SURVEILLANCE IN AMERICA IS ABOUT TO GET A WHOLE LOT WORSE

A defense contractor is selling technology that enables license plate reading cameras to also sense driver and passenger phones, laptops, and even pet microchips as you drive past. Police and others can buy it as of last week.

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People keep telling me to stop posting photos of where I am, now that I am almost definitely being surveilled and harassed by some sort of organization that wishes I would Just Shut Up. Friends. Readers. "Don't let them know your location," they say, usually in concerned tones, sometimes in urgent ones.

But here's the thing: it doesn't matter if I post photos of where I am, or write about it. The technology exists for these kinds of forces to find me no matter what I do, at least in the United States of America, where privacy is dead and mass surveillance is King.

Whether you post your location or not, whether you have location services enabled or not, whether you leave your phone at home, whether you have a faraday bag or not — as if last week, a new technology is now being sold to American law enforcement designed to make all of that beside the point. The well-meaning advice to go dark was always incomplete. This week, it became obsolete.

What Just Broke — and What Was Already Built

This month, 404 Media — a technology and privacy investigative outlet — obtained and published a product sheet for a surveillance system called ELSAG SignalTrace, built by Leonardo US Cyber and Security Solutions, the American arm of Italian defense giant Leonardo S.p.A. The report is spreading fast through privacy, civil liberties, and press freedom communities, but has yet to be covered by mainstram US news outlets. What it describes is a terrifying product that is now available for purchase by American law enforcement, in existence for at least two years — built quietly, patented quietly, marketed quietly — while the public had no idea it existed.

On March 26, 2024, Leonardo received US Patent 11,941,716 B2 for "Systems and Methods for Electronic Signature Tracking." The company issued a press release. Almost nobody noticed. By 2025, the technology had a formal product name — ELSAG SignalTrace — and an active marketing campaign aimed at law enforcement agencies across the country. General Manager Jason Laquatra described the system's purpose plainly: "The future of LPR [license plate reader] advancements is reliant on enhancing LPR data sets with additional information from various electronic devices to find the individuals police are looking for."

Translation: It is no longer enough for Big Bro to record your car everywhere it goes. They want to know who is inside that car. Down to your pets.

What It Does

You have probably seen license plate reader cameras. They sit on poles along roads, on bridges, and on top of police cars. They photograph the license plate of every car that drives by and store that information in a database.

Until now, that was all they did.

SignalTrace clips onto those same cameras already installed across the country. When your car passes one, it does not just photograph your plate. It sweeps every radio frequency signal in range: your phone's Bluetooth identifier, your laptop's Wi-Fi signature, your fitness tracker, your smartwatch, your car's tire pressure sensors and infotainment system. Your pet's microchip — a small chip under the skin that sends out a radio signal — gets logged too.

All of it is timestamped, linked to your plate, and stored in Leonardo's database for future searches.

Leonardo calls the resulting profile an "electronic fingerprint." The term is more accurate than they perhaps intend. A fingerprint follows you. A fingerprint does not require your cooperation. A fingerprint can be lifted from surfaces you didn't know you touched.

The system's most significant feature is its the persistence. Once it establishes that a particular group of devices — your phone, your watch, your car's sensors — consistently travel together, your plate becomes secondary. Per Leonardo's own materials, SignalTrace provides "actionable intelligence even if a suspect changes or removes a plate."

The tracking has migrated from the vehicle to the person.

But we always ki d of knew it would, didn't we?

Available Now — Already Legal to Buy

SignalTrace is here. Leonardo's procurement contracts page lists New Mexico specifically — agencies in this state can access ELSAG equipment through state price agreements right now, without special authorization. A sheriff's department or municipal police force can add SignalTrace to existing cameras as a routine purchase today. The same federal contract that governs Leonardo's deals with US Special Operations Command and the General Services Administration makes it accessible to agencies across all fifty states.

No public announcement is required when an agency purchases it. No notice is required when it is deployed. You will not know when you drive past one.

But someone will.

