Terms &
Conditions
Everyone signed. Nobody read the fine print.
After Operation Harvest Cloud, industrial engineer Knox Ramsey thought the worst was behind him. Then the government came back with a contract.
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The official explanation no longer fits the evidence.
Knox Ramsey didn't volunteer, and he doesn't get a vote. Beneath a city the country forgot, he uncovers a surveillance framework built by a grieving man who decided privacy itself was the enemy. But the operation is already rotting from the inside.
It is an election year. A citizens' privacy movement is filling the streets. As hidden systems close around them, Knox must expose who is watching, who is being used, and what the public surrendered with a single click—before the terms everyone accepted without reading come due.
There’s a market for your private life.
In Terms & Conditions, data brokers make a business of the details people give away. Connected devices carry private life beyond the room; a profile built for commercial use becomes a source of leverage.
The surveillance reaches the people making decisions for everyone else.
01 / 03The profile
Who controls what gets built?
Flint’s battery-anode project is one piece of a national effort spanning critical minerals, rare earth materials, and energy independence. The fight is over whether American investment can become a working supply chain—and who stands to lose if it does.
Private information gives the people listening a way into those decisions. For Flint, the outcome will be measured in work and whether another industrial promise gets kept.
A city that held up its end of the bargain.
I set this book in Flint on purpose. I grew up in the area, and I wanted to write the place the way I actually see it, which isn't the way it usually gets written about.
Flint built this country. I'm also not going to pretend the present away. The people there held up their end, and the deal got broken anyway. That's not pity. It's the plain truth.
Robert Cummer
Knox has already signed his own agreement.
To keep his son out of a federal prosecution, Knox signed five years of his life over to the government. The work takes him into other people’s private lives while his own family remains exposed.
He can isolate the failure in a system. The harder question is what he owes the people trapped inside it.
Terms & Conditions is the second novel in Robert Cummer's Knox Ramsey series, a high-stakes political thriller grounded in real engineering, surveillance, and the systems beneath everyday life.
The terms everyone accepted without reading are about to come due.
Preorder the ebook from your preferred ebook store or directly from Amazon for Kindle. Order print editions through your favorite bookstore or online retailer: paperback November 10, 2026, hardcover December 1, 2026.