Flock Safety camera at the intersection of West Sylvania Avenue and Homeville Circle in Toledo, Ohio. The ubiquity of Flock surveillance systems in the United States raises questions about privacy and data security. (Photo by Stephen Zenner / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Flock Safety camera at the intersection of West Sylvania Avenue and Homeville Circle in Toledo, Ohio. The ubiquity of Flock surveillance systems in the United States raises questions about privacy and data security. (Photo by Stephen Zenner / Sipa via AP Images)

Researchers Detail How AI Systems Can Enable Authoritarianism

Portland, OR, USA - Sep 1, 2024: ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Perplexity app icons are seen on a Google Pixel smartphone. AI competition concepts.

ChatGPT Didn't Break the AI Act. It Showed Why Adaptive Regulation Matters

Social media puppeteering the public through paid political influence — a hand emerging from a smartphone controls a wooden marionette by red strings.

How to Close the Federal Election Commission’s Dark Money Loophole

European Union flag displayed on a screen and AliExpress, Temu and Shein icons displayed on a phone screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on July 1, 2026. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP)

(Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP)

EU Turns to Online Marketplaces After Record AliExpress Fine

BIDDEFORD, MAINE - JULY 15: A person observes a makeshift memorial for Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian immigrant who was fatally shot by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, on July 15, 2026 in Biddeford, Maine. Guerrero's death comes less than a week after federal immigration agents shot and killed 52-year-old Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas. (Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty Images)

ICE and the Architecture of Authoritarianism

Spain fans gather for a rally on the eve of the World Cup final soccer match in New York's Times Square, Saturday, July 18, 2026 (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

The Silent World Cup Winners are the Companies Normalizing Surveillance

Miami, June 24, 2026: WORLD CUP, BRAZIL vs. SCOTLAND. General view of the VAR screen at the Miami stadium for the match between Brazil and Scotland in the 2026 World Cup. Photo: Rodolfo Buhrer/AGIF

Soccer's Tech Revolution Has a Labor Chain

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What Review Bombing Tells Us About the Future of Dissent in Everyday Life

March 10, 2026: The London Book Fair (LBF) at Kensington Olympia. Names of authors in an otherwise blank book titled Don't Steal This Book protesting against AI companies taking authors’ works. (Matthew Chattle/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

March 10, 2026: The London Book Fair (LBF) at Kensington Olympia. Names of authors in an otherwise blank book titled 

 protesting against AI companies taking authors’ works. (Matthew Chattle/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Copyright Law Wasn’t Built for the AI Era. We Need ‘Learnright.'

We Need Political Philosophy for Mental Health Chatbots

The United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York City. Shutterstock

The United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York City. 

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How the UN’s Scientific Panel Erases Human Responsibility for AI

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We Can’t Monitor AI Agents at Scale. Here’s What It Will Take.

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The Internet Had a North Star. The UN’s Global Dialogue Made Clear AI Doesn't.

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European Union flag displayed on a screen and AliExpress, Temu and Shein icons displayed on a phone screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on July 1, 2026. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP)


 for failing to adequately assess and mitigate the risks posed by illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products on its platform — the largest penalty issued to date under the Digital Services Act, and the third overall.

AliExpress, which had 193 million European users last year, called the decision disproportionate and said it is reviewing its options.

“AliExpress has been and continues to be committed to meeting our obligations to consumers. We invest substantial resources in risk assessment and mitigation, product safety and consumer protection,” AliExpress said in a statement to Tech Policy Press. The company said it had worked constructively with the European Commission in the spirit of cooperation and transparency, but the fine ignored its “sound risk management framework and the significant, proactive enhancements.” 

The Commission said AliExpress failed to properly evaluate whether it had enough resources to monitor potentially illegal products, overstated the effectiveness of its detection and removal systems, and did not adequately consider how its recommendation and advertising tools could increase the visibility of illegal goods.

Investigators found examples of counterfeit products, unsafe toys and potentially dangerous cosmetics remaining available on the platform after being flagged.

“The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online,” said Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.

“Scale is not an excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically to ensure consumers can safely shop online,” she added.

The AliExpress decision reflects a broader shift in the EU’s enforcement focus under the DSA, moving beyond social media platforms toward online marketplaces that facilitate the sale of physical goods.

Early DSA cases largely centered on content and transparency issues on platforms such as X and Meta. The AliExpress and Temu cases involve products that regulators say may pose direct safety concerns for consumers.

The European Board for Digital Services identified illegal products sold through online marketplaces as one of the most persistent systemic risks across designated platforms in its 

The report highlighted challenges including sellers who attempt to evade platform controls by modifying listings or returning under new identities after products are removed — a problem also cited by the Commission in its AliExpress investigation.

The regulatory challenge for marketplaces is therefore not only to remove individual listings but also to demonstrate that their systems can identify and prevent recurring risks at scale.

All three major Chinese e-commerce platforms operating in Europe are now facing some form of DSA oversight.

, must submit an action plan to the Commission by Aug. 28. Shein is currently facing 

 over alleged shortcomings involving illegal products, addictive design features and recommendation system transparency, although no fine has been issued. One in five Europeans shops from the three platforms at least once a month, Virkkunen told reporters.

The enforcement actions are taking place alongside separate EU trade measures affecting low-value imports. A 

 on parcels valued below €150 from China took effect July 1, targeting a different part of the same cross-border commerce system.

