AI Is Reading Your Private Files and Calling the Cops

Big Tech and the cops found a way around the Fourth Amendment and they expect you to pay for it

Ten years from now your granddaughter won’t own a computer the way you do. She’ll have a cheap screen and keyboard hooked up to a server in some billionaire’s data center where her homework and her photos and every late-night thought she types will live. The tech industry calls it a cloud computer and it’s where they’re herding all of us. Whoever owns that server owns everything on it. They scan it, they sell what they learn about her to data brokers who resell it to anybody with a checkbook, and the buyer at the end of that line is the last person on earth you’d want reading your grandbaby’s private thoughts.

She’s a high school sophomore on the honor roll who still calls you ‘Grama’ when she hugs you on Christmas morning. One night she uses that cloud computer to write in her journal about a dream that made zero sense in daylight.

In the dream she walked into school with a bomb strapped to her chest and kept telling her teachers to hug her.

Any child psychologist would call that a scared kid working through her fear of being loved and of letting people get close. The algorithm on that server never sat through a psychology class. It was trained to sniff out terrorist potential and when it sees bomb and school and chest in one paragraph it does exactly what it was built to do.

Two days later a pair of Digital Compliance Officers are knocking at the door. They haul your granddaughter off to a psychiatric ward for monitoring where she spends three months getting pumped full of mind-altering drugs. She comes home a trainwreck with a flag on her file that never comes off. For five bucks any cop or college or hiring manager can pull that flag up online and it follows her into every job interview she ever sits through. She is now considered ‘high risk’ and her whole future is ruined over a journal entry she wrote as a teenager.

Digital Compliance Officer is a job title I made up. Every other step of that nightmare is already running in this country RIGHT NOW and the only piece still missing is getting her whole life onto their servers (they’re pouring that concrete as fast as the trucks can roll).

The Chatbot Called the Cops

The machine that reads the journal already exists and last month it read one. At the end of September a Florida woman told Anthropic’s Claude chatbot she was going to shoot up the Lee County Sheriff’s Office and the next day told it she’d picked up a new gun. Anthropic’s software flagged the messages and a human review team read them and called the cops. Deputies arrested her at home on a felony charge of making a written threat. She told Sheriff Carmine Marceno she’d been using Claude like a diary and he used the occasion to remind the rest of us that users are ‘never truly anonymous.’

Nobody’s handing that woman a medal because a threat to shoot up a sheriff’s office is a whole different animal from a teenager’s nightmare about hugs. What should make your blood run cold is how she got caught.

A machine read her diary and a stranger at a tech company read it and then the sheriff read it before she had the faintest idea anybody was looking.

That machinery can’t tell a threat from a bad dream and nobody built it to try.

It isn’t one company either. Anthropic’s terms let it report what you type to police at its ‘sole discretion’ and back in March OpenAI reported a Florida man who told ChatGPT he planned to kill his ex-girlfriend. The FBI ended up with two months of his chat logs.

Now put yourself in the reviewer’s chair with your granddaughter’s dream on the screen. Call the cops on a kid who turns out to be harmless and you had a bad Tuesday. Don’t call and then see her face on the six o’clock news and you’ll never work in that industry again. Every reviewer in America is going to push the button that covers the company’s butt and your granddaughter is the one who pays for it.

Strip-Searched Over a Group Chat

If you think nobody would really sic the cops on a kid over a few typed words, the schools already proved you wrong. Districts all over the country pay a company called Gaggle to run AI over everything students type into their school accounts. A couple of years ago it flagged a thirteen-year-old at Fairview Middle School in Tennessee for a dumb, ugly joke in a chat with her friends and the state’s zero-tolerance law did the rest. Police arrested that little girl and strip-searched her and held her overnight because a piece of software read her messages.

That wasn’t a fluke. In Lawrence, Kansas the same software fired off over a thousand alerts in less than a year. It flagged a kid for helping a friend edit a college essay that mentioned mental health. It flagged a whole photography class for nudity that wasn’t there and wiped the pictures out of their Google Drives on its own.

