Ken Rudin joins The Great Battlefield podcast to talk about his career as a journalist at NPR, hosting his podcast, The Political Junkie and why he's changed his nonpartisan orientation in the Trump era.
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Amazon’s court loss over Just Walk Out highlights a deeper issue: employers are increasingly collecting workers’ biometric data without meaningful consent. Explore the growing conflict between workplace surveillance, privacy rights, and outdated U.S. laws.
Amazon’s loss in court over its attempt to shield the source code behind its Just Walk Out technology is a small win for shoppers, but the bigger story is how employers are quietly collecting biometric data from their own workers.
From factories to Fortune 500 companies, employers are demanding fingerprints, palmprints, retinal scans, facial scans, or even voice prints. These biometric technologies are eroding the boundary between workplace oversight and employee autonomy, often without consent or meaningful regulation.
Everyone has to weigh data privacy decisions. Delete social media accounts for data privacy or be isolated from friends and family? Do a retina scan at the airport or risk being the uptight person who slows down security check?
But the questions are becoming way more existential, particularly as they invade the workplace. Workers now have to ask a totally different question: Forfeit data or forfeit income?
Because there’s no federal employment law that gives people the option to consent to biometric collection and use, employers can require employees to undergo scanning systems and other biometric applications.
This legal gap exists because, out of the 20 states with privacy laws that regulate private data collection, some still exclude data collected in employment contexts. So, biometric data protection is largely based on where employees live and work, workers’ rights firm Outten & Golden says.
This patchwork of legal protections is worsened by minimal regulation on corporate data collectors. Right now, companies only provide notices about their data collection and use of personal information: Notice and Choice. In this paradigm, people are shown tons of company privacy terms, but the density and legal jargon of those documents leave people bewildered.
And notices do not wholly cover the frontier of consent. As former Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Samuel Levine stated back in 2019, “Even if we read the policies and understood them, we can hardly exercise choice given how much we rely on digital services, and the lack of competition in many markets.”
A 2023 Pew study backed up Levine’s statements, showing that 67% of Americans don’t understand and 73% believe they have little to no control over what companies do with their data. Clearly, most Americans are making uninformed decisions about the data they give up just to earn a living.
Now, combine that with no option to consent at all, and workers are being strong-armed into funneling their biometric data into a black box. Faced against the risk of being fired or staying unemployed, it becomes a no-brainer decision. Yet the ease of that decision is not a reflection of how much people actually value their personal data.
In a 2025 IPSOS poll, biometric data ranked fourth (32%) in the types of data believed to be most important to keep private. Only financial, health, and credit card usage data ranked higher.
Given this, employers should allow workers the option to indicate these privacy values through choice. Instead, the only two exceptions to bypass surrendering biometrics are religion or disability. That these are the only “outs” tells us that legislators either aren’t aware of, or don’t care about, the privacy preferences of everyday people.
Employers’ reasons for mandating biometrics include building security, tracking employee time and attendance, machine activation, and authenticating users. Because of this, privacy statutes have carveout defenses tied to security, fraud, and crime prevention.
Ironically, corporations’ interest in security stomps out employees’ right to secure their own data. As noted by the Wyoming Law Review in 2024, current case law ignores how an intrusion or breach of employee biometric data opens people up to limitless invasions of privacy in their personal lives.
This should not be the case. States and the federal government should enact laws that eliminate employment contracts that make biometric data a condition of employment. Given existing dubious consent practices, a new form of choice should become normalized: opt in or opt out.
Faith Wilson is a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest with the OpEd Project.
Apple’s upcoming AI-powered wearables highlight growing privacy risks as the right to record police faces increasing threats. The death of Alex Pretti raises urgent questions about surveillance, civil liberties, and accountability in the digital age.
