[en] Is #AI "#supercharged #surveillance" #legal? (#USA)

"... answer is not straightforward."

"... huge amount of information that the #government can #collect on Americans that is not itself regulated ... by the #Constitution .. #Fourth #Amendment ..."

"... the government can purchase commercial data ... which can include #sensitive personal information like #mobile #location and web #browsing records."

"What AI can do is it can take a lot of information, none of which is by itself sensitive, and therefore none of which by itself is #regulated, and it can give the government a lot of powers ...".

"AI can aggregate ... information to spot patterns, draw inferences ... at massive scale ... law has not caught up with #technological reality".

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/06/1134012/is-the-pentagon-allowed-to-surveil-americans-with-ai/

#privacy #pii

Over the past few years, the unrestrained use of poorly-understood AI in real-world applications had inflicted significant harm upon #social, #economical, #educational, and #democratic infrastructures, round the globe.

Throughout AI's evolution—from the early 1940s McCulloch-Pitts neuron model, through the mid 1980s NN, to the early 2020s DNN—this technology had always been accessible to academic researchers and independent practitioners, in the form of peer-reviewed scientific papers, curated data sets, open competitions, and even open-source implementations. The intellectual insights of the academics and the social concerns of the independents had always counterbalanced the excesses of the industry. But all that had changed, with the advent of the post-Transformer Foundation Models (FMs).

FMs are conceived, built, deployed, and evolved exclusively by BigTech, behind the veil of commercial secrecy and under the tight control by a few billionaires. Academic institutions and independent laboratories no longer have access to the data, software, hardware, procedures, and policies that govern these FMs, which are now re-quilting the World's socio-economic fabric, in real-time.

#AI now poses a clear and present danger to fundamental human rights. It must be #regulated, uniformly, globally, with deliberate haste.