Dena Temple Roston (2:40)

A 440 acre facility proposed right along the edge of St. Charles.

Scott Stratton Henderson (2:46)

And don't get me wrong, I think St. Charles, we would love to be open for business, but it really has to be smart development, not reckless development.

Dena Temple Roston (2:55)

That was the moment Scott realized he couldn't just stay on the sidelines. He needed to do something about it. He decided to launch a small revolution against the tech industry.

Dena Templewastin (3:06)

Foreign

Dena Temple Roston (3:10)

I'm Dena Templewastin and this is Click Here we tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. This week, the cloud, that far off place storing our data, isn't in the sky at all. It's all down here in buildings filled with humming servers that gobble up power and land. As artificial intelligence explodes, those buildings are multiplying and they're starting to make their way into places like St. Charles. And in many cases, big tech isn't getting a warm welcome, it's getting a fight.

Scott Stratton Henderson (3:45)

You know, I'm only 20 years old, but I've not seen something that has rattled a community so much.

Dena Temple Roston (3:53)

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Dena Temple Roston (5:42)

You're listening to Click here. I'm Dina Temple Roston. Scott Stratton Henderson was 20 when the data center fight came to town, and it seemed absurd on the face of it that he could take on Big Tech and win. He didn't have experience or connections. What he did have, though, was passion. Passion for the place that raised him, St. Charles, Missouri.

Scott Stratton Henderson (6:08)

I wanted to make sure that this thing didn't go well against St. Charles because I have always thought of St. Charles as a place worth fighting for.

Dena Templewastin (6:19)

For fun and adventure close to home, visit St. Charles, Missouri.

Scott Stratton Henderson (6:22)

A little cliche, but it's kind of what you'd see in the movies, you know, feel like kids still go outside and whatnot, ride their bikes. So all that sort of thing, it's

Dena Temple Roston (6:31)

all waiting for you. Shop, dine, stay, play, discover St. Charles, Missouri. So the thought of a massive humming data center planted in the middle of that, it just felt wrong to Scott. Not just because it was coming to St. Charles, but where in St. Charles they wanted to put it.

Scott Stratton Henderson (6:50)

The biggest controversy surrounding it and the biggest reason why I had a problem with it was the location.

Dena Temple Roston (6:58)

The proposed site wasn't some industrial corridor. It sat beside family homes and small farms.

Scott Stratton Henderson (7:06)

Literally, those people have to walk out every morning and see that massive thing right next to their house.

Dena Temple Roston (7:12)

And then there was the noise.

Scott Stratton Henderson (7:14)

You get noise and sound pollution. Data centers are known to have that kind of low humming sound.

Dena Temple Roston (7:25)

The hum can travel for miles. A constant industrial heartbeat you can't shut off. And even if people could learn to live with that, what lay beneath the proposed site, that was impossible to ignore.

Scott Stratton Henderson (7:38)

St. Charles, we already have a hell of an issue with our water and our wellhead district, which is where they

Dena Temple Roston (7:46)

were going to put this thing, their wellhead district. While other towns draw their water from reservoirs, St. Charles Drinks from underground aquifers and their aquifer. It had already been through a lot. A few years back. Toxic chemicals from a nearby plant had seeped into the groundwater, forcing the city to shut down six of its seven wells.

Asad Ramzan Ali (8:09)

The city of St. Charles is taking action, conducting its own investigation into water contamination. At the city's elm point well field.

Dena Temple Roston (8:17)

The city handed out bottled water. There were lawsuits, and the contamination. It hasn't even been fully resolved yet. And now residents were being asked to trust a new industrial project Sitting directly on top of the wellhead wouldn't make things worse. And this one would come with a new kind of risk. Diesel fuel.

Scott Stratton Henderson (8:39)

One of the parts of this proposal was supposed to put a million gallons of diesel fuel as a backup power option on top of the wellhead as well. And St. Charles and Missouri in general is a huge tornado prone area.

Dena Temple Roston (8:57)

It also sits on a fault line. So if one of those generators were to rupture from a storm, a quake, or simple human error, those backup tanks could turn a precaution into a catastrophe.

Scott Stratton Henderson (9:10)

You know, we're one natural disaster away from being a complete and utter contamination event happening.

Narrator/Reporter (9:17)

There's also the matter of the water.

