Cindy Cohn

But I would say it's not a surprise to us.

that the two hard lines that Anthropic drew that got them in trouble with the Defense Department is mass domestic spying and autonomous weapons.

Now, I don't know as much about autonomous weapons, but I've spent my career fighting mass domestic spying, and they're right.

That will change the dynamic.

It will change how democracy works.

We need... I mean, this is part of the stuff I wrote about in my book, is that...

people with less power need privacy to have protection against people with more power.

And mass surveillance supercharged by AI tends to make us a lot less powerful compared to the people who are going to know a lot about us.

And that

can really impact our ability to vote out the people who we don't think are leaders, control what policy and law affects all of us.

The political economy questions will turn, I think, on whether we can stop mass surveillance that's AI supercharged.

Well, I mean, I think that.

I think that we're living in a time where we're seeing that if you thought you weren't ever going to be a target of surveillance, that isn't a very safe bet anymore, right?

And, you know, I think the Dobbs decision, right, overturning Roe versus Wade suddenly made a lot of people who were engaged in reproductive assistance or needing reproductive help suddenly found themselves

targeted by surveillance.

We've got people who've gone to jail based upon their Facebook messages.

So suddenly the capabilities of surveillance of people's online activities where they might have seemed completely innocuous and nothing that could ever be used against you is throwing your mom in jail, right?

That happened in Nebraska.

And we are seeing the same things that, you know, you may not, you may be one of the few people who knows nobody with a green card, nobody with visa status, nobody's here on a student visa, nobody here's here with undocumented, and there's nobody who you love or care about.

who is impacted by the fact that the government has decided that those people are in the crosshairs, or you don't want to stand with them or protest with them, which is, you know, people who were exercising their first amendment right to, to monitor the police were the two people killed in Minnesota.