The psych ward from my story is already here too. Florida’s Baker Act lets police and judges and doctors send anybody who seems like a danger to themselves or others for an involuntary psychiatric exam. In one year Florida did that to kids 29,612 times and close to four hundred of them went through it somewhere between six and ten times.

So is the flag that never comes off.

In 2021 a San Francisco dad named Mark took pictures of his toddler’s swollen privates because a nurse asked for them before a video visit with the doctor. Google’s AI flagged them as child sexual abuse material, a human reviewer agreed, and Google reported him to the police and killed his account. Police concluded that ‘no crime occurred’ and Google never gave the account back. The cops cleared him and the algorithm convicted him anyway.

You’re Paying for Your Own Wiretap

By now you’re probably wondering how any of this is legal in a country with a Fourth Amendment. The short answer is that they figured out how to buy what they aren’t allowed to take.

Back in 1986 Congress banned phone and internet companies from selling your data straight to the government. That law is as old as the first Top Gun movie and nobody who wrote it imagined a two-way network wired into your phone and your car and your thermostat and your grandkid’s school laptop. So the companies sell your data to a middleman called a data broker who sells it to the government instead. Technically nobody searched you because they just bought you off a shelf like a can of beans (it’s pretty much money laundering for your privacy).

The head of the FBI admitted it this year.

In March Kash Patel told the Senate Intelligence Committee the bureau buys commercially available information and then wouldn’t promise Senator Ron Wyden it would stop buying Americans’ location data. Committee chairman Tom Cotton rode to his rescue by pointing out that ‘the key words are commercially available.’ Senator, by that logic your front door is only protected by the Constitution until somebody lists your house on Zillow. The Bill of Rights does not have a clearance rack.

Your phone’s location isn’t the only thing on that shelf. Delta and United and American Airlines and a bunch of other carriers own a data broker called the Airlines Reporting Corporation that sells the government access to five billion ticket records the FBI and the Secret Service and ICE can search without a warrant. It even asked the government to keep quiet about where the data came from. If you booked that trip to see the grandkids through a travel agency there’s a good chance it’s sitting in a federal search bar right now.

Once they’ve bought the data they want AI to chew through it. Earlier this year the Pentagon reportedly wanted Anthropic to help it sift bulk commercial data on Americans like their location history and web browsing. When the company refused to let its AI be used for mass domestic surveillance or for weapons that pick their own targets the Trump administration branded it a supply chain risk. No American company had ever been slapped with that label before. That’s the same company that reported the Florida woman to the sheriff. Even the companies that draw a line somewhere still read your stuff and still call the cops. The government is punishing them for drawing any line at all.

Now add up the bill. You pay for the phone and the computer and the monthly subscription and the cloud storage where your whole life sits. The company gets paid again when it sells what it learned about you to a broker. Then the FBI buys you back from that broker with your own tax dollars. You’re paying for the camera and the wiring and the recording service and the salary of the guy watching the tape. They actually expect us to foot the bill for our own surveillance. That’s bullshit and it is NOT happening on my watch.

You Don’t Own Your Computer Anymore

Every bit of that depends on your life sitting on their servers instead of your own machine. That’s why they’re coming for the computer on your desk first. Buy a new PC today and Windows 11 won’t even show you a desktop until you plug it into the internet and sign into a Microsoft account (Microsoft spent last year killing off the tricks people used to set one up offline).

My Computer became This PC because you no longer ‘own’ your own hardware. It isn’t ‘My Computer’ anymore.

That’s just the welcome mat. Microsoft teamed up with AMD and Intel and Qualcomm to bake a security chip called Pluton into the processors of newer PCs. Microsoft writes the software on that chip and updates it through Windows Update on its own schedule. Pair it with a feature called Secure Boot that only lets your computer start software signed with keys the machine already trusts. On most PCs the keys that matter belong to Microsoft and even most versions of Linux have to go hat in hand to Microsoft to get their startup code signed. They sell all of it as virus protection. What it really does is give Microsoft the power to decide what runs on HARDWARE YOU OWN.