Dena Temple Roston (9:19)

It takes just to run a data center. They can consume enormous amounts of water to cool their servers, roughly up to 5 million gallons a day. They also pull massive amounts of electricity from the grid. So when a data center comes to town, water tables shrink, power bills rise, carbon emissions spike. Scott's first instinct was Civics 101. Start a petition, Knock on doors, talk to neighbors. But there wasn't time. The city council vote was just a few weeks away. So he went digital,

Scott Stratton Henderson (9:56)

started a petition against it. With the change.org petition, it was a

Dena Temple Roston (10:01)

huge shot in the dark. St. Charles leans conservative, pro business, not exactly a hotbed for grassroots battles against major development. But when Scott checked back a day

Scott Stratton Henderson (10:15)

later, it multiplies and multiplies and multiplies. And then I think within the first 24 hours, it got over 500 signatures.

Dena Temple Roston (10:24)

Two weeks later, more than 7,000.

Scott Stratton Henderson (10:27)

So it all happened really quick.

Dena Temple Roston (10:33)

It wasn't just a petition drive anymore. It was a movement. David versus Goliath, armed not with a slingshot, but a change.org wink. And the giant on the other side of the screen was about to take notice. Stay with us.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (10:59)

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Dena Temple Roston (11:29)

click here comes from Monarch, the all in one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. Lots of us are thinking about our finances in 2026. But when it comes to paying off debt, building an emergency fund, and saving for major milestones, you need a tool that doesn't just track your wallet. You need something that helps you plan, project, and achieve your goals. Set yourself up for financial success this year with Monarch. It brings your entire financial life, budgeting, accounting and investments, net worth and future planning all together in one dashboard. It's cleaner than a big spreadsheet documenting all your expenses, which can make you feel bad about past spending. Monarch keeps you focused on planning ahead and gives you the complete picture so you can make decisions that actually move the needle. Set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch the all in one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Use the code clickhere@monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code. Click here. How does the brain process memories? Why is AI a solution and a problem for our climate? What is leadership in 2025 and beyond? The TED Radio Hour explores the biggest questions and the most complicated ideas of our time with the world's greatest thinker. Listen now to the TED Radio Hour from npr. From Recorded Future News, this is Click here. When Scott put his petition online, the city council was weeks out from voting on the big to data center or not to data center. But in a sense, the people of St. Charles were already starting to cast their votes. Thousands signed that petition and they started

Narrator/Reporter (13:31)

to gather offline too.

Scott Stratton Henderson (13:33)

People reached out to me and it kind of became a more organized effort with business owners and community members and people really working hard to have more of a unified opposition to it as opposed to just a few ragtag group of citizens.

Dena Temple Roston (13:52)

And as the opposition coalesced, the developers began showing up in town to make their own case.

Project Cumulus Lawyer (13:59)

We're going to end up becoming a significant part of the St. Charles and St. Louis economy and it's exciting to start bringing that into the new digital economy.

Dena Temple Roston (14:08)

And that right there, that's the main argument Big Tech brings to towns like this. They say they're offering progress.

Asad Ramzan Ali (14:16)

This seems like an industry of the future. It seems like something that we would want to invest in. So let's do what we can to lure those data centers here.

Dena Temple Roston (14:23)

This is Asad Ramzan Ali, the director of AI and Technology Policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.

Asad Ramzan Ali (14:30)

I don't think that's a bad instinct. I think governors and politicians who want to bring jobs to their states, that's a great thing. But in this particular case it's worth looking at. What exactly is the roi? What exactly?

Dena Temple Roston (14:42)

Roi, Return on investment, things like jobs and taxes. And the thing politicians love the most, the so called multiplier effect. When one big employer pulls another's behind it. Like when an auto plant comes to town.

Asad Ramzan Ali (14:58)

The auto example is a good one where you have thousands of jobs being created in an auto plant. You have the supply chain that springs up around it and all of those people who work there also eat lunch. They also go to the grocery store. So you get all the kind of multiplier effects of the economy. When people move in with data centers, it's different.

Dena Temple Roston (15:16)

Different because the jobs tend to vanish as soon as the concrete dries. There's a year, maybe two, of construction

Asad Ramzan Ali (15:23)

work, but those jobs disappear in 12 or 18 months when the construction's done. The permanent jobs inside the data center, you're talking about a Couple dozen each.

Dena Temple Roston (15:34)

While data centers may sound futuristic, they're not exactly transformative. A data center is basically a giant storage closet for the Internet.

Asad Ramzan Ali (15:44)

That's not the same. You don't build a neighborhood for 30 people. You don't have new restaurants spring up because 30 people move to a certain area of the city. And so the multiplier effects are smaller for data centers.

