by The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.
Begin with what is real, because the first answer is worse than most people assume. A company called Flock Safety operates roughly ninety thousand cameras across about seven thousand networks in the United States, and the company says its system performs around twenty billion vehicle scans a month. The cameras read your license plate. They also read what Flock markets as a vehicle fingerprint: make, model, color, the roof rack, the dent in a quarter panel, a bumper sticker, even whether you sit in a car or on a bicycle. Each reading carries a time and a place. The University of Washington Center for Human Rights, working only from public records, found that federal immigration agents reached this data in 2025 through what its researchers named front-door, back-door, and side-door access. In Virginia, the Center for Investigative Journalism counted nearly three thousand searches tied to immigration enforcement on the state’s Flock network across a single year, after local departments had promised their cameras would never serve that purpose. Those same audit logs caught a police officer in Texas running a nationwide Flock query for a woman who had ended her own pregnancy, a crime under that state’s law.
So the fear is well-founded. Every claim above rests on a date, a court filing, or a public record, not a conspiracy forum.
Can you dissolve what has already been recorded?
Partly, and the honest answer turns on where you live, which makes it worse for those of us here in New Jersey.
California passed the Delete Act, and on the first day of 2026 the state privacy agency, CalPrivacy, opened a tool called DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform. Here is how it works. A California resident verifies identity through a state gateway or Login.gov, files one request, and that single request travels to every data broker registered in the state, free of charge, which collapses a job that used to mean hundreds of separate forms into a few minutes. More than five hundred brokers sat on the registry the day it opened. Starting on August 1, 2026, those brokers must check the platform at least every forty-five days, delete the matched records across their own systems and their downstream contractors, and finish within ninety days, or pay two hundred dollars per request, per day, for the privilege of ignoring you. The deletion reaches further than California’s older privacy right, since it covers every piece of personal information a broker holds about you and not only what you handed over yourself. The enforcement is already live. A state Data Broker Enforcement Strike Force has fined several firms, and one operating as Datamasters was penalized and pushed out of the California market for reselling lists of people sorted by Alzheimer’s diagnosis, by addiction, by age, and by race, lists it advertised under names like Senior Lists and Hispanic Lists.
Read that and the shape of the thing comes clear. The deletion right is genuine, enforceable, and narrow. It reaches registered brokers and stops short of the open web, public records, the data already copied into a federal system, and the cameras on the poles. It belongs to Californians alone. New Jersey gives you real tools here, though it trails California. Since January 2025 the New Jersey Data Privacy Act has given residents the right to see, correct, and delete the data a company holds, plus the right to opt out of its sale, and since that July the state has required businesses to honor a universal opt-out signal, a setting like Global Privacy Control that you switch on in your browser once and that then tells every site you visit to stop selling your data. The law also treats your precise location as sensitive data a company cannot process without your say-so. What New Jersey lacks is California’s one-stop machine. There is no DROP here and no broker registry, so the deletion right has to be spent company by company, and only the state attorney general can enforce it, with no private lawsuit available to you. Daniel’s Law adds a separate shield for judges, prosecutors, and police, letting them demand their home addresses come down. The clean and total erasure does not exist for you here, and even in California it halts at the broker’s door.
Erasure is hard for the same reason the data is precious. Location records alone were a twenty-one-billion-dollar global business last year. Federal immigration authorities have bought phone-location data from brokers rather than seek a warrant for it. Senator Ron Wyden documented an anti-abortion group that purchased location data and used it to push targeted messaging at people who had visited any of six hundred reproductive clinics across forty-eight states. A record of where you go is a product, and a product resists deletion the way spilled water resists being poured back into the glass.
The cats are safe, and I had this one wrong too
Here I have to correct one of my own fears, because I held it as firmly as anyone, and it does not survive contact with the physics.
The microchip in my cat Percy and the microchip in my cat Lotty cannot be tracked. Not by Bluetooth, not by GPS, not by satellite, not by a data center in any desert, not by anyone who is not physically pressing a scanner against the animal’s shoulder blades. A pet microchip is a passive RFID transponder, a glass capsule about the size of a long grain of rice, working at 125, 128, or 134.2 kilohertz. It carries no battery and no power source of any kind. It does nothing until a reader comes within a few centimeters and floods it with a radio field, which the chip borrows for a fraction of a second to murmur back a single identification number, meaningless without the private registry that ties it to a name.
The physics closes off the rest. A GPS receiver needs an antenna with a clear view of the sky, and the antenna for these frequencies is larger than the whole chip. Living tissue swallows roughly forty-seven to fifty decibels of signal across fifty millimeters, and the GPS signal reaching the Earth’s surface is already a whisper above thermal noise. Bury a receiver under a cat’s skin and the sky goes silent. Wildlife researchers who implant tracking hardware in snakes have to run the antenna out through the skin to get any signal, which is surgery, not the quick injection the veterinarian gave them. Locating Percy in real time would take a powered tag on a collar; the implant earns its keep only after a human finds and scans the animal. Our cats are nobody’s network node.