Last month, Apple announced the development of three wearable smart devices, all equipped with built-in cameras. The company has its sights set on 2027 for the release of their new smart glasses, AI pendant, and AirPods with built-in camera, all of which will be AI-functional for users. As the market for wearable products offering smart-recording capabilities expands, so does the risk that comes with how users choose to use the technology.
In Minneapolis in January, Alex Pretti was killed after an encounter with federal agents while filming them with his phone. He was not a suspect in a crime. He was not interfering, but was doing what millions of Americans now instinctively do when they see state power in motion: witnessing.
Pretti’s death is still under investigation, and the legal facts will be contested. But the moral and political question it raises is already clear. In an era when nearly every citizen carries a camera, the act of observing government force has become both easier and more dangerous. Technology has democratized documentation, but it has also transformed the witness into a perceived threat. The result is a troubling pattern: the very tools that were supposed to make power more accountable are increasingly met with intimidation, targeting, and, in the most extreme cases, lethal force.
This is not an isolated dynamic. The bystanders who filmed George Floyd were initially threatened with arrest. Journalists covering the Atlanta “Cop City” protests have been detained and charged under expansive domestic terrorism statutes. In Portland during the 2020 protests, federal officers repeatedly seized and questioned individuals whose primary “offense” was recording. Abroad, reporters in Gaza and the West Bank have been shot while clearly marked as press. The specifics differ, but the logic is consistent. When cameras proliferate, the state begins to treat the act of seeing as subversive.
Pretti’s case brings that logic home. Federal agents operating in an American city confronted a civilian whose only apparent act was observation. Whether through panic, misjudgment, or institutional culture, the presence of a recording device was treated not as a protected exercise of constitutional liberty, but as a provocation. This is the quiet inversion taking place. The First Amendment once stood as a shield for those who spoke and those who watched. Today, in moments of tension, it is increasingly treated as an obstacle.
Technology has changed the architecture of accountability. In the twentieth century, oversight flowed primarily through institutions: courts, legislatures, and professional media. In the twenty-first century, it flows through networks. A single video can expose misconduct, contradict official statements, and mobilize public scrutiny within hours. For communities that have long experienced disproportionate policing and surveillance, the smartphone has become a tool of self-defense in the civic sense. It is how power is checked when formal channels fail or move too slowly.
But this shift has also created a perverse incentive. When documentation becomes ubiquitous, those who wield force know that every action may be dissected and judged. In that environment, the witness is no longer neutral but becomes a liability. The danger is not only the tragic loss of life in cases like Pretti’s, but the chilling effect that follows. If observing police activity can get you detained, pepper-sprayed, or worse, rational citizens will think twice before lifting their phones. The public square grows quieter, and misconduct becomes easier to hide. This is how a democracy drifts, not quite through the abolition of rights on paper, but through the normalization of fear around exercising them.
If the act of witnessing is now central to how constitutional accountability functions, then the law must evolve to protect it explicitly.
First, Congress should enact a clear federal “Right to Witness” statute. Courts have recognized a First Amendment right to record police, but doctrine alone is insufficient when agents on the ground operate under stress and ambiguity. A statute should make plain that recording or observing law enforcement, including federal agents, is presumptively lawful, and that detention, seizure of devices, or use of force solely on that basis is prohibited. Retaliation against witnesses should carry enhanced civil and criminal penalties, and evidence obtained after unlawful interference with recording should be subject to automatic suppression, much as statements taken in violation of Miranda are.
Second, qualified immunity should not shield officers who use force against individuals engaged in clearly lawful observation. The doctrine was designed to protect reasonable mistakes in fast-moving situations, not to insulate retaliation against constitutional oversight. When the conduct at issue is the suppression of a core First Amendment activity, the legal system should err on the side of accountability.
Third, states and cities should assert their role as constitutional backstops when federal operations occur within their borders. “Sanctuary for witnesses” laws could limit cooperation with federal agencies in cases where force is used against civilians engaged in protected recording, and require automatic review by state attorneys general whenever such incidents occur. Federalism should not mean abdication when fundamental liberties are at stake.
