Surveillance

In late 2025, Dallas City Council approved a contract with a company called City Detect to mount AI-powered cameras on sanitation trucks. The pitch was simple. Trucks already drive every residential street in the city on a regular schedule. Put two cameras on each one, let computer vision scan for illegal dumping, high weeds, and graffiti, and you get a monthly visual survey of every parcel in Dallas without hiring a single new inspector. ...

Over the past year, more than 50 cities and counties across the country have canceled their contracts with Flock Safety, the company behind the automated license plate readers now bolted to streetlights in most American neighborhoods. Local news covers each cancellation as a privacy win. City councils pass resolutions. Residents who organized against the cameras get their moment at the podium. Then, within months, installation crews show up and bolt new cameras onto the same poles. They’re just wearing a different logo. ...

Every conversation I’ve had this week about license plate cameras eventually landed on the same question from someone in the comments: does this stuff monitor phones too? Up until a few weeks ago, my honest answer was no. That answer is now out of date. What SignalTrace actually is In June 2026, 404 Media broke the story on a product called SignalTrace, built by Leonardo, an Italian aerospace and defense conglomerate that already owns ELSAG, one of the established license plate reader brands competing directly with Flock and Axon in the American market. Leonardo isn’t a scrappy startup chasing a government contract. It’s a €17.8 billion company, roughly 30 percent owned by the Italian government itself, with 60,500 employees and subsidiaries spanning fighter jets, satellites, and missile systems. This is a serious, well-funded player, not a fringe vendor. ...

If you’ve followed the Flock Safety license plate reader posts on this blog, you already know the pattern: a private company sells local government a tool framed as public safety or civic improvement, the contract gets signed with little or no public vote, and residents find out what they’re actually paying for only after someone starts asking questions. Zencity follows the same playbook, but it’s dressed up differently. Instead of cameras on the roadway, it’s software that reads what you post online. ...

Microsoft has been on a real push lately to position itself as the company that will keep your data safe as AI takes over the workplace. It has a name for the pitch, the Secure Future Initiative, a growing suite of products to sell under it, Purview, Entra, Defender, and a fresh annual report, the Data Security Index, built to convince you the problem is real and Microsoft is the fix. ...

Everything covered on this blog about Flock so far has been about fixed cameras, bolted to a pole, reading plates as cars drive past. That’s a real privacy concern on its own. But Flock has spent the last two years building something that goes further than a stationary camera ever could: a fleet of autonomous drones that launch themselves, fly beyond where any human operator can see them, and follow whatever the system decides is worth following. ...

If you’ve followed the backlash against Flock Safety’s license plate readers, you’ve probably heard a pitch that sounds like relief: some cities are ditching Flock for a company called Axon instead. Before you treat that as good news, you should know who Axon is, what it’s building, and why privacy advocates say the switch changes almost nothing. Who Axon actually is Axon Enterprise trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker AXON. It’s headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it used to go by a different name you’ll recognize: TASER International. The company rebranded in 2017 as it expanded from stun guns into a much broader law enforcement technology business — body cameras, dash cameras, drones, virtual reality training tools, and now a fast-growing license plate reader division. ...

Drive through most Texas towns now and you will pass at least one Flock Safety camera without knowing it. No blinking light, no sign, nothing that marks it as different from a traffic light or a road sign. It reads every license plate that passes, logs the time, the location, and details like bumper stickers or roof racks, and sends all of it to a searchable database. Cooke County has cameras like this too, installed without public notice, which is what got me looking into the company behind them. ...