Our Senior Policy Advisor and former U.S. Congressman, Bob Goodlatte, explains in Tech Policy Press why it’s necessary to protect encryption, which ensures that emails, texts, and other communications are kept private between sender and receiver. The world currently faces numerous cybersecurity threats, and every piece of data from medical records to trade secrets is a potential target. Encryption not only protects industry, but it also protects journalists from malevolent governments and victims from their abusers.

Yet the UK has chosen to pursue a disastrous policy of attacking encryption and the privacy it enables by requiring Apple to facilitate wiretapping of its users - even those that are, like the company, outside of the UK. The US government shouldn't be complicit in this power grab by continuing to give the UK authority to enforce surveillance orders against US tech companies, as it currently does under the 2017 CLOUD Act. 

​With help from vendors in the United States, Canada, Europe, and China, Pakistan has relied on a global supply chain to create comprehensive and sophisticated surveillance and censorship tools, according to a new report released by Amnesty International on Tuesday.

Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said:

“Pakistan’s Web Monitoring System and Lawful Intercept Management System operate like watchtowers, constantly snooping on the lives of ordinary citizens. In Pakistan, your texts, emails, calls and internet access are all under scrutiny. But people have no idea of this constant surveillance, and its incredible reach. This dystopian reality is extremely dangerous because it operates in the shadows, severely restricting freedom of expression and access to information.”

Amnesty International provides a real-life example, a journalist who is responding to constant surveillance with self-censorship. The journalist describes what happened after he published a story on public corruption:

“After the story, anyone I would speak to, even on WhatsApp, would come under scrutiny. [The authorities] would go to people and ask them, ‘Why did he call you?’ [The authorities] can go to these extreme lengths … Now I go months without speaking to my family [for fear they will be targeted].”

Keep in mind that virtually every bit of data that Pakistan extracts from its citizens relies on technologies sold by U.S. companies and used by our federal government. In our country, internal agency procedures, ethical commitments, and laws prevent such ready and rampant surveillance. But all the elements are in place. Through purchased data and FISA Section 702, the federal government can already view virtually anything it wants without a warrant.
​
Pakistan is a reminder of just how perilously close we are to an American surveillance state.

- Justice Potter Stewart

​Local police departments are spending billions of dollars on surveillance technology, from cameras, to cell-site simulators, to drones. Customers in blue range from the New York Police Department, which has invested $3 billion in surveillance in recent years, to small-town departments willing to fork out tens of thousands.

With so much money sloshing around, it is reasonable to wonder how careful local officials are in maintaining clear boundaries between customer and vendor. Events in Atlanta suggest that sometimes these boundaries are, at best, blurry.

Marshall Freeman is the Chief Administrative Officer of the Atlanta Police Department (APD) and a former leader at the non-profit Atlanta Police Foundation. Together, the Foundation and the APD devised Connect Atlanta, a camera network that makes Atlanta one of the most surveilled cities per capita in the United States.

The Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC) was combing through public records when they noticed Freeman’s name on a Conflict of Interest Disclosure Report. Citing “financial interest” in Axon, a law enforcement tech company, he recused himself from contract-related “matters and dealings” that could impact Axon financially. “I have interest in a company that is currently in talks with Axon around acquisition and investment,” he wrote, without specifics.

ACPC discerned that Freeman’s unnamed stake was in a company called Fusus, whose software fuels the Connect Atlanta surveillance system. Axon acquired it for $240 million barely a week after Freeman filed his disclosure. More red flags followed. Freeman was the only public official quoted in Axon’s press release announcing the acquisition: “I wholeheartedly encourage all agencies to embrace this cutting-edge technology and experience its transformative impact firsthand.”

Using open records requests, ACPC also reports it also found emails indicating that Freeman “boosted Fusus and Axon products to other agencies in Georgia and around the U.S.” on multiple occasions post-disclosure. When the reporting first surfaced, APD responded tersely: “The appropriate ethics filings were submitted.”

A few weeks later, though, the City of Atlanta Ethics Office begged to differ, announcing an investigation into Freeman’s post-recusal behavior. Fifteen months later, the body released an official report totaling 313 pages. The findings suggest that Freeman’s relationship with the camera-pushing Fusus dated back to his days at the Atlanta Police Foundation, a relationship he brought with him to APD and continued to nurture. According to The Guardian, he consulted for Fusus for at least a year after joining APD, “crisscrossing the country in person and by email while repping the company, including conversations with police departments in Florida, Hawaii, California, Arizona and Ohio.”

All told, the Ethics Office found 15 separate matters in which Freeman used his official position as an influencer for Axon and Fusus. For at least part of this time, he served on the board of two Fusus subsidiaries in Virginia and Florida – a fact he did not disclose to ethics investigators. 

Writing in The Intercept, Timothy Pratt and Andrew Free detail how Freeman’s impropriety (the “appearance” of which is the only thing he’s admitted to) is making all of us less free – taking the Great Atlanta Mass Surveillance Experiment and replicating it from sea to monitored sea: Seattle, Sacramento, New York City, Omaha, Birmingham, Springfield, Savannah, and counting.

Freeman may be an exception. But he might be the rule. It doesn’t matter, given the outsized influence even one public official can have when it comes to the proliferation of the police surveillance dragnet in the United States. Then again, by the time robust surveillance systems get to smaller, heartland cities like Lawrence, Kansas, it may already be too late.
​
At the very least, police procurement processes would benefit from tighter rules, like those that govern Pentagon officials when they assess contracts.

We often speak of surveillance technology. Now we have surveillance art, modernist sculptures that watch you back whenever you admire them.

We’re a bit forgiving when the technology is used as a form of home security, since it is defensive in nature rather than invasive (and mass in scale). But the melding of art and surveillance is a trend that ought to give anyone pause.

Alyn Griffiths of Dezeen reports on Sculptural Surveillance by Denmark studio Swift Creatives. Marketing to homeowners, these designs are bendable silly straws that you can customize into landscape art. Slender, looping, and brightly colored, these are meant to be noticed.

In the words of Swift Creatives co-found Carsten Eriksen, “Our concept for this collection aims to challenge the conventional notions of home surveillance, transforming functional devices into objects of beauty that homeowners can proudly display.” They are, he says, “aimed to stand out.”

Driven by residents/owners themselves, such approaches to home security are respectful and a far cry from the techniques high-tech burglars have been using. They also represent a far safer choice than Chinese-made junk products masquerading as security devices – which can be used to watch their owners instead of the other way around.
​
This has the feeling of a beginning of a trend. Perhaps the next time you get the creepy feeling that the eyes in a painting or a Rodin sculpture are following you, you might be right.

