Entries Tagged "surveillance"

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MIT to Become Hotbed of AI Video Surveillance

It’s a lot:

According to information obtained by The Tech, MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will support them, began November 2025 and will likely continue until September 2026.

Technical specifications for the cameras suggest that they will be capable of collecting real-time face and object classification data, including detection of motion, loitering, crowds, face masks, and camera tampering. Individuals can also be automatically classified on the basis of clothing color, gender, and age, up to a distance of 35 feet (11 meters) from the camera. According to a statement from MIT spokesperson Kimberly Allen, any collected data is “retained up to 30 days,” unless an exception is granted.

[…]

Most of the new cameras, which are part of Hanwha’s Wisenet AI line, are marketed for their ability to identify and classify multiple objects with deep learning algorithms. They support resolutions ranging from 2MP to 4K while also recognizing faces, license plates, vehicles, and other objects in real time.

Nearly all cameras will accommodate a wide range of pan, tilt, rotate, and zoom motion and will be monitored continually with Ai-RGUS, an AI camera software.

Yikes.

Posted on July 21, 2026 at 7:07 AM • View Comments

AI Surveillance and Social Progress

In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate that fact to you, and provide real-time alerts to any relevant authorities… and maybe also to the general public.

Think of these systems as automated speed cameras, but on steroids. Only they’ll enforce not just speed limits, but any other rule you can imagine. And you won’t receive a ticket weeks later by mail; you’ll be informed about and fined for your violation immediately.

These systems will combine powerful AI, public and private surveillance via real-time facial recognition technology and digital tracking, mass databases and highly personalized enforcement. If deployed at scale, they will have profound chilling effects not just on personal freedoms, but democracy and social progress itself.

China has been developing its surveillance infrastructure for years. The country has over 600 million surveillance cameras, increasingly powered by AI and facial recognition to enforce legal and social rules. Take the case of Lao Duan, a Chinese citizen blacklisted by the system after he lost his job and was unable to repay a series of loans. When he visited Beijing, the city’s AI surveillance system identified him by his face at a major intersection and displayed his face, name and citizen ID number on a large electronic billboard nearby with a message that he was an untrustworthy person. Similar systems are now being deployed across China and integrated with its infamous online monitoring, censorship and social credit systems.

AI surveillance is now being experimented with in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. According to a new report, the US Department of Homeland Security is rapidly increasing its use of AI-based surveillance, including facial recognition and the monitoring of social media accounts, to keep tabs on immigrants, dissidents, journalists, legal observers and protesters. While the systems are ostensibly used to maintain security and public safety, the real aim is often social control. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle—a powerful tech giant that works closely with the Trump administration—has said: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting.” The chilling effects are the point.

AI surveillance raises a range of public policy challenges: technical biases, unauditable systems, and inflexible automated law and social rule enforcement that can promote discrimination and undermine transparency, accountability and the rule of law. But we believe the most urgent and long-term impact will be its broader chilling effects.

In a new book, Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age, Jon Penney explains how surveillance, technology and power can be weaponized to influence behavior at scale. Surveillance, personalization, uncertainty and authority are all key mechanisms to increase the scale and impact of chilling effects. They cause people to self-censor their words and actions, to become more conformist and compliant and thus easier to manage and control. And the effects are additive: the more mechanisms employed, and the more powerful the form, the greater the chill.

Computerization has long allowed data collectors to track our locations, collect lists of whom we communicate with, and monitor our spending habits—unless we use cash. What’s new is an unprecedented fusion of each of these mechanisms, persistent and unrelenting. AI brings an analytical ability to spy on the contents of our communications, and to answer sophisticated questions about our whereabouts and activities: actions that previously required human analysts are now automated. The result will be a kind of supercharged societal level of chilling effects where fear, self-censorship and groupthink reign, and dissent, creativity and innovation become increasingly rare.

In this atmosphere of fear and conformity, risky ideas, social activism and self-reinvention—especially by disfavored groups and targeted populations—are also chilled. This will have long-term effects on social progress.

Consider the relatively recent societal normalization of same-sex relationships and the recreational use of marijuana. Over the decades, those ideas slowly progressed from being both immoral and illegal, to moral but still illegal, and finally to both moral and legal. But in order for any of that to happen, there had to be a counterculture that was able to experiment and eventually demonstrate to the world that morality could change over time. To the extent that AI surveillance chills this sort of experimentation in public or in private, social progress becomes impossible.

