I had a nice, happy little column I was planning this week – but nope, that got sidetracked.
I fell down a deep rabbit hole instead that took me right past the over-surveillance Flock issue and introduced me to a new breed of military-grade surveillance quietly being deployed across the nation.
Driven by defense contractors and AI startups, platforms like Leonardo’s SignalTrace and City Detect are taking up the cause where Flock left off and dismantling our remaining expectations of public privacy.
These days, you don’t even need to commit a crime to be permanently indexed.
What made me think about it is the fact very often when driving on I-35 in DeSoto, usually heading south (DeSoto’s side of the highway; Lancaster is the northbound), my Bluetooth turns off or just gets wanky.
It happens when I’m driving on other Dallas area highways too, so I began to wonder why.
My research led me to a passive wireless surveillance system developed by defense contractor Leonardo called SignalTrace (formerly marketed as EOC Plus).
Unlike Flock Safety Automatic License Plate Readers, which only track physical plates, SignalTrace is an “electronic signal intelligence” add-on that aggressively scans the 2.4GHz spectrum.
Its purpose is to continuously sweep and scrape unencrypted electronic signals broadcast by consumer devices – such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, RFID tags, smartwatches, fitness trackers, wireless earbuds, and vehicle infotainment systems or tire-pressure sensors.
Recent investigative reporting from Gadget Review and Yahoo Tech confirmed my suspicions: these dense, roadside surveillance grids are causing consumer wireless connections to crash.
To log your hardware, roadside scanners blast aggressive “probe requests” to force every Bluetooth device within range to broadcast its unique ID.
When these high-powered scanner arrays simultaneously sweep all 79 sub-channels used by Bluetooth’s “adaptive frequency hopping,” the intense, localized radio frequency energy physically drown out your phone’s low-power signal.
If the hardware floods your car’s infotainment receiver with too many requests at once, it triggers a buffer overflow that forces a hard system reboot.
The I-35 corridor through southern Dallas County is a major transit bottleneck.
Law enforcement agencies like DeSoto PD utilize this stretch for high-density ALPR and possible signal monitoring.
Because highway infrastructure requires sensors that can read multiple lanes of traffic simultaneously at 70+ MPH, the equipment deployed on I-35 overpasses and gantry poles uses maximum transmission power.
Voila – my electronic “glitch.”
While the public focused on privacy implications of tracking physical cars, Italian giant Leonardo S.p.A. and its American subsidiary, Leonardo US Cyber & Security Solutions, recognized a commercial goldmine.
When mounted alongside Flock cameras, SignalTrace instantly timestamps and pairs the electronic “fingerprint” of the devices inside a vehicle directly against that car’s license plate and location.
It also allows plate-free tracking; even if a car lacks a plate or is swapped, the software’s algorithms group devices that routinely travel together into a composite “electronic signature” to recognize the vehicle or its occupants.
The defense contractor relies on a deeply deceptive, narrow definition of anonymity to dodge public backlash, claiming it only collects “metadata” without decrypting message content.
But as the American Civil Liberties Union has continuously warned, location metadata is often far more revealing than a conversation transcript.
When an electronic fingerprint spends every night parked at a specific residential address, is at a specific location every weekday, travels to a location on the weekend, the system has constructed a flawless profile of an individual’s private life.
Worse still, Leonardo has designed SignalTrace to operate as a historical time machine. All this harvested data flows directly into the ELSAG Enterprise Operations Center data management platform and is archived for retrospective queries by law enforcement, border security, and federal agencies.
If an agency decides to investigate you months from now, they can retroactively map your entire social circle by identifying which other device clusters routinely move in a “convoy” alongside yours even tracking pedestrian-only spaces where standalone, camera-free signal nodes are deployed.
While Leonardo tracks we associate with from the radio spectrum, another layer of over-surveillance is watching called City Detect the urbanization of AI-driven visual policing.
Utilizing vehicle-mounted camera arrays and cutting-edge machine learning models known as PASS AI, City Detect scans public rights-of-way under the guise of automating municipal code enforcement.
Cities like Dallas are already onboard, spending $852,000 annually as part of a $2.556 million, three-year contract to deploy and maintain 100 AI-powered cameras across a fleet of 50 city sanitation trucks to scan neighborhoods.
The systemic danger is the inevitable creep of automated suspicion.
It begins with tracking uncollected trash or peeling paint but could easily move into real-time surveillance part of existing drone footage, social media feeds, and smartphone data.
With City Detect, automated corporate algorithms now replace human discretion, flagging, logging, and penalizing ordinary behavior.
What makes this multi-layered over-surveillance, so disturbing is that it is happening entirely in a regulatory vacuum.
Existing state laws regulate ALPRs to protect license plate images, but how many people reading this were aware of SignalTrace and City Detect?
Alas, then perhaps this mass electronic harvesting via SignalTrace has completely evaded current statutory restrictions.
Landmark judicial rulings like Carpenter v. United States, which require police to secure a warrant before compelling cell carriers for location data, do not stop defense contractors from scraping publicly broadcast hardware signals right out of thin air.
Does everyone see where I’m going with this?
Does anyone feel that they are being boxed into an invisible digital prison?
Without explicit community consent or transparent legislative debate, municipal governments are signing lucrative contracts with defense contractors to deploy technologies that completely strip Americans of their right to walk or drive down a street without being cataloged.
It is an un-American overreach that treats every traveling citizen as a permanent subject of interest in an ongoing, automated investigation.
What to do about it?
As a journalist I just did my part.
Now do yours and tell everyone.
Halting over-surveillance requires immediate, coordinated community and technical resistance.
On a personal level, adopt aggressive digital hygiene: manually disabling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when driving.
Also consider utilizing affordable, open-source micro-controllers running custom firmware, which can cut off the data pool that SignalTrace relies on.
Politically, exert pressure on local city councils to ban or heavily restrict municipal contracts with tracking-heavy vendors.
You might want to lobby your state and federal representatives to pass comprehensive legislation to close any legal loophole allowing state agencies to bypass warrants through automated data harvesting.
And if you think this is all fine with you, do nothing. Humans have the right to decide what is evasive and what they can live with these days.
I will tell you in closing the top shareholders of Leonardo S.p.A. after the parent company are BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street – no coincidence there.
Frances Townsend, a prominent member of the Leonardo DRS Board of Directors, also serves on the board of directors for the Council on Foreign Relations (if you do not know why I’m mentioning this, do your research).
Leonardo also has ties to the World Economic Forum aligning with its corporate sustainability and tech governance initiatives and directly participating in global platforms like the UN Agenda 2030.
If people continue to passively accept this corporate digital dragnet, then that is surrendering your right to live untracked - one municipal contract at a time.
Rita Cook is a contributing writer for The Ellis County Press. She can be reached at rcook13@earthlink.net.