Joseph Cox of 404 Media reminds us of three things that we know to be true about the new era of generative artificial intelligence:

1. AI isn’t a substitute for people.
2. AI isn’t a substitute for people.
3. AI isn’t… well, you get the picture.

As we’ve written before, AI works best when there’s a human in the loop. Take the case of Citizen.com, whose app is increasingly taking an AI-only approach to crime fighting. Because, really, what could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, as you can imagine. Without further ado, here’s 404 Media’s report on what happens when AI is left to its own devices, Citizen-style. It is prone to:

• Mistranslating “motor vehicle accident” as “murder vehicle accident.”

 

• Misinterpreting addresses.

 

• Publishing incorrect locations.

 

• Adding gory or sensitive details that violate Citizen’s guidelines.

 

• Sending notifications about police officers spotting a stolen vehicle or homicide suspect, potentially putting operations at risk.

 

• Writing alerts as if officers had already arrived on the scene, when in fact the dispatcher was only providing supplemental information while officers were en route.

 

• Duplicating incidents, failing to recognize that two pieces of dispatch audio are related to the same singular event.

 

• This was especially common with police chases, where dispatch continually provided new addresses. The “AI would just go nuts and enter something at every address it would get and we would sometimes have 5-10 incidents clustered on the app that all pertain to the same thing,” one source said.

 

• Omitting important details, such as whether a person was armed with a weapon.

​
The stakes are as strategic as they are tactical. One of Cox’s sources told him, “This could skew the perception of crime in a particular area,” as AI-created incidents proliferated.
 
By the way, the original name of Citizen – both the app and the company – was, perhaps tellingly, Vigilante. But that’s a story for another day.

Wearables are defined by their comfort. But there is a lot about wearable technology that is distinctly uncomfortable, if not Orwellian.

Wearable computers hit the mainstream with the introduction of Fitbits and smartwatches in the 2010s. Now, says The San Francisco Standard, the rise of artificial intelligence is adding spy tech to the wearable computing family tree. The newest devices are akin to smartglasses but take that technology’s most invasive feature – recording the environment – and turn the creep factor up to 11. The new wearables are stylish and somewhat stealthy and designed to do two things very well: listen and remember.

They come in the form of pendants, necklaces, lapel pins – or, in a twist, might even look like a Fitbit or smartwatch. But they are all recording devices capable of capturing the wearer’s every conversation and meeting, then transcribing them, and – the pièce de la résistance – using AI to organize, analyze, and mine them for insights (think personal assistant on steroids, or maybe your very own opposition researcher). In some cases, the devices may only transcribe conversations rather than record them, but they’re still listening and processing conversations, so such distinctions are hardly comforting.

The San Francisco Standard suggests that everyone in Silicon Valley should assume that everything they say, especially at work, is being recorded. Which means the rest of America – and its kitchen tables, coffee houses, and classrooms – won’t be far behind.

One venture capital partner told the Standard’s writers that she knew a fellow VC who records all in-person meetings “without telling the other meeting participants. It's an invasion of privacy and I seriously disapprove of it." Then, presumably referring to herself and the rest of us would-be audience members, she added, “Of course, this is a horrible way to live your life.”

In terms of the privacy concerns raised by this new generation of wearables, Julian Chokkattu of Wired cracked the code. Earlier generations of recording devices and software “at least required active engagement like a tap or a wake word to activate their ability to eavesdrop.” For the most part, the new devices are passive and always on, which places responsibility for gaining consent on the instigator. In other words, “Fox, meet henhouse.”

In the research, there are lots of names for the chilling effects that even consensual recording has on conversations, but one of the keenest is “spiral of silence.” People will varnish the truth, if they bother to speak it at all. They will hold back, self-censor, even shut down. As for the possible effects on creativity that this sort of tech might have – as in a brainstorming session, for example – we invite you to judge for yourself.

If you think all of this seems like a claim just waiting for a plaintiff, we agree: It’s a one-way express ticket to litigation city. But as with most things AI, the laws governing them are in their infancy and court rulings sparse. One corner of Silicon Valley is already fighting back though: Confident Security is developing Don’t Record Me, a browser plugin that could potentially detect illicit recordings and disrupt them.

What about audible cues or flashing lights to indicate that one of these devices is collecting data? Don’t count on it. One entrepreneur told Wired, in effect, “That would drain too much battery life.” Another claims that all you have to do is think about recording to activate his product. Thankfully, for that mode to work, the wearable has to be affixed to the side of your temple with medical tape.
​
But don’t expect other forms of personal surveillance to be so obvious. All the more reason for requiring disclosure for private recording and warrants when government agents listen in on what we say.

If you don’t like the feeling of being followed, we recommend avoiding Stockholm, Dubai, Almaty, and – this just in – Mexico City. All are major destinations under constant and growing surveillance by public cameras.

Izabelė Pukėnaitė at Cybernews reports that Mexico’s capital is now launching a mass surveillance CCTV plan with the suitably creepy name of “Eyes That Look After You.”
Let’s break that down: 30,000 new cameras, 15,200 new poles, a $19 million budget, and a whole lot of connectivity. Each pole will have two cameras, one fixed and one capable of tilting/zooming.

All of this comes as Mexico’s ruling Morena party moves to eliminate numerous independent regulatory and oversight agencies. One of those was a body that functioned as an ombudsman for the population, with the power to force government departments to hand over information citizens had filed requests for – a sort of Mexican version of the Freedom of Information Act.

As is always the case when such moves are enacted, the powers that be resort to doublespeak. “There will be more transparency,” declared Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, adding, “the public will be able to easily review the functioning, the spending, and everything the Mexican government does.”

An equally disturbing maneuver is the Morena party’s radical overhaul of the country’s judicial system that critics say could easily lead to unabashed one-party rule.

Color us skeptical, but we’re having a hard time seeing how a party that is voraciously concentrating its own power is going to use a new mass surveillance system to somehow make people freer – especially a camera system that the cartels have already used to target and kill informants.

These “eyes” aren’t designed to “look after” anyone. “Look for” is more like it, which, thanks to new legislation mandating a single biometric ID for all Mexican citizens, will soon be easier to do than ever. It is not hard to imagine these systems being used by Morena-controlled officials for political surveillance.

You might be tempted to think at least that could never happen here. It already is. Washington, D.C., beats out Mexico City as the global city with the most government-controlled cameras per capita.
​
Oh well, Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente – What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve.