There are no real historical precursors to this; these technologies are too new. Even the most notorious and large-scale domestic surveillance program in US history, the FBI’s use of wiretapping, physical mail opening, informants and paper index cards to track alleged communists during the 1950s and 1960s, appears genuinely archaic in light of modern AI-enhanced surveillance. So does East Germany’s human-centric surveillance network during the cold war. Only science fiction, from the likes of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, comes close. But even Big Brother’s “telescreen” feels decidedly mid-20th-century by comparison.

But we need not sit idly. Now that we recognize the danger of AI-enhanced mass surveillance, we can make the policy choices not to implement it. Bans on facial recognition and other forms of identification tech can slow development; robust new privacy and data protections can restrict data tracking and retention; AI regulations can curtail its most invasive uses; and structural reforms can help us scrutinize and break up powerful state/tech cartels that pave the way for technological excesses like AI surveillance.

The chill of AI-powered mass surveillance will suffocate the very foundations of healthy democratic societies. But we can still choose a different path.

This essay was written with Jon Penney, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

Posted on July 10, 2026 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

Flock Cameras Can Surveil Cars Without License Plates

This is from a 2024 company presentation:

Officers can also tap into data showing a car’s decals, bumper stickers, back and top racks—along with temporary and unique state tags.

Flock calls it a “Vehicle Fingerprint” and it’s touted as a way for law enforcement officials to get more information “even when you don’t have full plate information,” the company’s presentation shows.

The company gives police officers the ability to search that data as well, to “build stronger cases with less information upfront.” That includes being able to locate multiple vehicles law enforcement officials believe are moving together and what Flock calls a “multi geo search.”

This kind of thing is older than AI; I wrote about it in my 2014 book Beyond Fear. Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was using cell phone location data to track phones that were habitually near each other.

As bad as Flock is, remember that anyone with broad access to cell phone location data can do the same thing.

Posted on July 3, 2026 at 7:15 AM • View Comments

Papa Johns Surveillance-Based Advertising

Papa Johns is spying on people’s buying activities to predict when they are low on food:

The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they’re low on groceries—and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering ad. The idea is to reach hungry consumers by “knowing what is in their fridge without being too creepy,” said Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer at Carat.

To achieve that goal, NBCU and Instacart created a custom audience of shoppers who regularly purchase grocery staples on Instacart, such as eggs, milk, meat and produce. Based on that data, Papa Johns can determine which days of the week certain consumers are likely to run out of groceries and serve them an ad on NBCU streaming content accordingly. The brand served custom creatives to consumers based on their food preferences—such as whether they buy meat regularly—with QR codes and calls to action such as, “Light on groceries?” or “Empty fridge?”

Back in 2012, we learned (from Target and its campaign that detects when someone is pregnant) that the trick is to hide the knowledge in other, wrong, information. So the way for Papa Johns to not be “too creepy” is to deliberately get it wrong sometimes.

But still, ugh.

Posted on July 1, 2026 at 6:53 AM • View Comments

The Realities of AI Video Surveillance

The Financial Times has a good article on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia.

In contrast with older tools restricted to a few dozen preset searches, these new tools allow an almost unlimited range of enquiries by enabling language-based searches on video.

That lets intelligence officers hunt through massive streams of videos using simple search terms, such as two men handing a bag to each other; a person who has changed their appearance, or has changed clothes multiple times in a day; or a vehicle that has recently been painted over, or has driven past the same spot several times in a short period.

“This is the holy grail of surveillance,” said a European official whose country uses the technology on its cities. “We are able to look for behaviour, not objects—it has created a world of new possibilities.”

I wrote about this sort of thing a few years ago, how AI enables mass spying in the way that computers and networks enabled mass surveillance. The interesting development in the article is that AI allows people to ask natural language questions about video footage to AIs—and AIs can answer them.

Posted on June 30, 2026 at 8:05 AM • View Comments

Professional Athletes and Wearables

I haven’t thought about the privacy issues surrounding professional athletes and wearables.

