Whether Mahomes or Hurts Will Win Super Bowl LIX, the Emerging Surveillance State Is Now in the Game

​Following the New Year’s Day terrorist attack that left 14 dead, New Orleans is correct to, in the words of Homeland Security’s Eric DeLaune, “put a fresh set of eyes” on security plans for Sunday’s Super Bowl. But not all of those eyes will be human, and that’s not a reference to the 100 bomb-sniffing canines on duty.
 
The Superdome’s managing company has hired AI giant Dataminr to cast a virtual dragnet across the online world, looking for patterns that might suggest trouble is brewing. Throughout the weekend, the company will scrape more than a million sources of data (social media posts, traffic camera footage, dark web forums, and more) to feed its generative AI tool. Dataminr will then alert Superdome officials if it detects any potentially alarming patterns emerging from the data – all within 60 seconds of the real time event, according to the company’s own site.
 
The New Year’s Day attacker took advantage of a preventable lapse in physical security and planning – incomplete bollard installation, non-use of temporary barriers, ignored warnings, and good old-fashioned mismanagement. As they should, lawsuits aplenty are being filed. So revisiting such risks for the Super Bowl is warranted – banning drones, adding law enforcement, limiting traffic, restricting area access, requiring credentials. Add to those precautions snipers, National Guard members, SWAT vehicles, blast barriers, and giant X-ray machines.
 
All of that represents a suitably robust response. But the hiring of Dataminr and its “million-source-scrape” is a technological response of such astonishing scale that it risks going beyond proactive into the realm of paranoia. It should be even more alarming given that this represents a public-private partnership, as the Superdome is indirectly owned by the State of Louisiana.
 
What will happen with all that data, most of which will presumably not be needed for any legitimate safety concerns? No one knows, but in the past such data was used to report constitutionally-protected free speech to the U.S. Marshals Service and George Floyd protest details to police departments.
 
So be careful what you post on your social media accounts if you show your face at this Super Bowl Weekend. Big Brother and his algorithms will be watching – and collecting what they see.

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