​TikTok was already a privacy nightmare:

• The EU fined it $600 million for breaching data privacy rules.
• An FCC commissioner asked Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores because of mounting evidence that China had access to all user data.
• The FBI opened an investigation into alleged use of the app to track American journalists.

To this troubling list we can now add the following: In violation of the platform’s own policies, sellers are using TikTok to market GPS trackers to stalkers, reports Rosie Thomas of 404 Media.

“Unlike AirTags,”one vendor boasts, “this thing doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t send alerts, she will never know it’s there.” In the comments section of a similar ad, one user bragged, “I bought some and put it on cars of girls I find attractive at the gym.”

Lest there be any doubt, Thomas’ report quotes Eva Galperin at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “This is absolutely being framed as a tool of abuse.” Galperin, co-founder of a non-profit that keeps tabs on such products, categorizes these products broadly as “stalkerware.”

The central legal and moral issue underlying stalking, as with all violations of privacy, is consent. Expert Market’s page summarizing GPS tracking laws by state underscores the point: The word “consent” appears in these laws 115 times.

When asked about the viral proliferation of ads for these tracker tools, TikTok told 404 Media that they “prohibit the sale of concealed video or audio recording devices on our platform.” And yet, Thomas and her colleagues continued to find such ads every time they looked.
​
Which, of course, should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. This is just one more good reason why President Trump should cease suspending the law requiring TikTok to be sold or shuttered.

​Larry Niven, the acclaimed science-fiction writer, once drolly observed, “I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.”

It certainly seems so today, with networked Ring cameras on every door linked to public and private CCTV, license plate readers, and government agencies buying up our digital lives from data brokers… all of it potentially connected to AI and facial recognition software.

Even inside our home, drones can look through our windows. Thermal imaging cameras in the hands of police can penetrate walls to watch us move around in our living rooms and bedrooms.

But at least there is one place where surveillance cannot penetrate, one last refuge of absolute, inviolable privacy – the inside of our skulls. We are free to think any thought, sacred or profane, sublime or silly, without fear of detection or punishment by any human authority. 

But maybe not for much longer.

The science journal Cell reports that a computer system has been trained to decode brain waves from people who silently move their mouths while mentally sounding the words to themselves. The signal from the brain is then translated into speech in real time on a computer screen with an error rate of 26 percent to 54 percent.

Annika Inampudi in Science reports that this technology, as it is refined, will be a godsend to speech-impaired people paralyzed by strokes or neurological conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). To protect test subjects from blurting out private, inner speech, users can be given unique, nonsense phrases like “chitty chitty bang bang” to cue the device to read their thoughts only when they want it to.

It is this latter development that gives us pause. The fact that a safeword is needed to defend against unwanted exposure of thought is concerning. Also concerning is that scientists have had significant success decoding thought even when the subject is not silently mouthing the words he or she is thinking about. The system at times can read mere inner thoughts.

At a time when digital technology evolves on fast-forward, it is not too early to be concerned about how this technology might be abused. After all, a few years ago AI couldn’t pass the Turing test. Now ChatGPT is regularly writing entertaining short stories, poems with striking imagery, and student papers that get A’s from naïve professors. The same progression could enable mind-reading technology to rapidly allow authorities to dip into people’s skulls against their will.

Imagine, for example, how this technology might be used in interrogations.

In this country, at least, the Fifth Amendment prohibition against self-incrimination should make results from such mind-readings inadmissible. But in professions in which polygraphs are routine, from law enforcement to intelligence and some retail positions, it is easy to imagine how such technology could be abused.

Overall, speech recognition technology is a boon for handicapped people who are desperate to communicate. It is a heartening and praiseworthy development that scientists – often caricatured as amoral agents of progress – are diligently thinking of procedures to compartmentalize the reading of thoughts only when subjects permit it.
​
Still, this story should give us pause. Something to think about…

Just a quick update about the ever-expanding toolkit of the technocratic mass surveillance state: The new kid on the block is GeoSpy, which can examine a photograph and extrapolate your location in seconds. It claims to accomplish this by using only visual data in the image rather than metadata. From a purely technical perspective, that’s a big achievement.

From a privacy standpoint, it’s a nightmare.

According to an account first reported by 404 Media and summarized by Alex Hively of SlashGear, the original open source version of GeoSpy was quickly removed when it became clear that it could be used to stalk people. Company founder Daniel Heinen later admonished Joe Rogan and guests in a tweet reminding them that GeoSpy is “only for Law Enforcement and Government” use (which, at the time of the tweet had recently become true).

That GeoSpy is now “only for” law enforcement and government use is cold comfort. It seems an all-too-familiar narrative, reminding us of Clearview AI’s similarly reckless approach to the ethics of identification technology. By the end of 2021, the facial recognition startup had scraped ten billion images from the web and social media, providing agencies with a powerful new tool to instantly identify us and aid in the quick construction of dossiers of our beliefs, activities, and relationships.

And now, thanks to breakneck developments in technology, the government can now both identify us and locate us. Consider this statement from GeoSpy founder Heinen:

“My job as a leader in my space is to build the best technology that customers are asking for. It's not my job to play the ethics game because our elected officials will eventually figure that out. I have full faith in the American people to decide who to elect and what to vote on.”

(If this were a video, here is where we’d cut away to a dark screen and the sound of crickets.)
We won’t belabor the point as our readers know full well where all of this is likely to lead. But we will quote ourselves from a related article decrying the surveillance capabilities of drones and satellites: “What is cutting-edge technology today will be standard tomorrow. This is just one more way in which the velocity of technology is outpacing our ability to adjust.”

With the rise of GeoSpy, we now have one more reason for Congress and the states to hit pause and reassert the privacy guarantees inherent in the Fourth Amendment.

One last thing: Don’t assume you’re safe just because GeoSpy found a picture that you took indoors. It appears they’ve cracked that nut too, having discovered that their visual model can learn “regional architectural cues.” Silly us, we thought all apartment kitchens looked the same.

As Malwarebytes advises, “It’s just become even more important to be conscious about the pictures we post online.”

​In Washington, D.C., they call it the “data broker loophole.” This is the legal maneuver by which a dozen federal agencies, ranging from the IRS to the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon, purchase records of Americans’ personal digital activity from third-party data brokers.
 
What is this loophole? With a straight face, the government claims that while the Fourth Amendment forbids “unreasonable searches and seizures” of our personal effects, nowhere does the Constitution forbid the government from opening its wallet and simply buying our data. And to be fair, we all routinely click the “agree” box that allow these transfers when scanning social media platform’s long and hard-to-read terms of service.
 