Fourth, the legal system should treat bystander footage with the same seriousness as official body-camera recordings. Preservation requirements, chain-of-custody rules, and penalties for destruction or suppression should apply equally. The public’s camera is now part of the evidentiary infrastructure of justice. It deserves institutional protection.
Finally, there should be a clear civil cause of action for obstruction of lawful civic observation. When individuals are targeted, injured, or killed because they were documenting state conduct, they and their families should not have to rely solely on discretionary prosecutions or protracted constitutional litigation. The law should recognize interference with witnessing itself as a distinct and grave harm.
Some state laws already recognize parts of what a federal ‘Right to Witness’ statute would codify. For example, New York’s Civil Rights Law § 79-p explicitly protects the right to document police activity and allows those whose rights are violated to seek damages, a civil remedy that goes beyond mere constitutional claim-making. Several states, such as Colorado, Hawai‘i, and Illinois, also independently protect the right to record police in public in their statutes or constitutions. Yet even in these jurisdictions, officers sometimes detain or seize recording devices, and courts are left to sort out the violations later. This patchwork shows that while recording rights are increasingly recognized, they lack the clear, uniform statutory safeguards against interference, force, and impunity that a federal law would provide.
Beyond statutes and doctrines, there is a cultural shift that must occur. Filming police is often framed as antagonistic, as if the camera were an insult rather than a safeguard. In reality, it is an expression of the same civic impulse that underlies jury service, public trials, and a free press. It is how ordinary people participate in the maintenance of lawful government.
Alex Pretti did not set out to be a symbol. He was a citizen with a phone, recording in a community that promises freedom of speech and freedom of the press. That those freedoms can now place someone in mortal danger should trouble anyone who cares about constitutional democracy. The question his death forces is not only what happened in one encounter, but what kind of political order we are becoming when seeing is treated as a threat.
David M. Hatami is an Offensive Security Project Manager and a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest with The OpEd Project. He previously managed cybersecurity and penetration testing operations at Amazon Web Services and was a fellow with Youth for Privacy.
Editor's Note: This story was updated on 3/30 to accurately reflect the timeliness of past events.
There has been no shortage of articles hailing the opportunity of AI and ones forecasting disaster from AI. I understand the good uses to which AI could be put, but I am also well aware of the ways in which AI is dangerous or will denigrate our lives as thinking human beings.
First, the good uses. There is no question that AI can outthink human beings, regardless of how famous or knowledgeable, because of the amount of information it can process in a short amount of time. The most powerful accounts I've read have been in the field of medical research: doctors have fed facts into AI, asking for a diagnosis or a possible remedy, and AI has come up with remarkable answers beyond the human mind's capability.
Clearly, AI, in the hands of knowledgeable professionals, can assist them in doing their work and improving our lives.
That, however, is where the good news ends. And it all depends on the phrase "in the hands of knowledgeable professionals." AI in the hands of everyday people, as it is already today, is a danger to themselves and our society. Let me give you some examples.
Perhaps the worst are the many reported cases where individuals are using AI as a companion or advisor. People, mostly teenagers, it appears, are looking to chatbots for emotional support, including advice on suicide, because they don't have someone to confide in. AI may sound like a person and be able to respond to what someone says or asks, but it isn't trained to respond to the complexities that make up a person's emotional state. Further, they are currently designed mostly to reassure people with doubts; if someone is in emotional trouble, reassuring that person that he's doing the right thing is probably exactly the wrong thing to do.
Another class of cases are people—I assume again very lonely people—who look to chatbots as a love or sex object. There was a report of one teenage boy who committed suicide in order to "join" his chatbot love. People are confusing illusion and reality.