Dena Temple Roston (15:55)

And even the taxes they promise, Assad says those often evaporate too, especially in places like Missouri.

Asad Ramzan Ali (16:02)

In the state of Missouri, if you create 10 jobs and invest 25 million, you are exempt from all state and local use and sales tax.

Dena Temple Roston (16:12)

Tax breaks like that, Assad says, tilt the balance away from the community and toward big tech.

Asad Ramzan Ali (16:19)

Look, I'm not anti data center. I think that AI can have a lot of good and I think we will need a lot of data centers to be competitive geopolitically. But if I was a mayor, I'd say how does this help or hurt your long term objectives?

Dena Temple Roston (16:33)

There were a lot of questions the people of St. Charles wanted answered. But Scott, the 20 year old who started the petition, says no one even knew who they were negotiating with.

Scott Stratton Henderson (16:43)

Right. So that would tie into the non disclosure agreements.

Dena Temple Roston (16:49)

Everyone involved, even the mayor, had to sign NDAs just to get in the room to hear about the data center. Tech companies argue the secrecy protects proprietary information and even national security. Critics say it just keeps the public in the dark. In St. Charles, that secrecy didn't quiet Scott and the opposition, it supercharged it.

Scott Stratton Henderson (17:13)

That's something that frankly, big tech companies are just going to have to swallow is that they're going to need to share some more information with the communities they want to do business with or else you're going to get a lot of pushback like they have been having.

Dena Temple Roston (17:28)

And that pushback came fast. Yard signs appeared, flyers circulated, local press took notice. Protests followed. Hey, hey, ho ho.

Scott Stratton Henderson (17:39)

The data center's got to go.

Dena Temple Roston (17:41)

Hey hey ho ho.

Scott Stratton Henderson (17:43)

The dance.

Dena Temple Roston (17:44)

City council meetings in St. Charles used to be sleepy affairs.

Scott Stratton Henderson (17:48)

This is local government, right? So you don't have a big, you don't have a big crowd.

Dena Temple Roston (17:53)

But suddenly there were crowds, dozens of people lining up to speak this non

Asad Ramzan Ali (17:59)

disclosure agreements are unacceptable to us.

Scott Stratton Henderson (18:07)

We have the right to know what's

Asad Ramzan Ali (18:09)

going on in our community.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (18:11)

I do not want this over the water head where it might affect my children, my grandchildren and everybody in here. You can't buy back your health.

Scott Stratton Henderson (18:24)

I urge the city council to reject outright any plans for this data center. Additionally, I want to say I'm very Proud of my son's Scott.

Dena Temple Roston (18:33)

That's Scott's dad. And then came the vote. It was the height of summer, August 19. Interest was so intense, the meeting had to be moved from city hall to a convention center just to fit everyone.

Asad Ramzan Ali (18:47)

I'd like to call to order the regular session of the city council of The City of St. Charles, Missouri, dated Tuesday, August 19, 2025.

Scott Stratton Henderson (18:57)

Madam Clerk, could you please call the roll?

Dena Temple Roston (18:58)

The first person to step up to the mic that night was a lawyer for Project Cumulus.

Project Cumulus Lawyer (19:04)

Mr. Mayor, members of the commission, you are well aware we are not voting tonight on the application. That's because we have withdrawn the application. Because over the past, We have had significant feedback from you as members of the council and from the folks that were just cheering behind me, asking questions about this project, about its impacts, and, frankly, about the process to date, and process matters in this community. And I'm here to say the process was poor. We did a bad job at it.

Dena Templewastin (19:48)

Thank you.

Project Cumulus Lawyer (19:49)

Thank you.

Dena Temple Roston (19:54)

But after the proposal was withdrawn, people stayed for three hours. They vented, not just at the developers, but at the city leaders they felt had failed them. Trust had cracked open between citizens and city hall and between progress and the price of it.

Asad Ramzan Ali (20:12)

And I call on you to resign immediately so a real conservative can lead St. Charles County.

Dena Temple Roston (20:21)

Saint Charles isn't alone. As technologies like AI ramp up, so will demand for data centers. And across the country, communities are pushing back, forming networks, sharing tactics, learning how to read the fine print. No one betting on St. Charles would have predicted how this ended. A college student takes on big tech and wins. At least for now. The developers withdrew their proposal, but the fight isn't over just yet. The city council left the door open, saying they could come back in a year. Some residents worry the plan is to just wait them out, to let fatigue do the work that persuasion couldn't. But Scott had one last thing to say that night.

