“Cause we have a nice little database. And now you’re a domestic terrorist.”
On January 23, 2026, in Portland, Maine, that was the response a masked agent gave when a protester asked a simple question: “What are you taking my information down for?” The blunt admission marked a chilling shift in the American public square. What was once a marketplace for personal information has evolved into a permanent, powerful infrastructure: one that federal agencies, law enforcement, and even the Department of Defense
increasingly rely on to monitor, classify, and track people in ways the public rarely sees.
At the center of this shift is the data-broker economy, a vast, lightly regulated industry that buys and sells the intimate details of our lives. These datasets now feed into AI systems used for policing, immigration enforcement, and risk assessment. More recently, they have also begun informing the Pentagon’s exploration of autonomous technologies capable of identifying and targeting individuals without direct human oversight.
The implications for democracy are profound. When participation in a protest leads to an entry in a “nice little database,” what happens to the right to dissent?
Join Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Kade Crockford, Director of Technology and Justice Programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts, for a timely investigation into how these systems work, who they empower, and what they mean for the future of democratic participation. Moderated by Amba Kak, Co-Executive Director of the AI Now Institute.
Join the conversation.
Cindy Cohn.
Cindy Cohn has been Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2015, before which she served as EFF’s legal director and general counsel since 2000. She is an internationally renowned authority on digital privacy and surveillance, free speech, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, and other topics at the intersection of technology and law. The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2013, noting: “[I]f Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn.” Her memoir, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance” was published March 10 by MIT Press and she is currently conducting a national book tour.
Kade Crockford.
Kade Crockford is the Director of Technology and Justice Programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts. Kade writes, researches, organizes, lobbies, and advocates to ensure that privacy and civil liberties law keeps pace with new technologies, with a focus on how systems of surveillance and control impact not just society in general but their primary targets — people of color, Muslims, immigrants, and dissidents. Most recently, Kade has led ACLUM’s work to place democratic controls on government use of face surveillance technology and to ban the sale and trade of cell phone location data.
Amba Kak.
Amba Kak is a leading technology policy strategist and researcher with over a decade of experience working in multiple regions and in roles across government, academia, and the nonprofit sector. Amba serves as Co-Executive Director of AI Now. Previously, Amba was
Senior Advisor on AI at the Federal Trade Commission. She served as Global Policy Advisor at Mozilla. She also served on the Board of Directors for the Signal Foundation, the Program Committee for the Board of Directors for the Mozilla Foundation, and is a member of New York City’s Mayor Elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team. In 2024
TIME magazine listed Kak among 100 most influential people in AI.