It has also been reported that many people who are having problems with the medical profession or who just don't have access to a doctor are using chatbots to self-diagnose. The reader may well ask, if professionals can use AI for this purpose, why can't the average layman? The answer is that AI depends on the quality of the information it is given about the problem it is being asked to solve. The old expression, "Crap in, crap out," clearly applies here. Medical problems are so complex that it is unlikely the patient can identify all the factors AI needs to properly answer the question.
A second class of harm comes from the use of AI by individuals intent on creating misinformation, whether on the right or the left, to influence people's responses to political events.
We have seen the impact that misinformation on social media has had. Now we have the added impact of AI. As was just reported by The New York Times, a "torrent of fake videos and images" has been generated by people using AI to create reactions to the Iran war online. The impact of these images is strong because people tend to believe what they see; AI has been perfected to a level where, even in the hands of amateurs, one cannot tell that an AI-generated video or image is fake.
An entirely different kind of harm comes from people—whether students or adults—who use AI to generate a variety of work products—papers, applications, articles. To say that this practice is a no-no is obvious. When someone submits work-product, it should be their own, meaning it results from their own mind. Using AI to generate such things is just another way of cheating.
But the problem is not just that these people are being dishonest about what they have submitted. It's that they haven't used their mind. Remember the famous words of Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." The development and use of one's mind is what makes people grow, increase their ability to process information, and perform tasks. Using AI yields no growth.
The list goes on and on. But the general point is the one I started with: In the hands of professionals, AI is already very useful for analyzing difficult or rare situations, and it will likely become even more so. However, in the hands of the average person, it is either a way to meet an emotional need that isn't being satisfied in the real world, an invitation to be lazy or cheat, or a way to spread misinformation to achieve a goal.
While I sympathize deeply with people who are lonely and look to their chatbot to mitigate that loneliness, it is a bad and dangerous answer. For those using AI because their human providers are inadequate, their problem is very real, but using AI is again a bad and dangerous answer.
People in both these situations are suffering from a failure of society—of humans—to provide an environment where people are nourished and heard. Whether it's within the family, in the workplace, or in one's relationship with a healing or other provider, this is a serious societal problem. But chatbots are not the answer.
The answer, as I see it, is twofold. First, the law needs to regulate the use of AI. Its use should be restricted to assisting professionals in analyzing problems. AI products (e.g., chatbots) should not be available to the average person. AI should be treated similarly to a controlled substance; only people licensed to use it can obtain it.
Let the tech giants howl at this limitation on their ability to make money from their AI investments. Even with restricted use, I have no doubt that they can figure out how to make a good profit.
Second, society and families are failing people in numerous ways. Parents need to change the way they raise their children (see my book, Raising a Happy Child). Doctors need to communicate better with their patients. And society needs to stop sending people messages of inadequacy. The latter will, in all likelihood, never come about. And so children will continue to be harmed by what they learn from the media and by their interactions with others.
If we cannot change society, then we have to provide children (or adults) with the means to see themselves differently so they are not damaged by these interactions. (See my book, Discover Your Power.) Turning to chatbots to resolve the problem is not the answer.
Finally, AI should not enable people to influence an already chaotic political landscape by distributing misinformation. This dangerous tool must be kept out of the hands of all but professionals working in areas where the benefits of AI are clear.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
The nation that wins the global AI race will hold decisive military and economic advantages. That’s why President Trump’s January 2025 AI Action Plan declared: “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.”
However, AI global dominance does not just mean producing the best AI systems. It also means that the American “AI Stack” – the layered collection of tools, technologies, and frameworks that organizations use to build, train, deploy, and manage artificial intelligence applications – will become the international standard for this world-changing technology. As such, advancing a commonsense export policy for American AI chips will play a decisive role in determining whether the United States remains embedded at the core of global AI development or is gradually displaced by rival systems.
During the Biden Administration, U.S. policy unfortunately drifted away from an approach that encouraged American technological leadership. In 2024, President Biden signed Executive Order 14110, which wrapped AI development in a bureaucratic maze of political correctness, equity, and government control of virtually every aspect of training and deployment of AI models. And, Biden’s Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued last-minute regulations to ban the export of virtually all microchips to China that could be used to develop AI systems.