Illegal in Its Own Country

Leonardo S.p.A. is headquartered in Rome, Italy. The product it is selling to American law enforcement would almost certainly be illegal to deploy in its home country, or anywhere else in Europe.

European law — the General Data Protection Regulation, known as GDPR — requires companies to get your permission before collecting your personal data. It forbids storing that data indefinitely. The EU AI Act, which took effect this year, restricts technology that identifies and tracks people in public spaces.

The United States of America has no such laws and, in fact, has a federal administration trying to make such laws themselves illegal. Totally normal.

The Constitution Has Not Kept Up

The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect Americans from unreasonable searches by the government. In 2018, the Supreme Court took a meaningful step forward. In Carpenter v. United States, the Court ruled that police need a warrant to access months of location data from your phone company. The Court recognized that tracking someone's every movement over time is fundamentally different from watching them walk down the street once.

SignalTrace goes further than anything the Court has yet addressed. It does not go through a phone company. It does not require a subpoena. It collects your information directly, in real time, as you drive past. No judge approves it. No warrant is required. And the data does not go to a police evidence locker — it goes to a private foreign-owned corporation.

No federal law currently prohibits this.

When the State Has Enemies

The nothing-to-hide argument — if you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear — has always been weak. In June 2026, it is an active danger.

The federal government currently maintains a "Media Offenders" page on the official White House website listing journalists and news outlets by name. Journalists have been arrested this year while covering demonstrations. The Justice Department has opened investigations into news organizations for their reporting. The president has accused outlets of treason and his DOJ has issued subpoenas against media companies for their coverage of the Iran war. In just one year, the USA has dropped 7 spots in the Press Freedom Index put out by Reporters Without Borders, and now ranks #64 out of 180 nations.

A database that tracks where every American drives — who they meet, which doctors they visit, which protests they pass, which journalists' homes appear in their travel history — is a tool of authoritarianism. And this administration has shown it is willing to use tools like this against people it considers enemies.

You do not have to be doing anything wrong. You just have to be in the database. And if SignalTrace is deployed in your city, you already are.

Law enforcement abuse of existing plate reader data is already documented. Officers have used those databases to stalk former partners. A Texas officer searched 83,000 cameras across the country to locate a woman who had sought an abortion. False matches have resulted in innocent people being stopped at gunpoint. Add SignalTrace's device fingerprinting to that — with its capacity to track people even after they change vehicles — and the potential for harm scales accordingly.

What the Law Says — and What It Misses

New Mexico is ahead of most states in combating this. On March 6, 2026, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed SB40, the Driver Privacy and Safety Act. It takes effect July 1 — two weeks from now. The law prohibits sharing plate reader data with out-of-state agencies for immigration enforcement. It protects people seeking legal healthcare. It protects people exercising First Amendment rights. Violations carry fines of $10,000 or more.

That is real. New Mexico deserves credit for it.

But SB40 covers plate data only. It says nothing about Bluetooth signals, Wi-Fi identifiers, or the radio frequency signals your devices broadcast. Nothing about pet microchips. SignalTrace collects all of those things — and under New Mexico's new law, every bit of that collection remains perfectly legal. The legislature ran out of time before broader privacy protections could pass.

Other states are moving. Washington State passed a stronger law this year. Minnesota and Colorado have bills in progress. But thirty-five states have nothing at all. And no state has yet addressed what SignalTrace specifically does.

The fastest path to stopping it runs through state legislatures. Every state lawmaker needs to hear from constituents that device fingerprinting must be covered by privacy law — not just plate data. New Mexico's next legislative session is an opportunity to fix what SB40 missed.

City councils and county commissions have power too. A local government can prohibit its police department from purchasing SignalTrace outright. That is how the strongest state protections began — with local officials deciding their communities would not be caught unprepared.

The courts are the longer path. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are building the legal challenges. They need support.

Your phone is broadcasting right now. So is your watch, your car, your pet. Every time you drive past a SignalTrace camera, a record is made — stored by a foreign defense contractor, available for future searches, held indefinitely.

Maybe no one is looking at it today.

But today is not the only day that matters.

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