For two decades, the comforting response to mass surveillance was arithmetic. Yes, the government collects everything, but nobody could possibly look at it all. The haystack was too big. Your ordinary life was protected not by law but by the sheer impossibility of anyone caring enough to sift through it.
Artificial intelligence just deleted that protection, because AI is a machine built for exactly one thing, finding needles in haystacks.
Look at what has already been deployed while the public debated chatbots. Flock Safety, a private company, operates license plate readers in more than 6,000 American communities, capturing over a billion images every month and storing them in searchable databases, according to an analysis by the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Motorola’s competing network claims cameras from over 3,700 agencies and business partners. Layer on facial recognition, gunshot detection microphones, drone-as-first-responder programs, and AI platforms that can search body camera footage and police databases in plain English, and you have something no free country has ever possessed, a near-complete, machine-readable record of where ordinary citizens go, when, and with whom.
The new systems do not merely record. Vendors now advertise “anomaly detection,” algorithms that flag a vehicle for appearing at unusual places or times, with no crime committed and no warrant sought. That is pre-crime, sold as a software feature. And because the infrastructure is owned by private corporations under contract rather than built by government under statute, it arrived without a single vote being cast on whether Americans wanted to live under it.