I make this correction so the instinct gets aimed where it belongs. The hunch that something small and embedded is reporting on you is sound as instinct and false as fact for the cats, and every hour of worry it eats is an hour not spent on the device up on the pole that is reporting on you. Since I first worked this through, a defense contractor has begun listing pet microchips among the signals its roadside sensors claim to capture, a claim I take apart later in this piece, because it dies on the same physics and earns the same skepticism the original fear deserved.
Bluetooth: a real leash, loosely held
The Bluetooth fear lands much closer to the truth, though it needs trimming too.
Every Bluetooth device announces itself by broadcasting small advertising packets, and for years each one carried a fixed hardware address that let a mall, a stadium, or anybody with a cheap receiver follow a phone from sensor to sensor. Apple, Google, and the chip makers answered with address randomization, rotating the broadcast identifier so the trail breaks every few minutes. That defense is partial at best. Researchers have shown the randomization can be undone by fingerprinting the contents of the packets, by exploiting the instant when the address rotates while the payload does not, and by reading identifiers that leak out of device profiles no matter how often the address changes. Randomization raised the price of tracking and left tracking possible.
The bigger development hides inside a convenience you may already lean on. Apple’s Find My network turned hundreds of millions of iPhones into the largest crowd-sourced location system ever assembled. Any nearby Apple device that overhears a lost item’s Bluetooth beacon quietly uploads an encrypted location report, accurate in cities to about ten meters, and Google runs the same play on Android. The design carries real privacy engineering, rolling keys meant to keep even the company from reading the trail, and researchers have pried open cracks in those guarantees again and again. The architecture that helps you find your keys doubles as an ambient mesh that can locate any small broadcasting object anywhere people carry phones, which is how an AirTag dropped into a bag or stuck to a bumper became, in the language of the reporters who covered it, a near-perfect instrument for stalking. Apple and Google have since bolted on cross-platform alerts that warn you when an unknown tracker travels with you, a patch on a wound their own network opened. Bluetooth, then, is a leash. It is loosely held, frequently anonymized, and still, under the right conditions, perfectly able to set you down on a map. A defense contractor has now turned that loose leash into a roadside trap, building a sensor that reads the broadcast off the devices in your car as you drive past and ties it to your license plate, and I come to it below.
Have the cameras identified every body that passes?
Not yet, and that qualifier carries the whole weight of the answer.
Flock’s plate readers are built to read vehicles, and the company is consistent in saying its automated plate cameras do not run facial recognition. Grant that claim full value and the relief lasts about one sentence, because the company has spent the past year widening what the network sees. It has begun converting still cameras into video cameras, letting police request live feeds or short clips of whatever rolled past, and stacking generative AI on top so an officer can search the footage in plain English. Flock’s own demonstration is a search for a landscaping trailer with a ladder. The software has no instinct to stop at trailers. It can be asked to find a description of anything the lens caught, which includes the people inside the cars and the people on the sidewalk. The company also markets a camera line called Condor that pans, tilts, and zooms onto faces as people walk by, and a data product called Nova that wires the cameras into commercial data brokers and, in Flock’s own phrasing, lets an investigator jump from a plate to a person. A separate Flock device, an audio sensor named Raven, was advertised in 2025 as listening for human distress, its promotional material showing police alerted to the sound of screaming.
The honest summary holds two facts at once. The cameras have not yet catalogued every face in situ, and the system is being engineered, sale by sale, toward a world where the distance between seeing your car and naming you shrinks to nothing. Resistance is just as real, and you deserve to know it, since despair is its own brand of inaccuracy. An activist project called DeFlock has crowd-mapped more than seventy-six thousand of these readers. Since the start of 2025, at least thirty municipalities, among them Flagstaff, Cambridge, Eugene, and Santa Cruz, have switched their cameras off or torn up their contracts. Mountain View pulled its entire network, and the California Attorney General sued the city of El Cajon for sharing plate data across state lines. Flock, for its part, says communities govern their own sharing, points to a single toggle added in January 2026 that severs all federal sharing at once, and denies any link to Palantir. Those controls exist because the public dragged them into existence. The pressure has teeth. After 404 Media exposed that Flock’s people-search tool, Nova, was drawing on data lifted from hacks and breaches, employees objected in writing and the company publicly pulled the breach data, though an independent reading of Nova’s code argues the capability never fully left. The wider reporting on Flock drew a congressional investigation and a formal referral asking the Federal Trade Commission to step in. In December of 2025 the same outlet found more than sixty of Flock’s face-zooming Condor cameras sitting open on the public internet, their live feeds and a month of archived video reachable by anyone who knew the address. The apparatus is neither sealed nor inevitable, and it leaks from both ends, which is the opening you are looking for.
