, fear, and tribal identity.

Most parents of teenagers know what this looks like in practice even if they cannot name the mechanism. A child who was curious and open becomes rigid and extreme. A young person who had a wide circle of friends retreats into a digital community that reinforces a single worldview to the exclusion of everything outside it. In the most tragic cases a young person is radicalized toward violence by a process that took place entirely on a screen, shaped by systems that no one elected and that answer to no one. We have already seen where that leads. The evidence is in the body counts.

The population fragmented along algorithmic lines, sorted into mutually hostile tribes, each convinced the other is not merely wrong but dangerous, is not an unintended consequence of the technology. It may be the point. A population busy directing its rage inward, at its neighbors, at the other side of whatever divide the algorithm has most recently inflamed, is a population that is not looking at the people managing the system. It is not asking who built the infrastructure, who funds the politicians, or who benefits when communities destroy themselves from within. History offers enough examples of those in power finding population reduction and social fragmentation useful tools of control that the question deserves to be asked aloud, even if it makes people uncomfortable.

The data centers being built on Frederick County farmland are the physical infrastructure that powers these systems. The fiber running under the Potomac delivers the data that feeds them. The artificial intelligence running on those servers is the engine that executes them at scale. When we debate whether to allow this infrastructure in our community we are not debating an abstract economic development question. We are debating whether to become a more active node in a system that is already reshaping how an entire generation thinks, feels, and sees the world and that may have purposes far beyond anything its public pitch materials acknowledge.

I have been thinking about a conversation I had nearly twenty years ago with a relative who was deeply connected to national Democratic politics, someone whose spouse was among the first delegates committed to Hillary Clinton’s earliest presidential ambitions. I asked him how he could support a party whose policies seemed consistently to harm the very people it claimed to champion. His answer was short and unguarded. He said: we have to keep those people under control.

I have never forgotten it. Not because it was shocking, exactly, but because it was honest in a way that political people rarely allow themselves to be in conversation. It named the thing that usually goes unnamed.

Control is not an abstraction. It requires infrastructure. It requires the ability to know where people are, what they are saying, who they are meeting with, what they believe, and what they might do. For most of human history that kind of knowledge required enormous resources, human informants, physical surveillance, and still produced only partial and unreliable pictures. The result was that control was expensive, leaky, and ultimately limited by the sheer number of people a government could actually watch.

That limitation is ending. Not someday. Now. The infrastructure being built in communities like Frederick County, connected by fiber to the intelligence community corridor, powered by artificial intelligence that can analyze behavioral patterns at population scale, monitored by cameras that record every vehicle that passes any intersection in the network, represents the first time in human history that comprehensive population surveillance has become technically and economically feasible for a government that chooses to use it.

The people selling it to your local government call it economic development. They promise jobs and tax revenue. They hire Super PACs to fund the candidates who will vote for it. They stand up websites three weeks before elections and pour money through national progressive political advertising firms to make sure the right people win. The full financial details of that operation in Frederick County are documented in the companion article in this issue.

And they count on the fact that most people are not paying attention to the connection between the camera on the corner, the data center on the former farmland, the fiber running under the river, and the political operation working to protect the elected officials who made it all possible.

Early voting continues through June 18. The primary is June 23. The candidates who voted for the data center overlay zone over public objection are receiving substantial outside Super PAC money from a committee with a Seattle PO Box, a Ballard Spahr compliance officer as treasurer, and a federal lobbyist as chair. The full financial record is documented in the companion article in this issue.

Ask your candidates where they stand on data center oversight, on surveillance camera networks in Frederick County, and on the public’s right to know who is funding the campaigns that shape local policy.

And before you vote, consider who is paying to make sure certain candidates win.

Because whoever is writing those checks is not doing it for your benefit.