Today, September 15th, 2026, the largest front door on the internet changed its default from open to closed.
Cloudflare now blocks AI crawlers unless a site owner opts back in.
Yesterday, an AI research tool could crawl a competitor’s product page, a public filing, an industry report, and bring back an answer. Today, on every site that hasn’t opted out, that same request hits a wall instead, because someone flipped a default rather than writing a line of code.
A publisher checks today’s crawler logs and finds a bot that has read their site since 2023 turned away for the first time.
Nothing on the page changed. The environment did.
That’s a piece of shared infrastructure adopting a defensive posture, and defensive posture already has a vocabulary. It comes from the military, and it is about to describe a great deal of ordinary life.
Electronic warfare divides into three capabilities.
Electronic support means detecting and identifying whatever is emitting around you. Electronic attack means jamming, spoofing, or deceiving. Electronic protection means keeping your own systems working while the environment is hostile.
Flares off the wing of a jet are electronic attack. A radio that holds its link through interference is electronic protection.
Now look at what is on the consumer shelf.
A developer named Paweł Szydłowski built an app called Zuckoff that fingerprints the Bluetooth signature of Meta’s smart glasses and tells you when a pair is nearby. Roughly five thousand users in its first month, with a premium tier at $9.99 a year. EU regulators have already contacted him. That is electronic support, sold at consumer prices, to people who want one thing: to know when they are being recorded.
Then there’s a label called Cap_able knits garments whose patterns read to a computer vision system as an animal rather than a person. Artists run their images through Glaze or Nightshade before posting them. (Complementary tools built at the University of Chicago to protect artists from unauthorized AI training: Glaze acts as a defensive shield for an artist’s style, Nightshade as an offensive data-poisoning tool that disrupts how AI systems recognize what they’re looking at)
Researchers published a method this year that disguises your own walk or Gait Analysis, by making you move like somebody else. All of it is electronic attack, the same flare-and-decoy idea from a minute ago, just aimed at a camera instead of a missile.
Then there is everything boring. Hardened phones. Privacy screens visible only from directly in front. Passkeys.
The family safe word, which is the strangest artifact I found in this entire moment, a pre-shared human secret adopted because a voice is no longer proof of a person (“Queen to King’s Level 1”, IYKYK). All of it is electronic protection. As of today, add Cloudflare to that column.
Here’s the number worth planning around. MarketsandMarkets forecasts the electronic warfare market at $32.35 billion this year, reaching $64.66 billion by 2031, with electronic protection projected to become the largest capability segment. The institutions with the deepest threat intelligence in the world are concluding that hardening beats jamming.
That conclusion travels downward, and harder for civilians, since attack isn’t legally available to us.
Personal jammers are illegal and the FCC enforces.
So what we can lawfully do is detect, harden, and alter the only two surfaces we own outright: our own data and our own body. The consumer market will consolidate around support and protection, not attack. The jammers in the product roundups are the loudest items on the shelf and the smallest part of the future.
Why this is happening now is a standards story, not a gadgety story. IEEE 802.11bf, published in September 2025, makes body sensing an official WiFi capability.
The working group’s own threat analysis notes that these signals can expose heart rate, breathing rate, location, and identity. A member proposed protecting the sensing signals themselves. The group could not agree the threat was real. He withdrew the comment, and the standard shipped without the safeguard.
Commercial sensing chipsets were announced in January.
Put plainly: the standard shipped before anyone agreed people should be told when it’s being used on them.
Consent lost that race.
What that means for the router already sitting in your living room is coming in the field report. For now, that gap between what’s technically possible and what anyone agreed to is what the whole countermeasure market is growing into.
I have forecasted for some time that face-mounted computing has a social license problem rather than a technical one. A detection app with thousands of paying subscribers is what that problem looks like once it becomes a product category.
Now the number that should bother you: institutions will spend north of $30 billion this year defending themselves in contested electromagnetic environments, while the civilian counter-surveillance market sits near $2.7 billion and grows more slowly.
Individuals are the least-defended platform in the spectrum, and the sensing keeps moving into their routers, their eyewear, and their ceilings.
Most organizations have no answer here because nobody has asked them the question.
So let’s ask it in three parts.
What can sense our people, and would we know when it happened?
What are we emitting that can be collected?
What keeps working when the environment turns hostile, and what is our degraded mode?
I am building that into a Countermeasure Posture Review, with a longer field report coming that maps the full landscape.
If you want to talk through what that review would surface for your organization, reply to this one.
About the Author:
Richard Bukowski is a strategic foresight consultant and founder of Digital Wheel of Fortune, LLC, specializing in Digital Realities: the convergence of technology and culture reshaping how organizations sense, protect, and earn trust.
Available for strategic advisory and speaking engagements and Reality Check Reviews.
Richard, what a scary article for individuals who value privacy or anonymity. What an exciting one for people who want to find opportunities to make money.