This is still disingenuous at best. The digital trails we leave online – our communications, the identities of our friends and associations, our personal financial, romantic and health secrets, not to mention our search histories – reveal information that can be more intimate than a diary.
 
Americans are noticing this violation of their privacy. A recent Ipsos poll finds that roughly 90 percent of Americans respond that it is not acceptable for private data brokers to sell our personal data to the government.
 
Congress is certain to soon turn to legislation that will require the government to obtain, as the Constitution requires, a probable cause warrant before inspecting our data.
 
In the meantime, if you want more background on the nature, extent, and abuses of the data broker loophole, here are some useful resources:
 
1. What Are Data Brokers, And How Do They Work?
(Proton) / June 20, 2025
 
A detailed primer on data brokers and the risks posed to consumers, including the sale of such data to government agencies without warrants.
 
2. “Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking U.S. Soldiers and Spies to Nuclear Vaults and Brothels in Germany,” (Wired), Nov. 19, 2024.
        
Despite what has to be the most clickable headline in recent history, Wired presents a deep and substantive investigative report that reveals the extent to which the sale of personal data collected by personal devices is putting Americans in uniform and national security at risk.
 

• “More than 3 billion phone coordinates collected by a U.S. data broker expose the detailed movements of U.S. military and intelligence workers in Germany – and the Pentagon is powerless to stop it.”

 
3. “A Continuing Pattern of Government Surveillance of U.S Citizens,”
         (Americans for Prosperity: James Czerniawski) See p. 4, April 8, 2025.
        
Eighty percent of Americans agree that the government should “obtain warrants before purchasing location information, internet records, and other sensitive data about people in the United States from data brokers.” And yet federal agencies routinely buy our data, threatening our most basic constitutional rights.
 
4. “The Intelligence Community Plan to Make It Easier to Buy All Your Data,”
(Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability), June 2, 2025.
 
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has instituted a plan to make sure Americans’ private data is no longer decentralized, fragmented, siloed, overpriced, and limited – literally everything you might hope your personal data would actually be.

5. Montana Becomes First State to Close the Law Enforcement Data Broker Loophole
(EFF) / May 14, 2025
 
Montana is the first state to close the data broker loophole, preventing law enforcement from buying personal digital data – like location, communications, and biometrics – without a warrant. Under SB 282, such data can only be accessed with a warrant, user consent, or an investigative subpoena. The law goes into effect 10/1/2025.
6. Federal Government Circumventing Fourth Amendment by Buying Data From Data Brokers
(Criminal Legal News) / April 15, 2025
 
Summarizing much earlier reporting from Reason and WSJ, the focus is on efforts to dodge Carpenter v. United States (2018). Federal agencies routinely purchase commercial cellphone data – which tracks individuals’ movements – without warrants, skirting Carpenter, which requires a warrant for such data.
 

• Companies like Google and Meta collect massive user data for advertising, while others sell it to brokers, who then sell it to law enforcement. ICE, IRS-CI, CDC, and the DIA have all used such data. Agencies claim Carpenter doesn’t apply to purchased data, revealing a legal loophole Congress has yet to close.

 
7. “FISA and the Second Amendment: Gunowners Beware,” (Reason[A1] ), Feb. 1, 2024.
 
If you’re a gun owner and use Apple products, you should be deeply concerned about the ability of federal law enforcement agencies to get a lot of data on you – without ever having to get a warrant.
 
8. EPIC White Paper Finds Gaps in State and Federal Privacy Law Coverage of Data Brokers
(EPIC) /July 29, 2025
 
This report argues that data brokers exploit legal loopholes in the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) to avoid compliance with modern privacy laws.
 

• EPIC urges lawmakers to close these loopholes, eliminate exemptions, and regulate data brokers under unified, enforceable privacy standards. References foreign adversaries.

 
9. Government Purchases of Private Data
         (Wake Forest Law Review, 59:1) / April 2024

This paper questions the widespread assumption that the Fourth Amendment can never apply to commercial purchases. Yet police officers can generally purchase an item available to the public without constitutional restriction.
 

• The paper challenges the idea that consumers waive their rights to their cellphone data when they use apps or other services. The explanations customers see when an app asks for permission to access their data are often insufficient or misleading, and typically say nothing about personal data being sold. Further, penalizing users for disclosing their data to service providers creates harmful incentives and is incompatible with the Fourth Amendment.
  
  

This paper draws broader lessons about the inadequacy of consumer privacy law in the United States. It examines the potential for private surveillance to become government surveillance through technical and legal interoperability. It assesses possible solutions.
 
10. Federal Acquisition of Commercially Available Information
(POGO) / Dec. 16, 2024

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) warns that federal agencies' unchecked use of commercially available information (CAI), including sensitive personal data purchased from brokers, circumvents Fourth Amendment protections.
 
POGO urges the Office of Management and Budget to end warrantless surveillance practices, increase transparency, and implement strong regulations. The comment highlights risks to privacy and civil liberties, especially for marginalized communities, and documents past abuses by agencies like DHS, ICE, and the FBI.
Finally, if you are interested in solutions, start with The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which passed the House of Representatives last year. If enacted, this measure would require the government to obtain a warrant before buying Americans’ personal information.
 
PPSA looks forward to this or some similar legislation being introduced in the 119th Congress.

 [A1]This links to a Cato article, which does not contain any links to a Reason article, so I don't know if he embedded the wrong link or wrote the wrong text. The text itself is from Cato.

Farnsworth Intelligence sells highly personal data on the cheap. Its business plan is as revolutionary as it is mercenary and brazen: Positioning itself as a legitimate business but selling data previously brought to market in the twilight corners of the dark web.

The realm in which this company operates is euphemistically known as “open-source intelligence,” or OSINT. Once upon a time, OSINT was primarily composed of publicly available data. But don’t be fooled. To quote PC World writer Michael Crider, “This is information apparently sourced directly from data breaches, stolen from companies and services in ways that just about every country considers a crime.”

And it’s all repackaged to sell at various price points. To wit, 404 Media, whose Joseph Cox broke the story, bought a tiny slice of Farnsworth’s data wares for a mere $50. 404 Media reports that is all they needed to eventually mine the addresses of numerous identity theft victims. Perhaps that’s why journalists report the company’s website says customers can find up-to-date addresses for debtors. Need data for your multi-million-dollar divorce case? Farnsworth can do that too.

