347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You
3/16/20261 hr 9 min
In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a single prison guard. Although his original idea was never built, the word has come to indicate any system of social control through constant surveillance. Nowadays, we are close to creating such a system, not for prisons, but for our everyday lives. The data about our whereabouts and doings is collected by our smart devices, and available for search by the authorities. I talk with law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson about the new reality, as discussed in his book Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/16/347-andrew-guthrie-ferguson-on-how-your-data-will-be-used-against-you/
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Andrew Guthrie Ferguson received his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an LL.M. from Georgetown University. He is currently a professor of law at George Washington University Law School. He is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI) and was an Advisor to the ALI Principles of the Law, Policing Project. He previously worked as a supervising attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Sean Carroll· Host0:39
[ding] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As I'm recording this, uh, the week that I'm recording this, one of the many, many things that appeared in the news... Things are appearing in the news too quickly for any one of us to keep track these days. But one of them was a bit of a conflict between the US government and Anthropic, the AI company, because the Defense Department wanted to use AI from Anthropic in some of their applications, and Anthropic wanted certain protections that it wouldn't be used for purposes that they didn't approve of. The Defense Department did not go along, and therefore, the whole thing fell apart, and there was much, uh, shouting and cursing back and forth. And who knows how the thing is going to settle out eventually. But the