AI Overview
The immense computing power housed in AI data centers is directly driving a massive expansion in global and domestic surveillance. These facilities provide the necessary infrastructure to ingest, process, and analyze vast amounts of data—from facial recognition feeds to location tracking—for law enforcement and government agencies.
How AI Data Centers Power Surveillance
Predictive Policing & Data Brokers: Data centers process massive, warrantless collections of data, such as geolocation and web-browsing information purchased from data brokers. This allows law enforcement agencies to build geospatial heat maps to predict crime trends.
Real-Time Crime Centers: Platforms aggregate feeds from widespread sources (like automatic license plate readers and public CCTV cameras) into searchable, AI-powered networks. Officers can use natural language searches to track specific vehicles, bystanders, or suspects.
Global Monitoring: At a larger scale, AI data center architecture enables widespread public surveillance, such as real-time tracking of dissidents and monitoring of crowds using biometric scanning.
Physical Security Inside the Facilities
Interestingly, these data centers also use AI for their own physical surveillance. Operators use AI-powered cameras with video analytics to secure server racks, prevent unauthorized access (such as "tailgating"), and guide automated emergency responses.
Privacy & Public Concern
Civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, frequently cite "mission creep" regarding this technology. Tools originally justified for specific security applications are now increasingly used to monitor everyday citizens. If left unchecked, privacy advocates warn that these networks could facilitate an unprecedented digital surveillance state.
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers many promising applications. Algorithms and machine learning can help develop new drugs and target treatment in effective ways. AI also plays a role in tracking climate change by monitoring weather patterns. Wildlife experts have coupled AI with satellite imagery to monitor how endangered species are faring and where threats are appearing.
But there is a dark side to AI as well, given its potential for nefarious purposes. Concerns around privacy, safety and security have grown as the technology is used to analyze confidential material and amplify false narratives as part of disinformation campaigns. Due to its scalability and capacity to examine large data sets, it can study people’s behavior and act on that information.
Perhaps the starkest example is in China, where AI enables surveillance on a widespread scale. Coupled with social media monitoring, cameras, and facial recognition, the technology enables authorities to track dissidents and government critics and identify their statements and locations. There is infrastructure in place that can integrate information from a variety of sources and analyze it in real time for government authorities.
Concerns over AI surveillance echo the fears surrounding TikTok’s data-sharing practices with Chinese authorities, including the collection of users’ personal details and content interactions. U.S. officials have flagged this as a national security threat, contributing to Congress’ decision to ban TikTok in 2024.
However, AI surveillance may no longer be just a foreign government threat. Reports have surfaced about potential abuses in the U.S., including government contracts that may enable the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to monitor social media. According to the Politico Digital Future newsletter, “the contractors advertise their ability to scan through millions of posts and use AI to summarize their findings” for their clients. With major agencies, law enforcement, and intelligence services now in the hands of Trump loyalists, this monitoring capability is a particular concern right now when the administration is going after its critics.
DHS later confirmed it is using digital tools to analyze social media posts from individuals applying for visas or green cards. The surveillance software would search for any signs of “extremist” rhetoric or “antisemitic activity.” The announcement raised questions about how these terms would be defined and whether public criticism of certain countries could be used to label applicants as “terrorist sympathizers.”
Other reports suggest that surveillance has already occurred within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). According to sources quoted by Reuters, “some EPA managers were told by Trump appointees that Musk’s team is rolling out AI to monitor workers, including looking for language in communications considered hostile to Trump or Musk.” The EPA has denied the report, calling it “categorically false.”
It is not just the American government that is getting into the monitoring act. Some U.S. companies already engage in workplace surveillance of their employees for business purposes. In the absence of a national privacy bill, there are few legal safeguards to limit workplace computer or network surveillance—or even to require that such monitoring be disclosed. Employers can track what workers do on their computers, even if they are using their equipment at home as part of hybrid work. Some firms even go as far as monitoring keystrokes or facial expressions to see what people are doing, who may be underperforming, and whether they are obeying company policies. These digital practices are perfectly legal in many states.
Overall, it is a risky time for AI-based surveillance because we have a combination of advanced digital technologies, high-level computing power, abundant and non-secured data, data brokers who buy and sell information, and a risky political environment. It is the confluence of each of these factors that endanger people’s freedoms and ability to express themselves in an open manner. As AI surveillance grows, individual freedom diminishes, and the risks of government and corporate overreach rise.