Right now you can still dig into the settings on most PCs and turn Secure Boot off. That switch is the only thing standing between you and a computer that answers to Redmond instead of you. Microsoft already built the version without it back in 2012 when it required Windows tablets running ARM chips to ship with Secure Boot locked on for good. In August 2024 it showed us what happens when it flips the wrong switch. A routine Windows update locked a whole lot of Ubuntu and Linux Mint users out of the systems they’d installed right next to Windows on their own computers and it took Microsoft about nine months to fix it.

Your phone shows you where your PC is headed. Starting late this year Google will block Android phones from installing any app whose maker hasn’t registered their identity with Google. That includes apps you download straight from a website and the only way around it is plugging your phone into a computer and typing developer commands like a hacker in a bad movie. People who switch to a privacy system like GrapheneOS already get punished because some banks and government ID apps use a Google check to refuse to run on anything that isn’t Google-certified.

And don’t count on the people deciding what’s approved to stand up to a government.

In 2024 Apple yanked about two dozen VPN apps out of its Russian App Store because Russia’s censors told it to. Put all of that together and you can see the play. Once they own the lock they can block you from installing a Linux privacy system on your own laptop, kill the VPN or proxy that keeps your internet company from watching where you go, and force you onto approved software that phones home to the same people selling your data to the FBI. New York is already trying a version of it on 3D printers with a law passed this year that will eventually make them scan EVERY design you send against a library of gun parts. Today the list is gun parts and tomorrow it’s whatever they decide to load into it.

This is honestly the part that scares me the most because it comes BEFORE the cloud. It’s how they make sure that by the time the rent-a-PC shows up you won’t have anywhere else to go. You might own the hardware but it sure as hell isn’t YOUR hardware if you can’t choose what runs on it.

And the rent-a-PC is already on the shelf. In a 2022 internal presentation that spilled out during its court fight with the FTC, Microsoft laid out its plan to move Windows 11 ‘increasingly to the cloud’ and stream the whole operating system from its servers to any device. This February it announced Cloud PC boxes from Asus and Dell that boot straight into Windows on Microsoft’s servers with no local user accounts and no onboard storage at all. Stop paying the monthly bill and you’re holding a very expensive paperweight. For now Microsoft is pitching them to businesses (Office started out in offices too).

Meanwhile the computer you’d actually own is getting priced out of reach. AI data centers are on track to gobble up roughly seven out of every ten memory chips made this year. A basic RAM kit that ran about a hundred bucks a year ago was going for a freaking $439 by June and Gartner figures the average PC will cost about 17 percent more by the end of the year. Nobody has to pass a law banning private computers when they can lock down the ones you own, price the new ones into luxury items and let the rent-a-PC do the rest. It’s kinda genius if you own a data center and kinda terrifying if you’re anybody else. And Satya Nadella, if the cloud is so safe then go ahead and write your diary on it and send us the link.

Not On My Watch

The good news is that none of this is finished and every piece of it depends on you going along quietly. So quit going along quietly. Buy hardware you can actually own and open up and fix while you can still afford it. Keep one computer that never touches the internet for your private writing (an old laptop running Linux costs you nothing). Strip out every cloud subscription you can live without. If a kid in your life keeps a journal, buy them a paper one with a cheap little lock because that lock has never once called the sheriff.

Make your congressman and both of your senators earn their paychecks.

The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act would shut the data broker loophole and it cleared the House with votes from both parties in 2024 before the Senate let it die. Privacy groups on the left and the right have been pushing all year to bring it back and the only thing missing is enough regular folks raising hell about it.

Ten years from now your granddaughter is going to have a weird dream because every teenager in history has had weird dreams. The only person who should ever read about it is her. That’s worth fighting for while we still own the computers to fight with.

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The Algorithm Doesn’t Want You Seeing This Either

The same kind of algorithm that would read a nightmare about hugs and see a terrorist also decides who gets to see this newsletter. Lately it has decided you shouldn’t. We have almost 90,000 subscribers and our last dozen articles have gotten fewer than two hundred likes. That’s statistically impossible unless the people who signed up to read us aren’t being shown our work. We’re being SHADOWBANNED for telling the truth and we’re losing paid subscribers every single day.

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