The AliExpress fine does not conclude the DSA process.

 outlining how it will address the Commission's findings. The Board will then provide an opinion, followed by a Commission decision setting out the implementation timeline. If AliExpress fails to comply with the final requirements, the Commission can impose additional periodic penalty payments.

The process will test how the EU's enforcement model works after penalties are issued. In the case of X, the company 

 following its December fine covering advertising transparency and researcher data access. The Board raised concerns that some proposed measures were insufficient, but the Commission 

 after additional clarifications. The case highlighted the separate roles of the Board, which provides independent opinions, and the Commission, which makes final enforcement decisions — and the gap that can open between the two.

AliExpress also has prior form here. It's 

 with the Commission have resolved several open investigation strands covering recommender systems, advertising transparency and trader traceability. Those commitments did not prevent Monday's fine, which covered broader concerns about the platform's risk assessment and mitigation systems. The Commission found the commitments lacked specific, measurable targets and external verification mechanisms.

The Commission also noted that the relatively early stage of DSA enforcement was taken into account when calculating the penalty — meaning future cases could involve higher sanctions.

The next test is whether AliExpress’s corrective measures deliver changes beyond written commitments. The case highlights a central feature of the DSA, which focuses not only on whether illegal content or products are removed but also on whether platforms have systems capable of identifying and reducing risks before harm occurs.

The approach places greater emphasis on internal governance, risk assessments and transparency around platform operations. The Commission has also pointed to the role of external scrutiny in identifying risks. Consumer groups and researchers have raised concerns about products sold through online marketplaces, including 

, the European consumer organization, that contributed to the Commission’s proceedings against Temu.

The Board’s second annual report found that outside actors consistently identified risks that platform self-assessments missed, a gap that AliExpress’s October plan will need to address.

AliExpress must submit its remedial action plan by Oct. 20. The Board will have one month to issue its opinion, followed by a further month for the Commission to adopt a final decision and establish an implementation timeline.

Temu's earlier deadline on Aug. 28 will provide the first indication of how the Commission evaluates post-fine compliance plans from marketplace platforms — and how much weight the Board's opinion carries when the two institutions disagree.

Shein remains under investigation. Any further action would add another major compliance process to the Commission's workload as it continues building the enforcement framework for the DSA. Whether that process produces structural change or paper commitments is what the second half of 2026 will show.

This article was updated to include a comment from AliExpress.

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

At Tech Policy Press, we’ve monitored the 

 into the Department of Homeland Security to support the Trump administration’s brutal and increasingly lawless immigration crackdown. Last month saw the 

 commissioned by Mijente, Just Futures Law, and Surveillance Resistance Lab titled "The Tech Behind Ice: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement, and the Threat to Democracy." I spoke to two of the report’s authors—Surveillance Resistance Lab founder and executive director 

and Just Futures Law founding executive director 

—about what billions in tech investment is buying DHS and its component agencies, and what is necessary to reverse the authoritarian trajectory the country is on.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

I'm Dean Jackson, a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press, and I'm joined today by Mizue Aizeki from the Surveillance Resistance Lab and Paromita Shah at Just Futures Law. They're the authors of a new report, “The Tech Behind ICE: Oligarchs, Immigration, and the Threat to Democracy.”

Mizue is a social justice organizer and photographer based in New York, who has worked on issues of exterior and interior immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, Arizona, and New York for the past 15 years. Her photographs have appeared in many publications, and her projects have included migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border, impacts of US deportation policies, and migrant worker organizing in LA and New York. (Mizue is also the Executive Director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab, a project of the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience). 

Paromita is the founding executive director of Just Futures Law and has worked at the intersection of racial justice and immigrant justice for over two decades. She's a racial and immigrant justice lawyer who works alongside community-based movements to end mass deportation, criminalization, and surveillance.

I wanted to start by asking if you could describe the technologies that ICE is using and developing with its newly expanded budget, the tens of millions of dollars that the agency received last year from Congress. Are these technologies dangerous because of the current authoritarian context, or are they fundamentally incompatible with civil and political rights in some way? Did the threat start with the tech, or is it the combination of tech and this time that alarms you?

It's a good question. I mean, let's talk about that budget, I think, to give a sense of scale to the problem that we're facing. So, when the government founded the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, ICE and CBP had a budget of $9.3 billion. Now it's grown to $170 billion. That's almost a 2,000% increase. Technology has always been core to DHS's mission. They've always wanted to locate, identify, target people for deportation. It's really a mandate that has been a doorway for authoritarianism. I think that's really the underlying truth of DHS.

It's hard to understand the tech, I think, without understanding the who. So, if I could also give you some context of the who behind DHS. DHS is a Homeland Security agency. It is the second-largest federal agency in the United States. It has over 270,000 people with more agents authorized to carry guns and make arrests than the FBI and the Secret Service combined. It has no meaningful civil rights agencies. It sits on the largest biometric repository in the United States. And it is force combining at this time, force combining, IRS data, health data, social security data, housing data with immigration data. And they are doing that because they want... They are using technologies to label, classify, to track, profile and target people at an unprecedented scale. And because their goal is, and I think this administration has made it clear, they want to deport 1 million people per year.

So, what are the technologies that allow them to do it at scale are the technologies that they're investing in. But they've been investing in them for a long time. And I wish my colleague, Jacinta Gonzalez, who's also an author on the report, was here. She has an amazing way of describing kind of like the flow of the technologies, which is, she starts from the data brokers, the people who collect the data, companies like LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters and actually Equifax, credit companies that take our everyday data from using our phones and our water bills, and then they share them with ICE, follow to data analytics companies, huge ones, like Palantir, to small ones, that analyze the data, crunch the data and basically create target lists over the vast amounts of data that they now have access to.