Why the desert is filling with data centers
Here the chain of suspicion snaps, and the break is worth understanding, because it tells you what you are actually fighting.
Whatever you have heard, the vast facilities rising in the deserts and the exurbs are an artificial-intelligence story, and the money settles the matter. Roughly five hundred eighty billion dollars went into AI-focused data center construction worldwide in 2025, and the announced pipeline through 2030 approaches two and a half trillion. Individual campuses are designed to pull between one and four gigawatts each, and a single four-gigawatt site burns more electricity than the city of Houston. In Virginia, data centers already eat close to a quarter of the state’s power. The International Energy Agency expects global data center demand to cross a thousand terawatt-hours, near the annual appetite of all of Japan, and it names AI as the cause. Almost none of that concrete and copper has anything to do with surveillance. Construction is exploding because training and running large models ranks among the most power-hungry industrial activities our species has attempted, and the firms racing to do it are sprinting against one another.
The link to all of this is real and indirect, which is what makes it easy to miss and important to state precisely. This whole effort had a different goal entirely, and watching people simply became one of its cheapest byproducts. The same compute that lets a model answer your email makes it trivial to run plate recognition at twenty billion scans a month, to search video by spoken description, to match a face against a database in the time it takes to blink, to braid a broker’s location feed together with a camera’s timestamp. For most of human history, watching people was expensive, and the expense acted as a brake. The data centers stripped that brake out of the machine without ever building the machine itself, and the difference decides where your resistance should go.
Leonardo, and the machine that reads the car around you
Leonardo turned out to sit at the center of the exact escalation I had been reading about, the one that reaches past the plate and into the devices riding inside the car with you.
Start with the company, because its structure explains its motive. Leonardo is a large aerospace and defense firm headquartered in Rome, the business that once traded as Finmeccanica, carrying a market value in the neighborhood of thirty billion euros. Its catalog runs from helicopters and military radar to electronic warfare and surveillance aircraft, and through an American arm now called Leonardo US Cyber and Security Solutions, assembled years ago out of a company called Selex, it sells the ELSAG line of license plate readers. That same arm holds contracts with United States Special Operations Command and with the General Services Administration. The detail closes the distance between the abstract defense contractor and the camera bolted to the pole on your corner, since ELSAG and Flock occupy one shelf of hardware.
Now the part that matches the article I read. On the eighth of June 2026 the reporter Joseph Cox at 404 Media documented a Leonardo product called ELSAG SignalTrace, and his account runs close to the alarming version I had encountered, with two corrections that pull in opposite directions. SignalTrace is a sensor that clips onto an existing plate reader and listens to the radio spectrum around a passing car. It harvests the identifiers thrown off by the electronics in the vehicle: the Bluetooth signature of a phone, a set of wireless earbuds, a smartwatch or fitness band, a tablet, a laptop, and the car’s own emitters, meaning the tire-pressure sensors, the infotainment head unit, the built-in Wi-Fi hotspot. When the same bundle of devices keeps appearing beside the same vehicle, Leonardo’s software binds the bundle to the plate, stamps it with a time and a location, and files the record in the company’s Enterprise Operations Center for later searching. The product sheet states the aim without embarrassment: the device fingerprint follows the person even when the plate is swapped, removed, or faked. The published example describes one car among a hundred that consistently carries a single phone, a single car stereo, a single set of headphones, and a single watch, a combination distinct enough to name the driver behind the wheel. One caution belongs here for accuracy. The reporting describes a product Leonardo is marketing and selling, with a published specification and a patent behind it, and it does not establish how many of these sensors are already live on the poles, which is a thing worth knowing and worth asking your police department directly.
Now the two corrections, because they cut against each other and you need both. SignalTrace harvests the identifier your stereo and your earbuds broadcast, the electronic equivalent of a name tag, and Leonardo states in plain language that the system does not decrypt or capture the content of any communication, which means it never learns the station you have on or the song in your ears. The worry that a roadside box overhears your listening confuses a name tag with a wiretap. A name tag logged at every sensor, day after day, and saved for later builds a map of your movements that no single wiretap ever could, so the distinction offers thin comfort. The second correction is the one I promised you back at the cats. Leonardo’s published list of capturable signals includes pet microchips, printed there in black and white, which means the surveillance vendor reached for the identical claim the scaremongers did. Physics declined to update itself for the marketing department. A pet chip stays passive and answers only a reader held within a few centimeters of the animal, so a sensor on a pole cannot wake Percy’s chip through a car door at forty miles an hour today any more than it could last week. The RFID that SignalTrace can lift at a distance is the powered or long-range industrial sort, the asset tags and toll transponders engineered to be read from afar, never the rice-grain capsule asleep under a cat’s shoulder. The plain way to say it is that the pet-chip line is padding, and the same physical law that keeps a chipped pet off the grid also catches the vendor inflating its own brochure.