Wearables present serious privacy issues for “Average Joe” consumers, who are entrusting tech companies to safely store and protect their biometric data. Imagine the stakes for a professional athlete, whose entire livelihood could be affected by a single biometric data point. To give one of many realistic hypotheticals: a basketball player has a terrible game, and the coach wonders if they showed up to the gym hungover. The coach has access to the player’s wearable data, and checks to see when they went to sleep, as well as what their heart rate looked like during the night. Should the player have been out partying before a game? No. Should the coach be able to surveil them? Definitely not.

It will not surprise you to learn that there’s an emergent gambling angle here: sports leagues would love to commercialize players’ biometric data, and sharp bettors would love access to data about, say, a hungover player. “We’re going to get to a spot where people are betting not just on the velocity of the puck that was shot by a player in the NHL playoffs, but on what the heart rate of a certain player is going to be running down the field,” said Helen “Nellie” Drew, the director of the University of Buffalo’s Center for the Advancement of Sport, and a professor of practice in sports law.

There are other practical considerations, too. What if wearable data reveals that a player isn’t as speedy as they were before, and a team uses that data against the player during contract negotiations? What if a wearable reveals a player is favoring their leg, or is at greater risk of injury? This information is potentially beneficial to a training staff and an athlete, so long as it’s disclosed and used in a responsible manner—­a critical, mostly unresolved caveat. “Aging and injured players are the most at-risk” of wearable data being used against them, said Michael LeRoy, who researches sports labor laws and AI, and is a professor at the University of Illinois’s School of Labor and Employment Relations.

The bit about gamblers is particularly scary.

I have often said that surveillance tech is generally deployed first against people with diminished rights: children, prisoners, military personnel, the mentally impaired. This is another early use case with different dynamics. The surveilled are wealthy and powerful, and—in many cases—unionized.

Posted on June 22, 2026 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

The FCC Wants to Eliminate Burner Phones

A proposed FCC rule would kill burner phones: phones whose accounts are not attached to a particular person.

The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number and their physical address, alarming privacy advocates and civil rights activists who compare the measures to those from authoritarian countries where it can be difficult to buy a mobile phone plan without giving up your identity.

The proposed change would drastically shake up how people obtain phone plans in the U.S., and have all sorts of privacy and cybersecurity knock-on effects. The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers, with telecoms being required to collect other information on business and foreign customers like the intended use case of their bulk phone plan purchase and their IP address. But the changes would mean telecoms collect data on all new and renewing customers, and the FCC provides a long list of other things that the collected data could help authorities with.

Alternate link.

Posted on June 15, 2026 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

Enhanced License Plate Tracking

The surveillance company Leonardo wants more data:

A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific drivers or passengers.

The technology, called SignalTrace, would turn ALPR cameras from devices focused on tracking cars to ones that can more readily track the location of particular people. ALPR cameras have become a commonly deployed technology all across the U.S.; SignalTrace would make some of those cameras capable of collecting much more data.

Yes, it’s bad that more companies are collecting this level of surveillance data. But all of this pales in comparison to the type and quantity of data our smartphones already collect about us.

Alternate link.

Posted on June 11, 2026 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

Chilling Effects

Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it.

Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent.

This silence comes in the wake of a relentless Trump administration war on campus speech that has involved lawsuits, arrests, deportations and expulsions.

Reports cite a range of complicated factors for the restraint, from apathy to technology-induced incapacity. But as public policy and law and social science experts, we believe students aren’t protesting for a very simple reason: They are afraid. They are self-censoring and disengaging from campaign activism to avoid punitive measures.

In law and social science, we call this impact a chilling effect—the behavioral tendency for people in face of a threat to self-censor and restrain their activities for self-protection.

It’s increasingly clear to us that these impacts are not incidental or ancillary to Trump administration policy. Rather, the chilling effects are the point. This is the closest thing to a consistent governing strategy in Trump’s second term.

The broader chill of Trump threats

Chilling effects can be subtle, but today they are everywhere. And it’s not just students who are chilled by Trump administration threats.

Professors are censoring themselves in lectures and rewriting syllabuses. Researchers are stripping grant applications of words that might attract federal scrutiny, or abandoning the topics entirely. Media outlets are modifying their news coverage to avoid Trump lawsuits or sanctions.

Law enforcement and regulatory agencies are refusing to investigate Trump-aligned actors inside or outside government, and major national law firms are declining cases challenging Trump administration policies.