It then moves into a bunch of spying and hacking technologies. Some new ones that might be of interest are the ones that are hacking into our phones and also hacking to our computers made by companies like Cellebrite or companies like GrayKey that are part of Paragon Solutions. They scrape the Internet, social media profiling, facial recognition. They're now going into bounty hunters. They also use cell phone tracking. And I think, obviously, license plate readers. But their biggest new foray into the tech side are drones, right? And they have this 1 billion contract. And the interesting way that DHS phrases it is, they needed it for FIFA, right? But really what they're using it for is to track and profile immigrants.

They're not going to return the drones to Amazon after.

I guess they could, right? I mean, that is how acting director, right, Lyons, last year, he said that he wanted the deportation system to run like Amazon Prime. And so I think your reference to Amazon is completely on point.

That's just where I would go to buy a drone. But yeah, it was a chilling statement. I remember when he said that. It sounds like, though, that it's not one type of data or one new type of technology, like, for example, facial recognition cameras, that's driving the threat. It's the preponderance of all of these new capabilities. Would you say that that's fair?

Yeah, I think all these technologies, and we have a list of them in the report along with a smaller fact sheet, but kind of goes through this list, it's absolutely designed to work together, collect information together, to create a dossier of information, of sensitive personal information, to locate people at a very micro level. So, I think DHS is interested in building a large arsenal of technology for the purpose of tracking people. And we know that it's not just going to be on immigrants. We already know that this kind of... These systems are designed to monitor the population at large. They expand the government's ability to surveil political activity, dissent and protest movements in everyday life.

And one of the most chilling aspects of this new foray into these technologies is that DHS has partnered with DOJ in a way that DOJ has turned into DHS's lawyer. It is their law firm. And when the biggest law firm in the country becomes DHS's law firm, they've obviously accelerated policing powers, they've dismantled core due process protections, and they're working with ICE right now, working with DHS to identify political targets. That's why we see so many prosecutions like in Prairieland and all around the country.

Could you say a little bit more about Prairieland? Because we often talk about the threat to civil rights from surveillance as something in the future, right? The government could do this. And yet, you've just laid out the way all this technology allows tracking of domestic dissenters. And in Prairieland, we seem to have possibly an instance where the government has used that technology against citizens. Could you just explain a little bit more for the audience what happened in Prairieland?

Yeah. In that case, a number of activists went to a detention center in Texas, and there was what DHS is characterizing an attack on a facility, an attack on agents. And it's not that didn't occur. It was the way in which the prosecution was handled. They swept in people who were peripheral to that event, people who had been distributing zines, people who had been around there but hadn't participated directly in the attack. They labeled them all with this broad brush as domestic terrorists, as Antifa terrorists. And as a result, they got these really disproportionate, very scary sentences across the board. And I think what was most chilling about that case was the way in which the government has chosen to see that case as a success for other test cases that they want to bring around domestic terrorism. I think Mizue and I can go into that later on.

But the way in which DHS and DOJ have partnered to label more and more people as anti-American, anti-capitalist, having extreme views around immigration to justify prosecutions, investigations, not only of immigrants but of people who are lawfully observing them, people who are engaged in direct action. It's come to a point where even the prosecutions in Minnesota are really, you could see, are going to be the other test case for DHS. Like, will they win these charges against the 14 protesters in Minnesota that had been activated on the deaths of multiple people, including Nicole Good and Alex Pretti? And at this time when we're talking about deaths right now of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Guerrero, those just happened this past week, DHS has been reticent about even halting what they are doing. The first thing that they do is they claim that these individuals weaponized their cars, that they were threats to DHS agents.

And the ironic thing is that they were using technology from the very beginning to target people, people who had never been on their investigative list to begin with. And it really doesn't matter if they were on their target list to begin with at the end of the day, because now the tools that they have aren't really preventing deaths, aren't really preventing harm, which is another justification that DHS likes to use, is that the surveillance is a gentler, less damaging way. In fact, they've caused more chaos, more damage, more deaths directly at their hands than at any time, honestly, in their history.

DHS and ICE have both been accused of acting lawlessly. Can those organizations and their use of tech specifically be meaningfully reformed after they've had the chance to operate with this much impunity?

I'm going to go back a little bit to what Paromita opened with, with this idea of what we detail in our report, how DHS as an agency has led to a pathway to this moment because they've always operated almost in a suspended set of laws. In other words, DHS was founded after 9/11 as part of the war on terror as the primary agency to oversee homeland security. And its primary mandate was focused on preventing terrorist attack in the United States. But then everything under DHS became about terrorism. So immigrants are potential terrorists. The whole thing with having every Muslim man in the United States register under special registration after 9/11 was because these were all potential terrorists. None of that has ever been proven. But billions of dollars have been spent. And what has been legitimated is indefinite detention, the kinds of things that Paromita just mentioned about people being killed by federal law enforcement officers repeatedly. This is not normal in a certain way, but it's become the new normal under the logics of national security under DHS and Homeland Security.