As for the potential for trade secret violations, corporate espionage law, and the general use of stolen data in courts, EPIC’s Callie Schroeder says stay tuned. There are likely statutes that apply to what Farnsworth is doing, but as with all things digital, judicial rulings have been inconsistent to date.

And don’t even get us started on the surreptitious value government agencies of all stripes will place on this kind of dark web data – it could be a warrantless surveillance extravaganza.

​But there is no denying that shamelessness sells. After the story broke, Farnsworth issued a “404MEDIA” promo code on LinkedIn to celebrate the fact that it “has been getting a lot of attention.”

On April 8, the Board of Scarsdale Village, New York, approved a $2.1 million contract with Flock Safety to bring mass camera surveillance to its community.
 
Many residents of Scarsdale, the wealthiest suburb in the United States, were disturbed by the apparent contravention of the Board’s rules, giving no advance notice or allowing any public comment before voting 6-1 vote to approve the contract. Many of its residents are deeply troubled about the implications of Flock Safety camera surveillance, which enables AI-powered license plate readers to follow residents in their daily travels.
 
Jessica Burbank followed this story on Drop Site News, writing: “Flock is a $7.5 billion surveillance technology company, operating in over 5,000 communities across 49 states. Flock has a proven playbook to expand through securing local government contracts, often behind closed doors.”
 
Burbank reports on the public comments of Scarsdale resident Charles Seife, a former employee of the National Security Agency, who said:
 
“The system that Scarsdale wishes to implement is extremely dangerous … The records are kept for several weeks. At the very least, they allow retroactive surveillance. These systems are immensely popular with politicians and law enforcement, even though they do real and palpable damage to the citizenry …
 
“We're creating that database so that we can always do that for anyone, that you're constantly tracking people's movements. You have that system in place so that you don't need to articulate the suspicion before you're gathering that on someone, before you're actually trying to tag someone with wrongdoing. When you have that system there, all someone has to do is say, I don't like that person. And then you've got that surveillance already established.”
 
Seife later told Drop Site News: “Freedoms don't come back and privacy doesn't come back, and we are taking these irreversible steps so blithely for no real reason.”
 
Another Scarsdale resident, Josh Frankel, said: “The way I see it, it is not a matter of if this data will be abused and misused, only a matter of when and by whom.”

To try to find people in the United States illegally, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) directed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to comply with its request to sift through the health data of 79 million Medicaid recipients. This includes giving DHS access to sensitive personal information, including addresses, birthdates, ethnicity, IP addresses, banking data, immigration status, and Social Security numbers.

Twenty states have sued in response, arguing that giving DHS access to such personal data violates privacy protections under multiple federal laws, including the Administrative Procedures Act, the Social Security Act, HIPAA, and, of course, the Privacy Act.

Several civil liberties groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EPIC, and Protect Democracy Project, have filed an amicus brief in that case.

• In June, the deputy director of Medicaid protested the DHS plan in a memo: “Multiple federal statutory and regulatory authorities do not permit CMS to share this information with entities outside of CMS.”

 

• The ACLU’s Cody Venzke told Wired the move was tantamount to Medicaid “being entirely repurposed as a law enforcement database,” prompting the magazine’s writers to observe that the current plan “seemingly involves vacuuming up data from across the government.”

Our own take is that this is the weaponization of data, a characterization articulated by many others. The thing about weapons, of course, is that they can be pointed in any direction. Today it’s illegal aliens. Next time, it could just as easily be wealthy taxpayers, political dissenters, or those who engage in unpopular speech. Orange County official Jose Serrano told the L.A. Times that such targeting is dangerous because “the information is being used against people.”
​
In other words, it could be used for any reason by this or a future administration against you.

​Do you get a creepy feeling, a tingling on the back of your neck, when you think of a camera behind or above you illicitly watching your every move? Now, imagine if that camera has legs – and it’s crawling up your pants.
 
Yes, good, old-fashioned German ingenuity has resulted in Kakerlaken – the humble cockroach – being transformed into a robust surveillance platform. These roaches, the actual insects, are fitted with tiny AI backpacks that use neural stimulators under wireless control to steer the little spies to their targets, while they carry miniature cameras and sensors on their tiny, slimy carapaces. In case you are wondering, German scientists at Swarm Biotactics are using the Madagascar hissing variety, one of nature’s largest, and surely among your all-time, favorite cockroaches.
 
These cyborg-bugs will do more than provide real-time video reconnaissance. They will also detect toxic gas, radiation, and heat. And the technology’s neural interface can coordinate a large number of cyber-roaches to converge on a target as a swarm. Even better!
 
These technologies, reports The Times of India, allow “remote control and autonomous swarming in tight or inaccessible environments.” Germany has invested more than $15 million to perfect this surveillance army, no doubt with Russia’s military threat in mind.
 
Germany’s invention appears to be an advance over U.S. and Chinese military projects to develop tiny, mosquito-like drones to carry out surveillance. But those tiny robots are limited by range and battery life. A roach lives off the land and can scuttle for months to a year. They make the perfect sleeper agents and require no fake beards or forged passports.
 
We can certainly see the military utility of this project. We also can’t help but note that exotic technologies developed for warfare have a way of migrating – or, perhaps in this case, scuttling – from military to civilian uses. It is inevitable perhaps that similar off-the-shelf AI and sensors will make their way into commercial and law enforcement uses.
 
It’s bad enough when you see an ordinary Kakerlaken on the floor when you turn on the kitchen light. It would be even worse if someone recorded you shrieking before you smash it with your shoe.

The idea of one’s home as a castle is, increasingly, only true for actual castles – provided they’re off the grid. For the rest of us, devices are encasing us in surveillance boxes. Two recent articles bring home just how unprivate the home actually is.

First, Electronic Frontier Foundation contributors Hudson Hongo and Adam Schwartz explained that power meters – yes, power meters – are more than innocuous metal boxes we haven’t looked at since we bought the house. In California, where “government” and “overreach” have long been synonyms, it seems that even local power companies have gotten into the spy game.

EFF found that for ten years, Sacramento’s utility district (SMUD) targeted primarily Asian customers who seemed to be using more power than officials thought was needed. It was based on stereotypes that Asians tend to live collectively. SMUD was also looking for customers who grow weed illegally. The utility’s analysts didn’t even try to hide their motives: Among the 33,000 tips SMUD passed on to local law enforcement, a house that used 4,000 kWh was described as “4K, Asian,” and another noted with suspicion “the multiple Asians that have [been] reported” as living there.

