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This page is different from the rest of the blog. The other posts here dig into one company or one story at a time. This one is a starting point. If someone sent you here, or you’re new to this topic, this page gives you real steps you can take today, in plain language, no technical background needed. You don’t need to throw away your phone or stop using apps. You need to know which settings actually matter and which habits actually protect you. That’s what this page covers. ...

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. ...

In February, residents in San Marcos packed city hall for eight hours to fight a proposed data center that would have pulled more than 25 million gallons of water a year from the river the town is named after. One protester wore a blow-up salamander costume, a nod to the endangered Texas blind salamander that lives in those springs. A crowd of hundreds sang and chanted outside. Inside, resident after resident told the council to reject the zoning change the project needed. The council voted it down. ...

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 That answer is now out of date.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. ...

Texas is in the middle of building one of the largest transmission infrastructure projects in its history: three 765-kilovolt power line corridors stretching over 1,200 miles across the state. The stated purpose is grid reliability for the Permian Basin. The real story is more complicated, and it involves eminent domain, a generation shortfall nobody’s fixed yet, and a bill that every Texas ratepayer will help pay whether they ever see one of these towers or not. ...

I want to step away from the usual format of this blog for one post. No records request, no lawsuit filing, no city council agenda item. Just something I’ve been chewing on for a while now, and a conversation tonight that finally put it into words I could write down. The pattern under the pattern If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ve seen the shape by now. Flock cameras. Zencity scraping social media sentiment. Cell-site simulators bought with forfeiture money. Kyle Bass and a private equity firm trying to pull billions of gallons out of an aquifer an entire region depends on. Data centers justified as a national necessity while they draw down water and power with almost no local say in the matter. ...

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. ...

Texas spent the last few years marketing itself as the place AI companies go to build without friction. Cheap land, a deregulated grid, and a governor who called the state the “epicenter” of AI. That pitch just hit a wall. On August 3, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to conduct a full audit of every data center currently working its way through the state’s grid interconnection process. Until that audit wraps up, no new data center gets approved to connect. That single directive touches roughly 1,800 projects and 474 gigawatts of power requests, more than five times the grid’s all-time peak demand. ...

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. ...