Publishers are “stepping back” from LGBTQ+ books and other progressive subjects. Many in targeted immigrant communities are afraid to leave home to go to work or school.

In most cases, these people and institutions are not being specifically targeted or threatened by Trump. But they are afraid, and their fear is doing the administration’s work for it. They stay silent, avoid attention and confrontation, and look the other way. In other cases, they change their speech and behavior to accommodate or conform to the administration’s worldview.

Of course, there are counterexamples, such as the winter protests in Minneapolis in response to brutality by agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the recent “No Kings” rallies. But even here, the broader but less visible trend—chilling effects—is evident.

For instance, in recent reporting on the latest No Kings rallies, many media outlets observed that students were noticeably missing, despite the Trump administration’s unpopularity among younger Americans.

A persistent strategy

We believe none of this is by accident.

In a new book, “Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age,” one of us—Jon Penney—explains how law, technology, and state and corporate power are weaponized to chill and repress, and the dangers this poses for the United States and other democratic societies. The other—Bruce Schneier—has extensively studied the security infrastructure enabling this.

What we see isn’t gratuitous government cruelty, chaos or vengeance. Instead, we see a persistent strategy to maximize fear and chilling effects in ways that are corrosive to freedom and democracy.

Research suggests that surveillance, personal threats, uncertainty and abuse of power are key factors in doing so. The federal government has a clear and systematic pattern of employing these very mechanisms across a number of domains far beyond campuses.

They are evident in militarized raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and in journalists being arrested and indicted for reporting on protests. They are made clear in the long list of political enemies the Trump administration has investigated or threatened, including the Federal Reserve chairman. And they can also be seen in the weaponization of technology, including ramping up surveillance to target critics and protestors.

Corrosive to freedom and democracy

History offers some guidance on impacts.

During the McCarthy era, overreaching laws, surveillance, and public and private sector reprisals ostensibly targeted alleged communists. But the real aim was often to suppress progressive journalists, trade unions and political opposition.

In the 1960s, these same tactics were reused by Southern states to chill the Civil Rights Movement. Historians have written about how the widespread fear and conformity of these periods reshaped American society in enduring ways, including the destruction of progressive political movements and both delaying and muting the Civil Rights Movement itself.

When such state threats are systematized, they can foment a broader climate of fear, self-censorship and conformity. In that climate, dissenting speech, political opposition, democratic mobilization and other checks on power become increasingly difficult, even dangerous. It is no surprise, for instance, that Trump critics regularly admit to self-censorship, fearing for their safety.

Chilling effects are thus not only repressive—causing self-censorship—but productive. They produce conforming and compliant speech and behavior, which can have longer-term social impacts. They not only undermine protected rights and suppress accountability but can promote social change—even without a popular mandate to do so.

This latter point is often missed. It explains Trump’s assaults on universities and cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center for the Arts and the Smithsonian. Often dismissed as peculiar Trump obsessions, they are fully consistent with Project 2025—the sweeping policy blueprint for Trump’s second term authored by a coalition of conservative groups and its call to target the “institutions of American civil society” and “wield federal power” to “reverse” decades of progressive cultural advancements.

In the near term, this means an increasingly weakened democratic society, with the government and its patrons enjoying freedom to pursue their objectives. Over the long term, this can mean a changed society as more conformist and compliant speech and culture become more widely accepted and entrenched.

Not inevitable

In our view, this future is not inevitable, just as the McCarthy era “Red Scare” and violent civil rights era repression were not. In both cases, fear and chilling effects were resisted in law and civil society, as they can be today.

But the central mechanisms—surveillance, uncertainty, personal threats and abuse of power—would need to be addressed. For instance, new legislation could ensure justice for lawless government actors and constrain surveillance. Courts can block abuses of federal power, including illegal arrests, detentions and mass citizen databases.

The media, lawyers and civil society can hold the government accountable. And students, teachers, universities and cultural institutions can resist the tendency to self-censor and conform.

The citizen mobilization in Minnesota and the No Kings rallies are examples of that. But to resist chilling effects and their dangers over the long term, this would have to be the norm, not the exception.

This essay was written with Jon Penney, and originally appeared in The Conversation.

Posted on May 29, 2026 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.