Those nastygrams are exhibits in a lawsuit EFF filed on behalf of an Asian American advocacy group and individual residents. The complaint is simple: Order SMUD to stop searching its entire customer database without cause and prevent Sacramento police from performing dragnet searches (think entire ZIP codes), limiting them to court-warranted searches within the confines of active criminal investigations.

In other words, do what the Fourth Amendment has always required. Not to mention, SMUD should start following California’s own law prohibiting such privacy violations. In the meantime, the state might consider changing its motto from “Eureka” to “Yikes.”

The second story is even creepier. Writing in The Register, Thomas Claburn gave Black Mirror writers what might be great material for Season 8. Earlier this year we wrote about a disturbing new Wi-Fi capability discovered by deeply naïve researchers: The ability to sense bodies.

“Wi-Fi sensing,” as the broader field is known, is something the Wi-Fi Alliance should not have started promoting in 2020, but did anyway. Turns out Wi-Fi can do a lot more than get you addicted to your phone. In addition to sensing bodies, it can see through walls to map rooms and recognize human gestures, including sign language. And now? Now apparently Wi-Fi can determine the actual identity of the humans whose bodies it senses.

Or as the Pandora-like academics who cracked the code like to call it, “WhoFi.” If you don’t feel like diving into signal processing equations, we’ll break it down: Wi-Fi waves carry information about what happened to them while they were bouncing around. Signal strength or weakness, delays, whether the signal was twisted or scattered – all of that can be fed to AI to determine the features that make our body composition unique to us, right down to our bones and organs. And all this time you were preoccupied with getting fingerprinted. Get with the times.
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Finally, we’ll close with our decision to nominate the paper’s authors for “Achievements in Doublespeak.” Despite repeatedly describing their technique as a biometric method for re-identifying people, they insist that it can be made “privacy-preserving.”

We share our most personal information with banks, telecoms, online search engines, and social media platforms. They know what we spend our money on, with whom we communicate, what we search for, and what we read and post. What could be more personal than that? So whenever we allow corporations to hold such personal information in digital form, can that be taken as a presumption that we’ve just given away our right to privacy?
 
Advocates for a sweeping interpretation of the “third-party doctrine” believe so. The very act of sharing our data, they hold, automatically relinquishes any right to privacy. The government thus doesn’t need to seek a probable cause warrant to review our private information, as the Constitution requires. This is not a matter of theory. A complex web of federal and state law effectively requires communications companies – through a risk of ruinous fines – to search through the content of their customers’ data, and report suspicious results to law enforcement.
 
This is what happened to a Wisconsin man, Michael Gasper. His data was flagged by Snapchat’s automated scans as child sexual abuse material, and reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Based on this tip, a law enforcement officer was the first actor to perform a human review of the flagged file, though he did so without bothering to obtain a probable cause warrant, as the Fourth Amendment requires.
 
Initially, a lower court recognized that Gasper had a reasonable expectation of privacy in data he uploaded to the cloud through Snapchat. But the Wisconsin Court of Appeals held otherwise, reasoning that Snapchat’s Terms of Service – a lengthy contract most users “agree” to by checking a box, without ever reading it – eliminated any expectation of privacy. Now PPSA has filed a brief before the Wisconsin Supreme Court demonstrating that this ruling would undermine the heart of the Fourth Amendment. It would also defy a line of U.S. Supreme Court precedent that has long condemned overbroad interpretations regarding government access to third-party data.
 

• PPSA told the Wisconsin Supreme Court that the Fourth Amendment protects the degree of privacy that existed at the Founding despite advances in technology. This is not a reach. In the 18th century, Americans often entrusted their private property – and with it, their personal information – for limited uses by third parties, such as for custody, repair or transportation. Property owners maintained an expectation of privacy over their property, including their documents, when entrusted to a holder. In the 19th century, the Supreme Court held that letters sent through the mail “can only be opened and examined” under a warrant. Why should the cloud be treated any differently?

 

• Snapchat informed users, through its Terms of Service, that it performed automated searches for illicit material – essentially warning that it complies with the law. The state argues that this means Snapchat users have no expectation of privacy. But we told the Wisconsin high court: “when private reporting is mandated with significant penalties for noncompliance, such reports are state action, not private searches.”

 

• What about the eyeball search conducted by the law enforcement officer? We told the court: “But even if they were private searches, law enforcement cannot use them as a stepping stone to later, more expansive searches without complying with the Fourth Amendment.”

We reminded the Wisconsin Supreme Court that the U.S. Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States held that the government did not have the right to warrantlessly track a suspect’s location through historic call records.
 
We urge the court to realize that we can protect children from exploitation and abuse while taking the time to obtain a warrant based on probable cause. Otherwise, policy will continue to subject the private data of all Americans to warrantless searches.
 
The ransacking of our cloud-based data is much like the “general warrants” of the colonial era, when agents of the Crown could rifle through anyone’s documents at will. This practice was one of the prime outrages that sparked the American Revolution. We should not tolerate the government’s general warrants today.

Last week the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance held a hearing on AI and crime and something remarkable happened: Everyone agreed:

1. The administration’s desired moratorium on state AI regulation is a bad idea, and
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2. Existing criminal statutes everywhere need to be retrofitted to include AI-based offenses.

As for the first area of agreement, there was a collective sense that the country dodged a bullet last week when the Senate removed the moratorium from the budget bill and the House declined to reinstate it. Regarding the second issue, the consensus was clear: Buckle up. We have work to do.

Perhaps getting to work should start with persuading Members of Congress to show up at AI hearings. Other than the Chair and Ranking Member, only three of ten regular members were present. Those who did attend, however, heard from witnesses who, in combined testimony that ran 77 pages, struck similar chords:

1. Criminals can use AI impersonation to do things we’ve scarcely imagined.
   
   
2. AI is removing the technical barriers to crime. In the hands of industrious criminals, said witness Zara Perumal of Overwatch Data, “AI agents can learn by doing,” meaning the criminals themselves no longer have to be technical experts. “AI is removing human bottlenecks. It’s not just enhancing traditional fraud – it’s creating entirely new categories of criminal threat,” agreed Ari Redbord of TRM Labs. Just imagine, as one of the witnesses portended, “child abuse at scale.”
   
   
3. Law and policy are late to the party. For example, “Artificial Intelligence” isn’t even a category on the drop-down menu of the National Conference of State Legislatures. Overall, a handful of states have passed a few random measures, while hundreds of initiatives either failed or remain pending. As for the federal government, forget it. The administration’s recent moratorium attempt proved that the attitude du jour is recklessly laissez-faire. Which is exactly why subcommittee chair Andy Biggs (R-AZ) needed to call this hearing and promisingly referred to it as the first of many.
   