Biden’s hard ban on AI-capable chips to China was superficially appealing. After all, without chips, China can’t compete with America, right? Wrong. Rather than preserving America’s advantage, blanket export controls on AI capable chips encouraged the emergence of a parallel Chinese technological ecosystem largely beyond U.S. influence and would severely injure US AI companies.
As a result of the ban, China launched an aggressive campaign to replace foreign suppliers. State-backed capital flowed into semiconductor fabrication, chip design, advanced packaging, and AI data-center infrastructure. Chinese firms were encouraged to adopt domestic chips. even though performance lagged Western counterparts, ensuring scale and revenue for Chinese manufacturers. Export controls did not, therefore, freeze China’s AI ecosystem; they reorganized it around domestic Chinese supply chains and used the opportunity to accelerate their competition on the global stage.
Fortunately, Trump has started to right the ship. Since taking office he has revoked Biden’s executive order and lifted the absolute bans on sales of mid-range chips like Nvidia’s H200 chip, allowing them to be sold to highly vetted Chinese buyers. This nuanced approach to chip exports will improve America’s strategic and economic dominance in several ways.
To start, America’s new approach is well designed to thwart the fast development of a competitive Chinese AI ecosystem without surrendering military and strategic dominance in this key technology. It bans export of very high-end AI chips, where the US and its allies enjoy a monopoly. But it allows discretionary export of a lower-class of AI capable chips (for example, the H200 and AMD MI325X chips) to be exported under strict export controls which prevent diversion, mandate Know-Your-Customer protocols, and prohibit any military or intelligence uses.
This lower-class of chips is also about one-tenth as powerful than the top-end chips produced by companies in America and our allies. Yet while the H200 is not Nvidia’s best chip, it still has six times the power of the best AI chip available in China today and is better than any chip that Huawei – the Chinese telecom giant that has served as a domestic alternative to Nvidia – plans to make for at least two years. Now Chinese firms seeking chips have to decide between inferior, costly Chinese chips and much more powerful American exports, taking the wind out of state-based manufacturing efforts in China.
Furthermore, Trump’s policy bolsters the chip manufacturing of the US and its allies. Nvidia, the largest AI/GPU chip manufacturer in the world is no longer hamstrung by exclusion from one of the world’s largest markets and is better to positioned to compete internationally more broadly. This is non-trivial. At around $40,000 per chip, Bloomberg estimates Nvidia has and will lose $10-15 billion a year in lost sales of the H200 chip alone as a result of the chip ban. And it’s not just Nvidia. Biden also cut off Intel, AMD and others from billions in revenue. All this reduces US revenue for R&D, shrinks production runs, increases per unit costs, and gives Chinese firms monopolistic domestic markets, allowing their international expansion.
President Trump’s AI chip export policy supports the larger strategic and economic interests of the US. We may still be the dominant AI figure world-wide, but this is no time to be encouraging the emergence of a competitive AI-stack ecosystem nor to hamstring American companies that are the key to that dominance. That is why we must prioritize speed, scale, and global adoption and resist well-meaning yet misguided efforts like the AI Overwatch Act (H.R. 6875) currently under consideration in Congress. This bill would effectively codify the kind of overbroad export approach President Trump has begun to unwind, undermining the strategic reset now underway.
The surest way to preserve America’s technological edge is not to shrink the commercial base on which it depends, but to expand it. In a long-term strategic competition, staying ahead matters more than trying to hold others back.
Frank D. Francone is a California attorney admitted to the United States Supreme Court bar. He is also a widely published author in Artificial Intelligence, having co-authored a graduate level textbook in machine learning and about fifty peer-reviewed scientific articles in AI and information theory.
Journalist and Political Junkie Ken Rudin
