In a 2018 TED Talk, Yuval Harari argued that democracy prevailed
over fascism and communism in the 20th century not because of any
inherent advantage, but because the technology of that age
favored open and democratic societies. It was simply too
difficult and too costly to centralize power using pre-digital
technology.
But, Yuval warned, with the rise of AI, the calculus might flip:
it might actually become far more efficient to run highly
centralized authoritarian governments.
Eight years later, we're starting to see what Yuval was warning
about. Right now, police across all levels of government, from
small-town sheriffs to massive federal agencies, are adopting AI
at a staggering rate and using it to build the kind of efficient,
centralized surveillance-state apparatus that Yuval warned about.
Take, for example, the recent deployment of hundreds of thousands
of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) across the country by
companies like Flock and Axon. These cameras have made headlines
in recent weeks, but as you’ll hear in this episode, they are
just the most visible frontier of an AI-powered digital dragnet
that gives police the ability to analyze extraordinary amounts of
data about private citizens.
Today on the show, Tristan speaks with two experts on how police
are using AI technology today, what we can expect in the near
future, and what protections we need to create now before it's
too late.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a law professor at George Washington
University who studies how policing technology collides with
constitutional law. He's the author of Your Data Will Be Used
Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.
Garance Burke is an investigative journalist at The Associated
Press, where she leads high-impact projects on the intersection
of technology and society. Her investigations into the global
surveillance industry were part of a package that won the 2026
Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson
Yuval Noah Harari’s 2018 TED talk: “Why fascism is so tempting --
and how your data could power it”
The full series of AP stories produced by Grance Burke and her
Pulitzer Prize-winning colleagues
Further reading on Estonia’s data tracker tool
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra
Molnar
America and China Are Racing to Different AI
Futures
Laughing at Power: A Troublemaker’s Guide to Changing
Tech
Corrections
Andrew said that real-time crime centers are in 300 cities across
the US, which matches the findings of the National Real Time
Crime Center Association; however, this figure is disputed, with
the Electronic Frontier Foundation putting it at 150.
Andrew incorrectly described the resolution of the case of a man
misidentified by AI in New Orleans. He said the man was
acquitted, but in fact the charges were dropped.
Clarifications
As noted in the episode, Andrew’s discussion of agentic AI was a
theoretical account of a tool that police may use in the future,
not something actively used on the ground today.
Garance referred to the protests in Ferguson as the impetus for
police-worn body cameras. Body cameras were being piloted in the
US and UK prior to Ferguson, but federal grants in the wake of
the protests made them much more common.
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