https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/Recent content in Posts on Monster ZeroHugoen-usWed, 02 Sep 2026 12:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/start-here/Mon, 20 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/start-here/<p>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&rsquo;re new to this topic, this page gives you real steps you can take today, in plain language, no technical background needed.</p> <p>You don&rsquo;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&rsquo;s what this page covers.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/dallas-trash-truck-surveillance/Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/dallas-trash-truck-surveillance/Dallas sold AI cameras on sanitation trucks as a voluntary beautification tool. Six months in, the system has flagged 21,000 properties with blight scores feeding a code enforcement pipeline. A look at how the pitch and the outcome diverged, and who&#39;s actually catching the scores.https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/flock-axon-vendor-switch/Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/flock-axon-vendor-switch/More than 50 cities have canceled their Flock Safety contracts as a privacy win. Months later, Axon installs a comparable system on the same poles. A look at why that&#39;s a vendor swap, not a solution.https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/texas-data-center-ndas/Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/texas-data-center-ndas/When elected officials sign NDAs with the developers whose projects they&#39;ll later vote on, the public hearing becomes theater. Here&#39;s why that arrangement is a structural conflict, not just a secrecy problem, and how to check if your city or county has signed one.https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/signaltrace-alpr-device-tracking/Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/signaltrace-alpr-device-tracking/A defense contractor is bolting Bluetooth, WiFi, and RFID tracking onto license plate cameras already installed across the country. Here&#39;s what SignalTrace actually does.https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/texas-power-line-gamble/Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/texas-power-line-gamble/Three 765-kV transmission corridors, thousands of acres of private land, and a $100 billion bill headed for every Texas ratepayer. Here&#39;s who&#39;s actually paying for this and who benefits.https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/we-keep-building-the-thing-nobody-asked-for/Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/we-keep-building-the-thing-nobody-asked-for/On arms races, fear-driven funding, the compliance chain that builds things nobody wants, and the rhetoric that shuts down every question before it gets asked.https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/zencity-community-trust-surveillance/Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/zencity-community-trust-surveillance/<p>If you&rsquo;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&rsquo;re actually paying for only after someone starts asking questions. Zencity follows the same playbook, but it&rsquo;s dressed up differently. Instead of cameras on the roadway, it&rsquo;s software that reads what you post online.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/texas-data-center-pause/Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:43:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/texas-data-center-pause/Governor Abbott ordered a statewide audit of every data center in ERCOT&#39;s interconnection queue, freezing new grid connections for 1,800 projects and 474 gigawatts of power requests.https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/microsoft-ai-data-integrity/Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/microsoft-ai-data-integrity/<p>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.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/flock-drone-surveillance/Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/flock-drone-surveillance/<p>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&rsquo;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.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/axon-surveillance-streetlights/Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/axon-surveillance-streetlights/<p>If you&rsquo;ve followed the backlash against Flock Safety&rsquo;s license plate readers, you&rsquo;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&rsquo;s building, and why privacy advocates say the switch changes almost nothing.</p> <h2 id="who-axon-actually-is">Who Axon actually is</h2> <p>Axon Enterprise trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker AXON. It&rsquo;s headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it used to go by a different name you&rsquo;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.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/insurance-algorithms/Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/insurance-algorithms/<p>Insurance used to work in two simple steps. You paid a premium based on broad categories, your age, your driving record, your zip code. Then if something happened, a person reviewed your claim and decided what the company owed you. Both of those steps now run through algorithms that most policyholders never see, never consented to in any meaningful way, and can&rsquo;t meaningfully appeal. One decides what you pay. The other decides what you get back when you need it. Texas is already in the middle of the biggest legal fight over the first one.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/ai-data-centers/Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/ai-data-centers/<p>On May 11, 2026, the Cooke County Commissioners Court passed a resolution asking the state of Texas to give counties more say over how data centers get built and run. The resolution doesn&rsquo;t oppose the industry outright. It says plainly that these facilities will matter to the state&rsquo;s economy, then says just as plainly that they use enormous amounts of water and electricity, and that rural communities like this one are left with little control over either. Cooke County isn&rsquo;t an outlier here. It&rsquo;s one of a growing list of rural Texas counties reaching the same conclusion at close to the same time.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/surveillance-pricing/Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/surveillance-pricing/<p>The paper price tag is disappearing from grocery store shelves. In its place, small digital screens called electronic shelf labels let a store change any price in seconds from a central computer, no employee walking the aisles with a pricing gun. Kroger says the switch saves labor and improves accuracy. Nearly one in four Kroger stores now runs on the technology, and Walmart plans to have it in every U.S. store by the end of 2026. The efficiency argument is real. The question worth asking is what else that same infrastructure makes possible.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/kyle-bass-water/Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/kyle-bass-water/<p>Anderson County Judge Carey McKinney found out about it at church. A deacon asked him the Sunday before Memorial Day if he&rsquo;d seen a groundwater permit application published in the local paper. McKinney went home and pulled the week-old newspaper off his kitchen counter. That&rsquo;s how the highest elected official in the county learned that a Dallas hedge fund manager wanted to pump 10 billion gallons of groundwater a year out from under his community, roughly three times what the entire county uses annually, and pipe it somewhere else.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/flock-cameras/Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/flock-cameras/<p>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.</p>https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/kalibrate-gas-station-pricing/Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:56:51 -0500https://blog.monsterzero.org/posts/kalibrate-gas-station-pricing/<p>Kalibrate and the Quiet End of Gas Station Price Competition</p> <p>For decades, gas stations competed the same simple way: undercut the guy across the street. Drive by two stations a block apart and you&rsquo;d often see genuinely different prices, because each owner was racing to win your business. That race is disappearing, and a lawsuit filed in June 2026 argues software is the reason why.</p> <h2 id="what-the-lawsuit-alleges">What the lawsuit alleges</h2> <p>A proposed class action filed in federal court in Sacramento accuses Kalibrate, a fuel-pricing software company headquartered in Manchester, England, of running what plaintiffs call a system that coordinates pump prices across competing gas stations instead of letting them compete independently. The suit names major retailers alongside Kalibrate itself, including Marathon Petroleum, BP, Circle K, 7-Eleven, Walmart, and Albertsons, collectively operating more than 1,700 gas stations across California.</p>