A national privacy bill could help mitigate some of these threats by establishing privacy standards and blocking some of the most dangerous practices, but it would not be a comprehensive solution.
Further, U.S. government agencies should be barred from using AI or facial recognition software to spy on individuals or monitor their public statements on social media. Using such tools to track what people say about public officials could cross into undemocratic territory for the United States.
On a Saturday morning, you head to the hardware store. Your neighbors’ Ring cameras film your walk to the car. Your car’s sensors, cameras and microphones record your speed, how you drive, where you’re going, who’s with you, what you say, and biological metrics such as facial expression, weight and heart rate. Your car may also collect text messages and contacts from your connected smartphone.
Meanwhile, your phone continuously senses and records your communications, info about your health, what apps you’re using, and tracks your location via cell towers, GPS satellites and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
As you enter the store, its surveillance cameras identify your face and track your movements through the aisles. If you then use Apple or Google Pay to make your purchase, your phone tracks what you bought and how much you paid.
All this data quickly becomes commercially available, bought and sold by data brokers. Aggregated and analyzed by artificial intelligence, the data reveals detailed, sensitive information about you that can be used to predict and manipulate your behavior, including what you buy, feel, think and do.
Companies unilaterally collect data from most of your activities. This “surveillance capitalism” is often unrelated to the services device manufacturers, apps and stores are providing you. For example, Tinder is planning to use AI to scan your entire camera roll. And despite their promises, “opting out” doesn’t actually stop companies’ data collection.
While companies can manipulate you, they cannot put you in jail. But the U.S. government can, and it now purchases massive quantities of your information from commercial data brokers. The government is able to purchase Americans’ sensitive data because the information it buys is not subject to the same restrictions as information it collects directly.
The federal government is also ramping up its abilities to directly collect data through partnerships with private tech companies. These surveillance tech partnerships are becoming entrenched, domestically and abroad, as advances in AI take surveillance to unprecedented levels.
As a privacy, electronic surveillance and tech law attorney, author and legal educator, I have spent years researching, writing and advising about privacy and legal issues related to surveillance and data use. To understand the issues, it is critical to know how these technologies function, who collects what data about you, how that data can be used against you, and why the laws you might think are protecting your data do not apply or are ignored.
Big money for AI-driven tech and more data
Congressional funding is supercharging huge government investments in surveillance tech and data analytics driven by AI, which automates analysis of very large amounts of data. The massive 2025 tax-and-spending law netted the Department of Homeland Security an unprecedented US$165 billion in yearly funding. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of DHS, got about $86 billion.
Disclosure of documents allegedly hacked from Homeland Security reveal a massive surveillance web that has all Americans in its scope.
DHS is expanding its AI surveillance capabilities with a surge in contracts to private companies. It is reportedly funding companies that provide more AI-automated surveillance in airports; adapters to convert agents’ phones into biometric scanners; and an AI platform that acquires all 911 call center data to build geospatial heat maps to predict incident trends. Predicting incident trends can be a form of predictive policing, which uses data to anticipate where, when and how crime may occur.
Privacy risks of using AI to collect data
The U.S. Government Accountability Office identified 10 privacy risks in collecting data using systems that include artificial intelligence. The report, published on March 26, 2026, also included a longer list of challenges to preserving privacy while collecting data using AI.
List of 10 items
Data persistence Data may continue to exist in AI systems and be difficult to extract/remove once collected.
Data re-identification AI has the ability to cross-reference multiple data sets from seemingly independent and anonymous outputs to reidentify anonymized data.
Generation of deceptive or inaccurate outputs AI may be used to intentionally or unintentionally generate deceptive outputs (e.g., deepfakes) or inaccurate outputs (e.g., hallucinations) that may result in harm towards individuals.
Improper disclosure AI can reveal and cause improper sharing of individuals’ data when it infers additional sensitive information from raw data.
Increased accessibility to sensitive information AI can make sensitive information more accessible to a wider audience (e.g., data brokers) than intended.
Invasion of privacy from data aggregation AI may combine various pieces of data about a person to make inferences beyond what is explicitly captured in those data (e.g., social scoring), which can invade an individuals’ personal space and solitude by revealing private information (e.g., health-related, financial, location).