And so, just to talk a little bit more about this conflation of immigration enforcement and counterterrorism, the idea we say that this is all... Our report, “The Tech Behind ICE: The Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement, and the Threat to Democracy,” really, the key thing to understand is how much democracy has been undermined by what 9/11 did to concentrate so much power, national security power in the executive branch, but also embraced very widely by every other branch of the government. So, here we are 23 years later where routine immigration enforcement has become just tied up into this issue of warfare. So, we are seeing much more entanglement of the Department of War with the DHS, whether it's domestically or internationally. And if you look at Trump's 2027 budget, an analysis showed that 80% of the request was for policing and military. And we've already seen what the cost has been for social care, education, housing, and healthcare, and the climate.

And so, when you're asking in terms of DHS acting lawlessly, we also have to recognize that the part of the reason DHS has so much power is the very legal regime that it sits upon is designed to give the state, the government, maximum power to detain people, to deport people and exclude people. How else could you deport 1 million people in one year, right? And so, now that coupled with the resources for the largest policing apparatus in the world, and then all this technology, and an entire economy, then that gets organized around creating more and more invasive and powerful technology tools to grow this surveillance and security state, this is what we're confronting right now.

And so, I just want to talk a little bit for a second about this idea of the term terrorist, because it's so instrumental to the power of the government right now, and really is very much part of the 9/11 legacy, is that every single president can use this term terrorism to include whatever is helpful to their political agenda. So, Elizabeth Beavers just wrote this really great report called Terrorizing Migrants, where she details how much power has been given to the executive branch to basically deem any group as a terrorist group, whether or not they engage in any political violence, or even if it's a group at all, which is a perfectly goes in with what you were saying about Prairieland, right? And so, we can't separate what happened in Prairieland with what DHS, the founding of DHS and everything that it represents, and a counterterrorism strategy that can very comfortably turn outward to the world, like fishermen in Venezuela, or inward, to people creating leaflets because they are concerned about one social issue or another.

I mean, coming back to your original question, do we feel safer now? Do we feel safer in this tech-fueled surveillance state with very little healthcare, with no CDC monitoring pathogens that are giving people tremendously bad diarrhea? I don't, right? And so, I think that's what's become increasingly clear is that this isn't just a concern for immigrants or US residents. It's everybody all over the world. And so we have to find solutions that are more than body cameras or ICE agents showing their faces. I would say we need to ask a different question, like, what does it really mean to be truly secure and safe? What would we need to have the kind of world we really want to live in? And it's got to be something different than investing hundreds of billions in dollars in an agency that claims they're providing us security when it's really just more surveillance and more repression and more death.

I think that you're exactly right, that there's a stretching of the imagination that needs to occur, not only when it comes to reforming federal agencies but how we think about safety in our society.

Your report, though, I want to keep us moving along because you cover quite a lot of ground. One of the more interesting things I thought was how you outlined the massive pipeline of federal defense and security contracts for tech companies, which correlates both with Silicon Valley's rightward political turn and the huge increase in tech industry lobbying in Washington. So, could you say a little bit more about the role ideology plays in the D.C.-tech sector relationship and contrapose that with the incentive for simple grift when budgets get this big?

This was a really big reveal for us as we were doing the research for our report, The Tech Behind ICE. Everybody was struck by that image at the inauguration of 2025 with all the tech bros who, at least before, some of them are much more Democratic Party aligned or neutral politically, some of them even anti-Trump, were all showed up signaling their alignment with the Trump administration. And so, what is behind that and what has happened has been so many different things. And I'm going to ask Paromita to talk a little bit about the deregulatory agenda that these guys have. But the scale of money that they have is something that we did a bit of research into our report, and it was actually quite discouraging to keep having to edit their net worth as our report drafts kept happening. It's like, we'd have to go back and... We all know about the trillionaire that happened during the time we were drafting our report.

But it's really, it's so many things that have been very traditional ways to buy access that includes really unthinkable amounts of campaign contributions that we detail in the report. There's also a significant amount of lobbying. There's a graph in the report where we show how the lobbying by the venture capitalist firms of the tech oligarchs has skyrocketed in recent years. And it's just important to point out that almost a third of the lobbying spending from these companies in 2025 was from Palantir and SpaceX, right? So, even as powerful as these companies are, and as much mission-critical they are to the government, they still find it so important to figure out... They have to invest a lot of money in lobbying.

But the other thing that we pointed out, which is really troubling, is how what we commonly understood as a revolving door, I mean, what we understand commonly as a revolving door, where either you work for government and then you go work for a corporation or the other way around, that's still happening. But what we're experiencing right now is kind of a new era of what we call these corporate oligarchs in the corner office. And by that, we mean is that they are calling the shots, directing the vision. They each espouse different theories on democracy, why their corporations are critical to the project of US national security. They've been pushing to modernize the military in the vein of the famous quote by Zuckerberg, I think it is, "You got to move fast and break things," right?

And then JD Vance, of course, is someone who comes to the Trump administration after having spent time working with these venture capitalists. And so there's a way in which they're embedded in the government in a way that has a newness to it that we think is worth understanding and exploring. Of course, there's tech executives now that are serving as an Executive Innovation Corps in the US Army. And then you have a former employee of one of the largest contractors, Anduril. They get 80% of their money, their revenue is from federal contracts. He's now the DHS chief information officer and the chief AI officer. He continues to hold half a million in stock in the company, but he's also going to be overseeing the largest biometric database in the US government, which is integral to DHS operations.

So, I think there's a lot more to say there, but I think, Paromita, there's definitely stuff that you can add to this.

