Ars Technica: This is what you call your tyranny test.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson: One of the times I feel this is most resonant, if you remember a couple years ago, people who are stalwarts of the Second Amendment were really worried that a Democratic government was going to come up with a federal list of all the gun owners in America. So at some moment there’d be a knock on the door and their guns would be confiscated. Well, with automated license plate readers, if you put those outside of the gun range and the gun show and where you buy your ammunition, you have your list.

You don’t need to have some government list. You literally, through the data that you give up by just living your life, you can show who has a gun in their home. That might worry people who believe the Second Amendment means that they should be able to have their own gun rights without the government necessarily knowing it, but it cuts both ways. Everyone is revealed. Everyone is exposed. And everyone should be worried about their government having that data that potentially could be used against them.

Ars Technica: What is the potential scenario that worries you the most as we move forward? As AI tools in particular keep developing, are we moving into even more serious uncharted waters?

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson: Yes. I think AI is going to supercharge police power in ways we’ve never seen. We’ve all lived in a world where we have cameras on our streets. If there was an individual problem, they could go back into an individual camera. The idea that all those cameras can be fused together in a central command center, like a real-time crime center, and AI video analytics can then observe every single object, foreground and background, identify man, woman, child, cat, door, car, what kind of car, and then track those objects throughout the city—that’s a whole new power that we’ve never had before.

There are currently no real rules limiting that. There used to be a cautiousness in rolling out new technology. But we are watching the federal government in the guise of immigration enforcement actually use all the technology that does exist, but without any guardrails or concerns. So for the first time we’ve seen mobile facial recognition in the wild. It’s not that that technology wasn’t theoretically around, but we did not see local police taking a smartphone camera out for facial recognition. We’re now seeing that with ICE and Customs Border Patrol (CBP). We knew that you could track individuals with location and social network analysis. But now we’re seeing that being used by ICE to identify the areas and people that they want to target, using the power of these new systems in ways that we haven’t seen before in local law enforcement.

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/04/how-our-digital-devices-are-putting-our-right-to-privacy-at-risk/