Scott Stratton Henderson (21:07)

The people of St. Charles, Missouri, have spoken. And even though they have withdrew their application, for the time being, they plan on coming back. My message to them is St. Charles does not want or need your data center. When you come knocking on our city gates again, the good people of St. Charles, Missouri, will be waiting.

Dena Temple Roston (21:41)

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Dena Templewastin (24:41)

If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.

Narrator/Reporter (25:11)

Here are some of the top tech stories making news this week. It's Tuesday, February 3rd

Asad Ramzan Ali (25:19)

Google Google, accused of eavesdropping on folks, has now agreed to pay $68 million to settle a class action lawsu.

Narrator/Reporter (25:28)

The lawsuit claims Google's devices were recording private conversations not because people asked them to, but because they were accidentally triggered by words mistaken for hey Google or ok, Google. Those recordings, according to the suit, were then shared with third parties for targeted advertising. Google denies any wrongdoing, but if the settlement is approved, it will cover anyone who bought a Google device after May 2016 who experience these so called ghost recordings. And it's not the first time. Last year, Google paid the state of Texas $1.4 billion to settle claims over data privacy violations. Once again, convenience comes with a cost, and that cost may be surveillance. Next, a cyberattack in Europe, a major

Dena Temple Roston (26:17)

cyberattack that could have left half a

Asad Ramzan Ali (26:19)

million people without power.

Dena Temple Roston (26:21)

And Poland.

Narrator/Reporter (26:22)

In December, the Russian hacking group Sandworm targeted Poland's power grid. Not the massive transmission hubs, but dozens of smaller distributed energy facilities, renewables, combined heat and power plants the kinds of systems that rely on remote connectivity and often receive far less cyber security investment. Poland's lights stayed on, but hackers accessed operational systems and permanently disabled equipment at several sites. Researchers say the attack signals a shift. As energy systems become more distributed, they also become more exposed, and now more clearly than before, they have become legitimate targets.

Asad Ramzan Ali (27:03)

Some social media platforms like Meta have started blocking links to Islist, citing policies around sharing personal information.

Narrator/Reporter (27:11)

Meta has started blocking links to a site called ICE List, a crowdsourced page that claims to document the names of Department of Homeland Security employees, along with reports of immigration raids, sightings and vehicles. The volunteers behind the site say they're simply holding federal agents accountable. Meta says the site violates its policies on sharing personal information, but the creator of Islist says links to the page circulated on Metis platforms for months without any issue. So why the change now? It may have something to do with what happened in mid January, where the site claimed to upload a leaked list of 4,500 DHS names. It quickly went viral. All of this is unfolding as the Trump administration has been pressuring tech companies to remove tools that track ICE activity. The site is still online, just not on Facebook threads or Instagram. And finally, something new from Apple.

Asad Ramzan Ali (28:12)

This new feature limits the precise location from cellular networks.

Narrator/Reporter (28:17)

Apple is rolling out a new feature that allows some iPhone users to limit how precisely cell networks can track their location. Every time your phone connects to a cell tower to make a call or to receive a notification, that connection can reveal exactly what where you are. With this new feature turned on, cell carriers will only be able to see your general neighborhood. The change won't affect emergency services or app based location sharing, and for now it's limited to certain models in certain places. As law enforcement increasingly relies on cell carrier data to track people's movements, and as hackers continue to target that data, this move could make one thing harder to pinpoint exactly where someone is. Click Here is a production of Recorded

Dena Temple Roston (29:11)

Future News and prx.

Narrator/Reporter (29:12)

Today's show was written and produced by

Dena Temple Roston (29:14)

Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Gaeda, Zach Hirsch and Casey Georgie. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cavato, and Fact Check by Darren Ancrum.

Narrator/Reporter (29:25)

Original music is by Ben Levingston, with

Dena Temple Roston (29:27)

additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Narrator/Reporter (29:30)

Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound

Dena Temple Roston (29:34)

designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Niswonger. Find us on X or Facebook at Click Here. Show or leave us a voice message at 661-5ch. Talk sometimes we'll turn those moments into reports, sometimes into a conversation, and sometimes into a future story you'll hear on this show. I'm Dena Temple Raston, and thanks for listening.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (30:05)

Support for this program comes from Recorded Future. In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what can be seen, it's what gets missed. Recorded Future analyzes billions of signals to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Recorded Future Know what matters, act first

Dena Templewastin (30:20)

if you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.