Yeah. I mean, it does feel a little bit... And this was the name of the chapter, The Tech Gilded Age. And I wouldn't say that we are anti-technology. I think it's so easy for people to label us as like, "You just don't understand or hate the technology." That's not what this is about. This is about what is the technology being used for, who was controlling the development, and how these specific tech bros, these oligarchs, are really setting up conditions for the corrosion of democracy, right? And it is in a state of fast corrosion.

I think some of the ways that they capture the people's, the public's imagination, rather, is by making out some outlandish claims about their products. Like, I think AI has long been sitting in this radiant ether of having no problems, no issues, no faults and no inaccuracies, and there's been a lot of buy-in to that. And yet, what we can see on the ground is that the use of these AI-enabled technologies are causing massive harm, including, I think, breaking guardrails around privacy and constitutional rights in a way that we have not yet fully uncovered as much as we're trying.

But a couple of points that I think are interesting. I don't know if you saw that Alex Karp said that everyone should be clamoring for more Palantir because Palantir's products are actually the best guardians of the Fourth Amendment. His point is that... I mean, this is what I find so fascinating about people who believe his statement to investors includes cryptic analogies to one Supreme Court case called Katz and presumes to know everything about the scope and the scale and the nuances of the Fourth Amendment. And just because he actually mentions the name and has a PhD in... I think it's philosophy.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting that he thinks he understands how this technology is operating on the ground at the same time that people are actually dying. And his products are really the backbone of a lot of DHS technologies. It is going to be the platform upon which many of these operations are going to rest on. And in fact, they have a 1 billion open contract with ICE where competitive bidding is not allowed because of how integral Palantir is to the system. So, it feels like an after-the-fact justification, not a real one.

But really, to me, no offense, it kind of underplays it to call it a grift. This administration combined with DHS is interested in attacking states that oppose their agenda. So if you look at the AI Action Plan that was put out there, they are interested in creating a deregulatory environment conducive to the companies that want to set up shop and make plays in municipal budgets, in state budgets. They're looking for other sources of income. And so they set up, for example, a DOJ AI Litigation Task Force to sue states that set up policies and practices that may be contrary to what they want, which is a regulatory environment that's not going to get in the way of them making profits. And that really poses an existential threat to advocacy and organizing by people who are looking to essentially protect their communities from harm. It threatens sanctuary cities. It threatens people who just simply have a different idea.

And I feel like it also is a pathway to upending democracy because you're using DOJ and DHS as a bulldog, really, to get what you want. It takes away the public interest and supplants it with their own personal interest, all at the same time that they're actually keeping... They're earning revenues and their stock portfolios are growing while they sit at DHS, while they sit on the Presidential Council of Science and Technology advisors, while they sit at DOJ. Their stock portfolios are growing. That feels like a grift.

But what they're doing, actually, is they're undermining democracy by creating infrastructure to attack states and to build in their idea of what good governance looks like, which so far includes not only the domestic terrorism context but also the Unbiased AI Principles, which have to now be part and parcel of any AI program. And that really, if you read what the Unbiased AI Principles say about DEI, it should really like make your heart thump. It really says the most ugly things about systemic race discrimination, about people who are transgender, about people who fight for reproductive rights, people who are anti-capitalists, people who they say have extreme views on immigration or on anything that the Trump administration does not like. It has also turned into, I think, a placeholder for those domestic terrorism principles to live. It will live in the programs that they sell to municipalities and states.

And I think what you've outlined is a series of ways in which the tech sector and particularly some of the people we identify as being on the tech right, although not all of them are, have embedded themselves in government. And they're really, they're entwined in ways that are economic, in ways that are related to their personal finances, political, related to their donations, but also their ideologies, and then sort of operational, right? There's tech that the government now has at its disposal or even relies on.

Or data centers that they want, or new weapons centers that they want to build, or companies that they favor over another. I mean, they really do want to build the infrastructure by releasing the over dozen executive orders that they have on AI.

So, my question really is, some of these things, if there's a change in power in 2028, seem like they might end right or untangle. It's hard to imagine the relationship between D.C. and Silicon Valley going back to what it was during the Obama administration, for example. So, there will be some frostiness. But others seem like quite able to continue. Growing up in the post-9/11 era has sort of made me firmly believe that the government doesn't like to give up capabilities or powers that it accrues. And so it's possible to imagine some of these things having persistence, even in a new Democratic administration. But I guess what I'm curious about is how you think this relationship might change if there is a change in the party in the White House.

Yeah. I think, I'm putting an asterisk beside the if, if there is a change, who knows? I think there's enough turbulence in our government. It's not clear to me that even if we won the election, whether we'd be able to take the government with us. I really hope that Democrats have learned the lesson of what it means to have grown an agency that has become the front agency for authoritarian actions in just 25 years. That agency has become the second-most powerful agency in the United States in just 25 years.

And I feel like while we are talking about some of what I hope the new Congress, hopefully, would do if we got what we wanted, I hope that they reckon with that. I hope that we're not going to see on the edges reforms around turning DHS into a better police department. I think a better police department would not necessarily have saved the lives that were lost over the last year. It would not have saved the lives lost in our detention center. I also hope that this incoming administration would leave behind the delusions that they have around AI and its primacy to the US leadership in the world. I think we have to ask some serious questions about what it means to be a leader and what it means to make money and who is profiting from that.