   
4. When it comes to fighting AI-powered crime, the best offense is a good defense. Given that the proverbial cats and genies are already out of their respective bags and bottles, it’s time to “shift the technical advantage to the defenders,” said Perumal.

Oregon and California, for example, intend to repurpose existing laws to include AI abuses. Some from-scratch legislation is also emerging, like Texas’ Responsible AI Governance Act and Tennessee’s ELVIS Act.

While most of the discussion centered on how criminals can misuse AI, we should not forget how it may be misused by our own government, which has a voracious appetite for our purchased data. AI is the critical ingredient to turn all that raw personal data into a working surveillance state.

The ACLU’s Cody Venzke reminded everyone not to overlook the Swiss Army Knife of our democracy – the Bill of Rights, especially the First and Fourth Amendments. Such protections, Venzke said, do not lose their power “simply because a new tool such as artificial intelligence was used.” They are both our sword and shield against criminals and government surveillance abuse, especially in the age of AI.

​“The government will become the master, and the people its slaves.” – Anti-Federalist No. 84

The ACLU is suing Sonoma County for using an intrusive drone program as a general surveillance tool, now in action despite a 40-year-old California Supreme Court ruling that prohibits warrantless aerial surveillance.

The California county’s Code Enforcement Service (CES) began the illegal program six years ago under the auspices of needing help to find non-permitted cannabis growing in rural locations. But the ACLU says CES has expanded this program into a general code enforcement tool, issuing millions of dollars in fines unrelated to cannabis growing, from building code violations to zoning infringements.

To accomplish this, CES employees have swooped in to “inspect” backyards, horse stables, playgrounds, hot tubs, outdoor baths, swimming pools, and more – you know, all the places where weed is usually grown? Sonoma drones have even flown under awnings and suspiciously close to curtainless windows. In fact, one of the plaintiffs captured a photo of a drone flying just outside her bedroom window (viewable at top, center-right; © Nichola Schmitz/ACLU):

Given what this image implies, would this be a good time to mention that the drones employ zoom lenses? And you thought your HOA board was devious.

At least your HOA is regulated by state laws. As the Los Angeles Times points out, California has no laws regulating the use of drones by code enforcement offices (beyond the state Supreme Court ruling mentioned above). ACLU senior staff attorney Matt Cagle told the press: “When it comes to laws relating to government use of drones, it’s kind of the Wild West.” This legal uncertainty, and the fact that drone use for warrantless surveillance is proliferating, makes the ACLU lawsuit all the more important.

“The use of drones over someone’s private space raises a question of what is considered private,” UC Irvine law professor Ari Ezra Waldman told the Times. Then he gave the best analogy we’ve heard regarding the unconstitutional nature of these drone surveillance operations:

“ … if law enforcement on the ground wants to see on the other side of a tall fence or trees into someone’s property, they have to get the person’s consent or they need probable cause for a warrant. ‘Why shouldn’t that apply above ground too?’”
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Or as the popular paraphrase of Isaac Newton’s translation of an ancient tablet goes: “As above, so below.”

EFF’s Matthew Guariglia and Dave Maass have brought to light a development in police stations across America that should concern every criminal defense attorney.

A new artificial intelligence program sold by Axon – the manufacturer of police body cameras and tasers – now offers police departments an AI agent that can take audio from body-worn surveillance cameras and convert it into a police report.

Getting police reports right is critical to ensuring justice in the courtroom. These reports are often the first drafts of a courtroom prosecution of a criminal suspect. The officer writes down details about witnessing a possible crime, the discovery of evidence, and reports whether or not the suspect resisted arrest. A prosecutor will scour the police report for details to craft a narrative of guilt before judge and jury. Thus, the accuracy of a police report can mean the difference between freedom or prison for innumerable defendants.

Axon advertises its product, Draft One, as a convenient way to streamline this process. It does the desk work so officers can spend more time on the streets. Sounds good, but what could go wrong?

• Any defense attorney will tell you that in the confusion of an arrest, officers will often order suspects to quit resisting arrest when, in fact, the suspect is trying to be cooperative. The straight conversion of the jumbled audio of an arrest risks all kinds of misrepresentations.

 

• EFF writes: “The public should be skeptical of a language algorithm’s ability to accurately process and distinguish between the wide range of languages, dialects, vernacular, idiom and slang people use.”

 

• EFF: “Police officers who deliberately speak with mistruths or exaggerations to shape the narrative available in body camera footage now have even more of a veneer of plausible deniability with AI-generated police reports. If police were to be caught in a lie concerning what’s in the report, an officer might be able to say that they did not lie: the AI simply mistranslated what was happening in the chaotic video.”

The Draft One process, by design, thwarts any attempt at an audit or to determine whether a statement was written by an officer or written by AI. In filing a Draft One report, an officer does sign an acknowledgement that he or she reviewed the report and edited it in accordance with that officer’s recollection.

However, once the text is copy-and-pasted into the officer’s police report, and the window is closed, the original AI draft disappears. There is nothing to stop an officer from just downloading the AI report and making it official.

This aspect of Draft One is a feature, not a bug.

EFF dug up a video of a discussion about this new product. In it, Axon’s senior principal product manager said: “So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosures headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices.”

More disclosure headaches? Like what really happened in an arrest?

• EFF sums up this position: “Axon deliberately does not store the original draft written by the Gen AI, because ‘the last thing’ they want is for cops to have to provide that data to anyone (say, a judge, defense attorney or civil liberties non-profit).”

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We are all for ways to make the difficult job of being a police officer easier. It is not too much to ask, however, that drafts be kept of any AI assistance, and that such assistance be disclosed to defense attorneys. One bill before the California Assembly, SB 524, would be a good start by mandating such transparency in America’s largest state by population.

Who better to consult about the personal issues that ChatGPT users ask than the AI chatbot itself? So we inquired.
 
On the personal side, ChatGPT says users most commonly ask about:
 

• “Mental health and emotional support,” including how to handle “anxiety and stress, depression, relationship struggles and self-esteem.”

 

• “Romantic Relationships & Dating,” including “dating advice” and “breakup help.”

 

• “Career and Work Issues,” including “quitting a job” and “difficult coworkers or bosses.”

 

• “Identity and Life Decisions,” including “sexual orientation or gender identity,” “religious and spiritual doubts,” and “major life choices.”