Lack of security over data Inadequate AI data requirements and storage practices can result in data breaches and improper access.
Lack of transparency related to data use AI may be used without providing individuals with notice and control over how their data is being used.
Lack of transparency in AI model algorithmic decision-making The workings of AI models could include decisions based on individual data that one is unaware of and that can lead to privacy risks.
Secondary use of data The use of personal data for purposes other than originally intended can be exacerbated by AI’s ability to repurpose data.
DHS has also spent millions on AI-driven software used to detect sentiment and emotion in users’ online posts. Have you been complaining about Immigration and Customs Enforcement policies online? If so, social media companies including Google, Reddit, Discord, and Facebook and Instagram owner Meta may have sent identifying data, such as your name, email address, phone number and activity, to DHS in response to hundreds of DHS subpoenas served on the companies.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s national policy framework for artificial intelligence, released on March 20, 2026, urges Congress to use grants and tax incentives to fund “wider deployment of AI tools across American industry” and to allow industry and academia to use federal datasets to train AI.
Using federal datasets this way raises privacy law concerns because they contain a lifetime of sensitive details about you, including biographical, employment and tax information.
Blurring lines and little oversight
In foreign intelligence work, the funding, development and controlled use of certain AI-driven gathering of data makes sense. The CIA’s new acquisition framework to turbocharge collaboration with the private sector may be legal with proper oversight. But the line between collaborating for lawful national security purposes versus unlawful domestic spying is becoming dangerously blurred or ignored.
For example, the Pentagon has declared a contractor, Anthropic, a national security risk because Anthropic insisted that its powerful agentic AI model, Claude, not be used for mass domestic surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons.
On March 18, 2026, FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed to Congress that the FBI is buying Americans’ data from data brokers, including location histories, to track American citizens.
As the federal government accelerates the use of and investment in AI-driven spy tech, it is mandating less oversight around AI technology. In addition to the national AI policy framework, which discourages state regulation of AI, the president has issued executive orders to accelerate federal government adoption of AI systems, remove state law AI regulation barriers and require that the federal government not procure the use of AI models that attempt to adjust for bias. But using advanced AI systems is risky, given reports of AI agents going rogue, exposing sensitive data and becoming a threat, even during routine tasks.
Your data
The surveillance capitalism system requires people to unwittingly participate in a manipulative cycle of group- and self-surveillance. Neighborhood doorbell cameras, Flock license plate readers and hyperlocal social media sites like Nextdoor create a crowdsourced record of all people’s movements in public spaces.
Sensors in phones and wearable devices, such as earbuds and rings, collect ever more sensitive details. These include health data, including your heart rate and heart rate variability, blood oxygen, sweat and stress levels, behavioral patterns, neurological changes and even brain waves. Smartphones can be used to diagnose, assess and treat Parkinson’s disease. Earbuds could be used to monitor brain health.
This data is not protected under HIPAA, which prohibits health care providers and those working with them from disclosing your health information without your permission, because the law does not consider tech companies to be health care providers nor these wearables to be medical devices.
Legal protections
People have little choice when buying devices, using apps or opening accounts but to agree to lengthy terms that include consent for companies to collect and sell their personal data. This “consent” allows their data to end up in the largely unregulated commercial data market.
The government claims it can lawfully purchase this data from data brokers. But in buying your data in bulk on the commercial market, the government is circumventing the Constitution, Supreme Court decisions and federal laws designed to protect your privacy from unwarranted government overreach.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable search and seizure by the government. Supreme Court cases require police to get a warrant to search a phone or use cellular or GPS location information to track someone. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act’s Wiretap Act prohibits unauthorized interception of wire, oral and electronic communications.
Despite some efforts, Congress has failed to enact legislation to protect data privacy, the use of sensitive data by AI systems or to restore the intent of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Courts have allowed the broad electronic privacy protections in the federal Wiretap Act to be eviscerated by companies claiming consent.
The way to begin to address these problems is to restore the Wiretap Act and related laws to their intended purposes of protecting Americans’ privacy in communications, and for Congress to follow through on its promises and efforts by passing legislation that secures Americans’ data privacy and protects them from AI harms.
Also:
How AI can enable public surveillance 
Also:
US government ramps up mass surveillance with help of AI tech, data brokers – and your apps and devices