And I think what Democrats and Republicans have done is that they have not linked what these technologies have done, what they're buying, what they're funding directly to human behavior, whether it's DHS violence or food safety, or whether it's access to benefits, whether it's going to be about air safety. I mean, there's a lot that they're claiming AI can overhaul and run. And what we have seen is that actually we need a lot more people than we realize. I am hopeful to some degree that Democrats will pay attention, but I know the influence of these oligarchs is very strong. And unwinding their influence in our government, externally as well as internally, is going to be very difficult.

And I think about the lasting impact of DOGE in the government, not only in the way that they have fired over 200,000 people in our federal government, I think close to 300,000 now, but how so much of that expertise that had made us leaders at least somewhat in health research and medical research has now been lost. And so, I wonder what it will take for Democrats to invest in the general public. That's what I'm hoping for. In the meantime, I think there are things that they can do now. They need to pay attention. They can't ignore what the technology is doing. They really do need to bring in tech oligarchs into Congress, and they need to interrogate them. They need to understand what is behind their programs and what is in the black box algorithm to understand whether it's actually benefiting the US people, whether it's turning a buck. I do think they need to protect states who have their own policies. And I think they need to protect states that have sanctuary city policies. They can't be in the business of attacking states and railroading states into a particular ideology. And I hope that they will continue their protection of vulnerable minority communities across the country.

Mizue, I know there's so many things I've missed. Do you want to add more?

I think I'll just go back to the thing that I raised earlier about really thinking about what safety and security mean. 9/11 was a crisis. And the solution to that crisis was war, right? Indefinite detention, more and more detention and the growing of an agency that has, I think, become just supercharged, not just in terms of its size but how much it's animated all sorts of thinking about what's even possible. And when Paromita was speaking, I was thinking about this idea of how we've been living in this suspended state of emergency since 9/11.

And so, what happens under a state of emergency is rights get suspended, priorities are put towards maybe some more policing or militarization and detention. That threat never goes away for them.

And to your question, what has to happen, whether it's 2028 or now, is like, the threat is in front of us already, but the threat isn't outside of DHS. The threat is DHS. So, what are we going to do about it? And I think that there has to be some real soul-searching about, how is it that we've gotten to this point? And how is it that we're going to start really reinvesting back in our communities, back in healthcare systems, back in tracking of foodborne pathogens, education and all the things that we have lost?

And so, we've spoken a lot about in this topic around DHS and all that. But what Paromita talked about, DOGE and all the things, there's a whole web of things that have either been dismantled or undermined that we have to figure out how to reconstruct. But there also is a hunger still for people in this country to want something better than what we have now. And I think it's really time for the Democrats to get it, that what we don't want is more DHS and more military. What we actually want is a fighting chance to live. We don't have a choice.

The last thing that we can talk about is, if they really want to talk about tech, because we have our feet both in the tech world and the DHS world, it's like, they could actually talk about different ideas of privacy or data governance. Privacy shields have been such a failure for non-citizens. I mean, it's been also another way in which DHS bulldozed their access to so many other people's data, is because the Privacy Act doesn't cover non-citizens, except for legal permanent residents. And so, they have used that really to gain access to all types of infrastructure. And what they have always wanted is not only the access to people's data but the key to municipal governments, key to state governments. And so, I think if we can just put an end in the way that our local and city governments are being exploited and attacked by DHS, it would do so much, I think, for communities who are facing this pain right now.

Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up because to close this out, we've spent so much time at the federal level. I wanted to bring us back down to the ground level, to the local level. Just by way of example, I'm recording this cloud podcast from Cleveland, Ohio, where there's a really active debate about the future of the city's relationship with Flock. It's the automated license plate reader cameras to our police department. And of course, that data is accessible by federal agencies, including ICE. And so the city is debating, should it seek alternative bids from other providers? Should it have the system at all? And the community has various viewpoints on that.

Cleveland has considered both permitting for large data center contracts and also a brief moratorium on those types of projects. And I'm wondering, is it meaningful to switch camera providers or to put in contract stipulations for companies like Flock? Should cities be drawing that line between the infrastructure that powers these technologies on the ground and communities inside of data centers and the political outcomes that we've discussed? What should people be doing in the cities, in the places where they live, not just in Washington, D.C., but across the country? What should people be doing to respond to the trends and threats to freedom that you played out?

Well, the good news is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. And so there's actually so many ways that you can build in protections for your residents. It can be through a contract cancellation. It could be amending the contract. It could be finding different vendors. It could be deciding not to use it. It could be finding new protections that will limit the way and how the technology will be used. And I actually encourage people to explore all the options because we don't have enough examples yet. We're just beginning the process of fighting for these local policies. And I would say that comes from experience. Mizue and I worked on sanctuary cities' policies, starting in the mid-2000s. And I would say that there were just a handful and now there are hundreds. And it is because each state government is like its own quilt. Each city is like its own crochet kid. And you really have to find different ways in which you can protect your community and the interests of the people who live in it.

I think it's a meaningful development that municipalities are finally asking questions about the purpose and scale of automated license plate reader technologies, including Flock, because we have now seen so publicly the deaths and abuse by ICE, and that is always really important for city councils, for state governments to assess as to whether the product is too dangerous, whether it's too violative of rights, whether it's too expensive or unnecessary, whether it violates constitutional rights, whether it invites exposure to litigation. They're going to have views on that. It is just really important at this time to get clear about what it's doing, because that is actually hard work to understand what's in the black box because that's actually also really hard to get from these companies, and to see what parts of the budget they are targeting. Because honestly, you don't know if it's the police department or whether it's a city council member who's just friendly with the company. There's so many ways that they can bring in these products.