Who benefits is therefore no riddle. The buyers benefit, meaning police forces, homeland-security and border agencies, governments that want a fuller view of their ground and the people crossing it. The seller benefits, and Leonardo’s single largest shareholder is the Italian state, which means one national government books a profit on watching hardware that other governments mount above their own citizens. A suspicion runs under all of this, that the apparatus serves only the watcher, and it lands on something solid. These systems treat the watched as raw material and the watcher as the paying customer, and the person who passes the sensor supplies the product without consent, without a cent, and without ever surfacing on the invoice.
The end game
Whether the end is to track, to prosecute, or to imprison, the most truthful answer I can give refuses to choose one, because the apparatus needs no single villain holding a single plan, and that absence is the part that should keep you up at night.
Almost none of this was built as a weapon. Plate readers were sold to recover stolen cars and find missing children. Brokers grew up to sell advertising. Apple’s Find My mesh exists so people can recover lost phones. The data centers are an industrial bet on a new kind of software. Each piece was justified by a benign and often sincere use, and each piece, once installed, hardened into latent capacity. The danger worth naming has nothing to do with one architect drafting blueprints for a prison. It is quieter and harder to fight than that: a society can assemble every wall of a prison for ordinary commercial reasons and then leave the choice of whether to lock the door to whoever happens to hold power next.
I have spent years on the history of democratic collapse, and the pattern here is an old one. Authoritarian movements rarely forge their instruments from raw metal. They inherit them. The registries, the cameras, the location feeds, the cooperative vendors all sit waiting in place, paid for by taxpayers and shareholders who were sold convenience and safety, and a new regime simply repurposes the lot. The American system has already shown the seam plainly. A camera network sold to small towns to fight carjackings was turned, inside a single year, against immigrants and against a woman seeking an abortion, accomplished by editing the reason typed into a search box and nothing more. The hardware did not object. The hardware never objects. That indifference is the entire problem, because it leaves the only real safeguard a political one, and political safeguards are precisely what authoritarian movements arrive to dismantle.
What is left to do
Think of the farm as mortgaged rather than gone. A mortgage can be contested, refinanced, defaulted on, or paid down, and every one of those verbs names a choice still sitting in your hands.
The concrete steps are unglamorous and they work. Show up where the cameras get approved, because city councils are where Flock contracts live and die, and the thirty-odd towns that switched their systems off did it in public meetings, not in private despair. File every deletion you are entitled to. Put your phone’s Bluetooth and location permissions on a short leash, keep the cross-platform tracker alerts switched on, and stop suspecting the cat. Back the journalists and legal shops doing the documentation, the reporters at 404 Media, the lawyers at the ACLU, the researchers at the University of Washington, the people converting a vague dread into an enforceable fact. None of this buys back the privacy of 1990. Every bit of it shifts the answer to who holds the keys, and who holds the keys was always the only question that was going to decide the rest.
The Jersey version of the work
Here in New Jersey, the steps take on a local shape. Flock is already here. The cameras watch Newark, Monroe Township ran a mayor’s column selling them as a crime-deterrent, and towns across South Jersey have bolted them up, many on apartment complexes, school lots, and church driveways, often with no public discussion at all. Use the tools the state already hands you. New Jersey’s open-records law, OPRA, lets any resident demand a town’s Flock contract, its data-retention period, its list of agencies with access, and its usage logs, the same kind of paper trail a single resident in Dunwoody, Georgia used to expose who had been searching the cameras and why. Take that paper to your council and ask the two questions that matter: turn off national and federal sharing, and cut the retention window to days instead of a month. Switch on a universal opt-out signal in your browser this week, file your deletion requests under the new state law, and when a company stonewalls, complain to the Division of Consumer Affairs, because the attorney general is the only enforcer the law gives you and the office acts on what it hears about. Press Trenton for the rest, a Delete Act with a one-stop platform and a broker registry, so the next person does not have to chase three hundred forms by hand. The ACLU has published a plain how-to for pressing a police department on exactly these settings, and it is the right map to carry into the room.
Believe the parts of this that frightened you only as far as the documents reach. That is why the cat and the desert dropped off my list while the cameras stayed on it.
Nobody has taken the farm from you. You are being asked, quietly and continuously and without ever casting a vote, to sign it over yourself, and the signature is the thing to withhold.
Leave a Reply