AI is creating a frictionless surveillance state
Perhaps you saw the video: a young woman walks out of her Boston-area townhouse and is immediately surrounded by unidentified men who place her in handcuffs and swiftly lead her into an unmarked car.
The woman is Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts PhD student and Fulbright scholar. As of this writing she is imprisoned in an ICE facility somewhere in Louisiana.
Her crime? None has been stated – not by the men who disappeared her, and none by U.S. officials. The most that Secretary of State Marco Rubio could offer, a few days ago, was a litany of hypotheticals: “If you invite me into your home, and I go to your house and start putting mud on your couch and spray painting your kitchen, I betcha you’re gonna kick me out.” No mention of anything Ozturk did.
Ozturk’s arrest appears to have been triggered by an opinion piece that she co-authored for the Tufts student newspaper. A year ago. As Mike Masnick puts it (TechDirt, March 27, 2025):
A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper.
I’ve read the op-ed. It’s benign and straightforward, just grad students saying that they disagree with their university administration. Why would such a trivial post, from a year ago, rise to the top of the U.S. government and set off a kidnapping raid?
A clue, I think, is a short article in Axios from March 6. It reads:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-fueled “Catch and Revoke” effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups . . .
The effort . . . includes AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts.
Here we see key to the entire matter. Our increasingly authoritarian government is embracing Silicon Valley’s intrusive surveillance and AI algorithms in order to flag the political dissidents it wants to silence.
Rumeysa Ozturk, in other words, is the victim of the unholy partnership between Big Tech and the current occupant of the White House. This is nothing new, of course. I ran an entire Techtonic episode called Welcome to the oligarchy: on Big Tech’s government takeover (Jan 27, 2025). What is new is that the Trump-Big Tech partnership is beginning to have outcomes that are visible, tangible, unjust, and totally illegal. And they’re just getting started.
My Techtonic show this week covers these events. I called it the “Emergency surveillance update”: stream the show or see the episode page.
Be careful with drawing the easy conclusion that this doesn’t impact you. Do you think the authoritarians will stop at deporting grad students on student visas? The current occupant has already threatened to deport U.S. citizens engaged in legal protest. From the New Republic (March 21, 2025):
Donald Trump is threatening to deport U.S. citizens who vandalize Tesla dealerships.
In a post on Truth Social Friday morning, the president took his threats to punish protesters for committing so-called “domestic terrorism” against his billionaire bureaucrat’s electric vehicles to a new level.
For years I’ve been warning about the rise of the surveillance state run in partnership with Big Tech:
On the June 24, 2024 Techtonic I interviewed Byron Tau, author of Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State
. . . and on our members-only Creative Good Forum I’ve posted links to pieces like On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power (Tech Policy Press, Nov 26, 2024).
In other words, this shouldn’t be a complete surprise. But what’s new is that we’ve passed beyond the warning stage.
It’s actually happening.
All of the layers of surveillance – of our emails, our texts, our locations, our voices, our relationships, our purchases, our activities, our faces, our habits, our lives in every conceivable detail – all of it is being compiled and analyzed by Big Tech . . . and now handed to the government.
For years these companies have claimed that “your privacy is our number one priority” – yet when the White House calls, they offer no pushback or resistance of any kind. This, too, should not be a surprise. The Big Tech CEOs stood smiling beside the presidential podium at the inauguration, and now they’re making good on their promise. They’ve fully partnered with the state.
What does this mean for the rest of us – those of us not kneeling to the authoritarian, and not employed by the Big Tech giants? The disappearance of Rumeysa Ozturk is a signal that we’re all on notice. Anything you write, post, text, email, say, mention, or mutter under your breath, within range of any Big Tech surveillance device, may be fed to an algorithm that deploys ICE agents to your door.
We’re entering a frictionless, AI-powered, authoritarian surveillance state.
The surveillance is everywhere. For example, millions of Americans own an Amazon Alexa spy device. As Ars Technica reported, everything you say to your Echo is now being sent to Amazon. If someone in your home cracks a joke about the current occupant within range of a surveillance device, how much do you trust the Big Tech company not to share it with ICE?
Our privacy is being hijacked in broad daylight, just like political dissenters, and sent for rendering in a government facility far away.
(→ For more reading: Ozturk and others are listed on the Wikipedia page listing deportations. Other trackers are at this page and this map. Even grad students who aren’t dissenters are being caught up. See the recent This American Life episode featuring Ranjani Srinivasan, a Fulbright scholar at Columbia, who escaped ICE agents before she could be unlawfully detained. No charges against her were ever filed. And here’s the story of a Canadian detainee. Finally, read M. Gessen’s essay in the NYT from April 2 about our police state – here’s a gift link.)
We’ve crossed a line in this country:
The most powerful companies in human history
are deploying their global-scale surveillance platforms
for use by ICE
to shut down dissent
at the behest of an aspiring dictator
who has repeatedly shown no respect for the rule of law.
How we will live through this, I’m not sure. But I know that these are going to be dark times, and we need to stick together.
I hope you’ll join my community at Creative Good. You’ll show your support for my work on this newsletter, and you’ll get access to all my resources on the Creative Good Forum.
And again, please do listen to this week’s “Emergency surveillance update” on Techtonic: stream the show or see the episode page.
See past columns. And please join us.
Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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