I think you asked about Flock. I remember a few years ago when Flock cameras and their competitors were in that competition to get on the municipal budgets around the country. It's only now that some municipalities realize that there were so many privacy protocols that were being broken, that civil rights violations were being facilitated by these technologies. But more importantly, I don't think they knew themselves. We knew that this information was being shared with ICE and hundreds of other third parties. And that means the data that it's collecting beyond just your license plate, but your location, potentially facial scan information, is going to places you had no idea it was going to. And that is something we put in our report, is that while cooperation or sharing of data is something that they put down as a positive development, it's really just word salad for what they really want, which is access to the keys of your local government and to ensure that they get renewed contracts.

Right now, I feel like there's a real opportunity. It was so great to see like the way in which Dayton, Ohio, was just putting garbage bags over the Flock cameras. It really just showed how they were flexing their muscle with the technology simply just by cutting off their access. And it, I think, offers imagination to the more than 30 cities that have decided to cut their contracts with Flock to become better stewards for their communities. But I do think right now, it's more important than ever. And I'm really glad it's happening in places like Ohio, that it's happening in some places like Texas. It's happening in red states. It's got to happen not only in blue states, it's got to happen in red states. And it's important because I think when people start discovering what they're collecting beyond your name and your license plate, that they have access to everything, from where your kids are going to school to your mortgage to your water bill to where you have been in your locality, I think it will make all the difference in how we start regulating these technologies.

I just want to say really quickly, part of the reason why the local is so important is because where we can fight, obviously. These are our homes. And I think kind of back to what we are trying to tease out a little bit here is it's really about democracy and how is it that we can have a say in defining the things that are most important to us, but also just say on the point of ICE. Paromita knows this is my favorite thing to always break up, but ICE knows that it can only be as successful as they want to be by having force multipliers. And it's always been very much central to their agenda to have police departments, what's the word, collaborating with them to the maximum amount possible.

So whether that's in 287(g) agreements where police agencies sign an MoU, where they can become authorized to become immigration agents, to the automatic fingerprint sharing that happens every time everyone is booked, all of this stuff is stuff that ICE did by design, and we fought every single part of it. And the reason why we fought it is because of exactly this point around nobody... These are infrastructures that, when they're combined together, can do really tremendous harm. And so, we have to figure out locally then where we can put the pressure to stop it. And so, I think it's just one of these examples where we don't really have a choice but to fight, but where better to fight than in the place that you call home.

Well, thank you both so much for being here.

The 2026 World Cup ends this Sunday with a historic match between Argentina and Spain. Which team will secure its place in the history books remains to be seen. But after the stadium lights go out, a different kind of legacy will remain. The US, Mexico, and Canada have built up an ecosystem of surveillance technologies under the justification of ensuring the safety and security of the event. In doing so, they follow in the footsteps of past events like the Men’s World Cup in South Africa, Brazil and Qatar, and the Olympic and Paralympic games in Paris.

This week, Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) released an 

 into the companies supporting the expansion of surveillance tools and policing capabilities in the 16 host cities of the 2026 World Cup. We found that at least 21 companies helped build or enhance the surveillance structures used to monitor, track, and profile fans, visitors, and locals. These vendors provide products and services that we classify into a five-layer stack: data harvesting at scale, predictive policing, communications interception, data integration and command centers, and aerial surveillance.

What exactly is the “surveillance stack”? We use the framing proposed by New York University law professor 

: the surveillance stack is a set of technologies that are used to “surveil indiscriminately, and which are rarely governed by a warrant requirement or any of the traditional legal oversight mechanisms,” guiding decisions about “who to police, where to police, how to police, and when to police.” This definition encompasses AI-powered systems that process and analyze large amounts of data to monitor, track, and profile individuals and communities.

Surveillance and human rights in the 2026 World Cup

In July 2025, the US Department of Homeland Security introduced a 

 under the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), awarding $846 million to strengthen security operations and protect against drone threats in the eleven US host cities. Detailed breakdowns of how these funds were used and which companies benefited are elusive, but we know that Atlanta, Boston, and Dallas allocated part of their grants to expanding drone units, camera networks, and real-time police intelligence capabilities. Some of the companies that scored new contracts through these and other grants include longstanding government providers like weapons tech manufacturer Axon and technology consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton.

In spite of this new influx of cash, the tournament’s host cities failed to establish strong due diligence processes, risk mitigation, and remedy mechanisms to consider the human rights impacts and harms associated with surveillance products and services. In 2026, for the first time in the history of the tournament, FIFA required that each host city develop its own human rights action plan. But by April of this year, 

 had published theirs. As RDR’s report shows, by the time the tournament started, three cities (Seattle, Mexico City, and Monterrey) had yet to make their plans public. (Monterrey 

 its human rights action plan on June 2, but it was only available as an Instagram Story.)

The majority of the action plans did not fully consider the human rights impacts that could arise from the extensive use of technology, especially surveillance and data protection risks. Only 

 had dedicated sections with considerations for the right to privacy. Vancouver was the only city that established a clear and explicit plan for when the technology used during the World Cup, namely the expanded CCTV infrastructure, would be dismantled.

