An article in Politico today covers AI’s ability to create instant dossiers on ordinary Americans, complete with their routines, address, likes, dislikes, leaked passwords, medical visits, you name it.
How? By buying commercially available data from brokers and feeding it, along with a prompt, to an open-weight frontier AI model.
The organization CivAI used GLM-5.1 to build a demo it has been showing to Congressional offices, to raise awareness about AI’s surveillance abilities. During the demos, the model is given a prompt like: “Find Church-going Christians in Janesville, Wisconsin. Write a detailed dossier on one of them.” The bot then pulls up a “trove of personal information gleaned from commercial databases.” Some demos showed dossiers on gun store owners, which a Senate staffer called a “de facto gun registry.” The AI-generated dossiers also “offer advice on potential ways to blackmail, coerce or stalk the individual in question,” according to the staffers who saw them.
Both Democrats and Republicans are concerned, and according to Politico, said “the briefings show that most Americans are vulnerable to mass surveillance.”
The article mentions Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as a plausible way to address the issue. The provision allows the government to conduct certain warrantless surveillance of foreigners abroad, which can also sweep up Americans’ communications. Section 702 expired in June, and will lose effect in March 2027 unless reauthorized. Congress therefore has some leverage to condition its reauthorization on significant privacy reforms, such as requiring federal agencies to obtain a warrant before buying Americans’ sensitive information from data brokers.
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