 
For several years, consumers have freely asked such questions, confident in ChatGPT’s promise that it doesn’t retain their queries once deleted.
 
Now, thanks to a pliable magistrate judge in New York, all such queries by hundreds of millions of users will be permanently stored and subject to exposure by discovery for future lawsuits or by official warrants.
 

• This is not to say that this case over copyright violations lacks merit. While developing ChatGPT, OpenAI and some of its competitors freely helped themselves to voluminous (as in Library of Congress-sized) databases, including the contents of The New York Times, without any licenses, permission, or compensation to the holders of the rights to that content. Copyrights were ignored.

 

• But what is leaving civil libertarian and digital industry observers agog is the sweeping order by which a judge is forcing ChatGPT to violate its promise to its customers and store all users’ queries, no matter how personal.

 

• Courts may well find that OpenAI’s free use of copyrighted material – allegedly lifted from Russian pirate websites – was an insane business plan from the start. But the judge’s order to lock down and preserve the private queries of 800 million people is equally insane.

Only a few business and education customers are exempt. As for the rest of us, virtually anything asked – no matter how personal – is a permanent record that lawyers in a nasty divorce or commercial dispute, or a government agent, could pry open with the right legal tools.

The actual number of users affected is estimated to be 10 percent of the world population. Yet as staggering as the number of affected users is, The Hill contributor and privacy attorney Jay Edelson says the case’s legal implications are of far greater concern:

“This is more than a discovery dispute. It’s a mass privacy violation dressed up as routine litigation … If courts accept that any plaintiff can freeze millions of uninvolved users’ data, where does it end? Could Apple preserve every photo taken with an iPhone over one copyright lawsuit? Could Google save a log of every American’s searches over a single business dispute? …

“This precedent is terrifying. Now, Americans’ private data could be frozen when a corporate plaintiff simply claims — without proof — that Americans’ deleted content might add marginal value to their case. Today it’s ChatGPT. Tomorrow it could be your cleared browser history or your location data.”

Blame not the plaintiff in this case, understandably concerned about the ransacking of its copyrighted material. Blame the judge for ordering such broad discovery. A better approach would have been a randomized sampling of a large number of users’ queries, anonymized to protect their privacy.

Users – all of us whose private data is now at risk – were never consulted by the court. Two attempts from private citizens to intervene were smugly dismissed by the judge.
Edelson writes:

“Maybe you have asked ChatGPT how to handle crippling debt. Maybe you have confessed why you can’t sleep at night. Maybe you’ve typed thoughts you’ve never said out loud. Delete should mean delete.”
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Let us hope appellate courts replace this magistrate judge’s chainsaw with a scalpel.

We frequently report on the dangers of general surveillance in the hands of government actors willing to disregard quaint notions of privacy and civil liberties. Now comes a sobering reminder that bad actors can use the global surveillance economy to track down people in order to kill them.

According to The Guardian, that’s exactly what the Sinaloa drug cartel did in 2018, as detailed in a new Justice Department report. “El Chapo” Guzmán was extradited to the United States in 2017. As payback, a hacker working for El Chapo’s drug cartel subsequently accessed the phone of an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.

The cartel, reports Reuters, used the phone number to obtain records of calls in and out as well as geolocation data. Next, the cartel got into Mexico City’s extensive camera system to track the FBI official to identify everyone who met with him. Some were intimidated and threatened. Others were murdered.

Out of the 10 largest metropolises in the world, Mexico City ranks seventh in CCTV cameras per 1,000 people, or roughly six cameras per person. Yet there, as elsewhere, it has had little impact on the crime index. In the meantime, savvy criminals working for shadowy organizations can use it for criminal surveillance.

The Justice Department report says that the FBI has a strategic plan in the works to help mitigate such vulnerabilities. Such efforts are well-intentioned, to be sure, but likely to be one-sided. Playing defense against hackers with access to every tool they need is not a long-term solution.
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Let’s start by putting stronger guardrails on camera networks in every country that uses them. The warning is that when governments create systematic surveillance networks, they could easily enable the crimes they seek to prevent.

Perhaps it was always the height of naïveté to assume that forty years of research into “computer vision” – the field of artificial intelligence that allows computers to interpret images – would only make the world a better place. Now a landmark study published in Nature reports:

• “Our findings challenge narratives that most kinds of computer vision and data extraction are largely benign or harmless and that only a small portion is harmful. Rather, we found that the computer-vision papers and patents prioritize intrusive forms of data extraction.”

Let’s be clear about what that means.

• The study found that fully 86 percent of the field’s derived patents focused on using computer vision technology to create and extract human-related data, about bodies, body parts, and the spaces where such things are found. In other words, it is technology that tracks individuals and what we do.

The field of computer vision research, says ScienceBlog, has become “a vast network that transforms academic insights into tools for watching, profiling, and controlling human behavior.”

• Australian academic Jathan Sadowski told The Register that the discipline’s research conveniently meets the insatiable surveillance needs of its friends in high places – the military, law enforcement, and corporations: “Computer vision's focus on human data extraction does not merely coincide with these powerful interests, but rather is driven by them.”

The Nature study also discovered that, to help normalize their voyeurism, researchers in the computer vision field had adopted some clever linguistic tactics, including referring to humans and our body parts as “objects” – a kind of dehumanizing rhetoric that brings to mind the worst of the previous century. The obfuscating language, notes Sadowski, has the added bonus of abstracting “any potential issues related to critical inquiry, ethical responsibility, or political controversy.”

Such studies underscore a pressing reality, namely that we are rushing full tilt into uncharted territory without brakes and without any guardrails on the road. And in some cases, without any roads at all or even any maps.

Technology, and especially AI, doesn’t have to exist in the absence of privacy and accountability. With that goal in mind, one of the leaders of the Nature study, Dr. Abeba Birhane, recently established the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin. She represents the best of us in the struggle against an unrestrained surveillance state. The whole site is worth a deep dive, but we’ll leave you with this excerpt:

• “AI systems are integrated hastily into numerous social sectors, most of the time without rigorous vetting. As a result, AI systems built on social, cultural, and historical data and operating within such a realm tend to diminish fundamental rights, and keep systems of authority and power intact.”

AI Accountability Lab reminds us that any new powerful technology inevitably has political and personal consequences. When technology drives the times, philosophy and prescience are needed as never before.
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Congress and the states need to enact – use whatever metaphor you like –  legal maps, guardrails, brakes. In the end, they all represent the same idea – a return to the privacy guaranteed to all American citizens in the Bill of Rights.