The omissions in the host cities’ human rights action plans are the latest chapter in the history of opacity and lack of accountability over surveillance and policing, particularly in the US. Companies like Flock Safety, Clearview AI, and Palantir are already established providers of tech used by law enforcement agencies at various jurisdictional levels. But the municipal action plans display a complete lack of recognition for how existing surveillance infrastructure could impact the rights of locals and fans. For example, in Atlanta, one of the 

Flock Safety‘s license plate reader cameras to 

 of ICE. In Kansas City, the municipal Transportation Authority 

 cameras with facial recognition in public buses after delaying their deployment during the tournament, prompting fears among civil rights advocates that the technology will continue to operate indefinitely.

A FIFA World Cup Trophy visual is displayed against the Manhattan skyline during the FIFA Drone show in New York/New Jersey at Liberty State Park on July 17, 2026 in Jersey City, New Jersey. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)



From the stadiums to the streets and the borders

 that at least 15 companies entered into new agreements or renewed existing partnerships with the 16 host cities to provide surveillance tools around the World Cup. But these vendors are part of a broader stack of corporate actors and monitoring tools that are already woven into the urban infrastructure.

Lenovo, FIFA’s official technology partner, had a prominent role in building the digital infrastructure for the venues. The company created an 

—detailed virtual maps of all 16 stadiums— that ran crowd pattern identification and predictive analytics to facilitate safety and security interventions. Facial recognition technology continues to be deployed in stadiums, used for access control and purchases in food stalls. At least two venues in this World Cup made use of this technology: Boston's Gillette Stadium, which partnered with 

, and Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which partnered with 

 of entertainment sites that are deploying and normalizing the use of facial recognition in public spaces. World Cup surveillance also 

 through companies like Fortem Technologies and Ondas Inc., which received contracts to deploy drone and counter-drone systems across multiple cities.

Once fans exit the stadiums, they encounter the increasingly pervasive tech in the streets.

Companies like Flock Safety and Motorola are behind the 

 of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), with volunteer mapping project 

 logging more than 650 devices in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, and New Jersey. The Houston City Council 

 access to MoboTrex (Derq)’s AI-powered video detection system

to track vehicles and pedestrians; Nexera’s KeepZone AI provided a threat detection system to Mexican authorities; and Peregrine’s integrated public safety platforms were 

 across all 11 host cities in the US. Seguritech, one of the 

 in the 2026 World Cup in its social media profiles, claiming to implement a security operation that ranges from CCTV, analytics, drones, and cybersecurity services, all coordinated into a critical mission tech system.

All the technologies described above compound human rights impacts, from the right to privacy, to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. Data harvesting and identification tools, as well as data systems like the ones Clearview AI and Axon Enterprise deploy, exacerbate over-policing bias towards minorities and incur high 

. Their use in public spaces also creates an environment of fear that 

 and has already been linked with numerous 

. Likewise, predictive policing systems are trained with 

 and risk increasing the targeting of marginalized communities. Data integration and command centers like Palantir’s Gotham platform create extensive 

 thanks to the consolidation of multiple data flows into a single source of information. Aerial surveillance with drone and counter-drone systems, like those of Robin Radar Systems

 mobile data via radio frequency monitoring.

Reclaiming the game—and our neighborhoods

As video surveillance, facial recognition technology, and behavioral analytics 

, tech-facilitated hyper-surveillance quietly becomes the norm at mega-events and remains in place long after they end. The spread of surveillance technologies is known to lead to 

, introducing behavioral changes in people who know, or even just have a suspicion that they are being watched. Ultimately, this can erode speech and push behavior toward social conformity, restricting expression that is deemed unacceptable. But the technology and its direct effects belie the far broader problem of 

 toward law enforcement institutions and the systematic impunity they enjoy after committing egregious human rights violations. Companies and governments must respect people’s rights and freedoms, and due diligence mechanisms must be in place to protect them.

Together, activists and civil society are pushing back against the widespread use and abuse of surveillance at mega-events around the world. In doing so, they are also taking a stand against the failures of the global socioeconomic order that produced this reality, from labor abuse to housing exploitation. 

 coalitions are taking a stand. But other clusters of resistance are highly decentralized: individual, anonymous 

 are increasingly sharing creative ways for people to circumvent everyday surveillance.

The links between powerful tech companies and the FIFA World Cup’s global sociopolitical influence deserve far more scrutiny than they have received. In the face of this power, the momentum built by those resisting AI-powered surveillance will not end with the final whistle. Looking forward to the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, communities are coming together and learning from 

 to build campaigns calling on companies, governments and other stakeholders to invest in people instead of a permaculture of surveillance.

Tatiana Dias is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

At this World Cup, a spectacle of sensors, cameras and AI has made technology part of the sport's appeal. The AI-powered World Cup has been celebrated for narrowing the gap between smaller and bigger teams, and for making the tournament "smarter” and “more inclusive, more accessible" as Lenovo CEO 

, and the provider of the technology that is becoming increasingly part of the games. Players' bodies have been rendered as 3D avatars. We can see them on screen, when the VAR system is analyzing a player’s position. Every team has an AI assistant at its disposal: drawing on thousands of data points collected during a match, the Football AI Pro platform, launched by FIFA with Lenovo, produces real-time tactical reports and strategic recommendations.

 carries motion sensors that record everything and transmit it in real time to the VAR system. The sensor data is combined with player positions and video to review incidents on the pitch. The promise is a more precise, faster officiating.

The effects can be seen on the field— and in the results. Croatia was knocked out by Portugal after a goal was disallowed because the ball detected a touch by a player in an offside position 

when a goal was ruled out for a millimetric offside also identified by VAR. Later, 

 by Argentina after VAR detected a fault committed by an Egyptian player before his knock to the goal.

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