Technology

If policymakers’ speeches and industry lobbying points are to be believed, commercial data is a strategic resource necessary to “win” the “AI race” with China. This argument demands continued widespread, unfettered, permissionless corporate access to vast troves of data (so the rhetoric goes). Not only consumer data should be accessible, but data held (and, in many cases, copyrighted by) corporations, research institu­tions, and other entities, too—all of which can be funneled into corporate AI systems, turbocharged into the military and national security apparatus, and used to gain a competitive edge, particularly against Beijing.

Indeed, there are plentiful ways that commercial data and open-source intelligence can be used to advance national security objectives and fulfill what many would agree are important governmental functions, such as hunting foreign hackers or investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine.30 Yet, the conundrum lies in the copious national security and counterintelligence problems embedded throughout the practically unrestrained private-sector data collection landscape. How­ever much might be gained by this (often nakedly self-serving) appeal to the national interest as the trump card against stronger AI and data regulations, there are too few incentives to consider what has already been lost: any semblance of anonymity, obscurity, or privacy that once enabled sensitive government entities to function safely.

Ultimately, policymakers must come to terms with the fact that U.S. national security officials, military service members, intelligence officers, and sensitive facilities worldwide already operate at a major disadvantage in the face of both state and nonstate adversaries alike. This vulnerability will only grow with time as long as we have few meaningful protections against data-brokers and other types of unfettered data collection, transmission, and use. Protecting service members from espionage, blackmail, sabotage, or worse will mean confronting a stark reality: piecemeal policing at the post-collection stage like that attempted by previous administrations cannot achieve what even a modest federal data privacy framework could. Taming the adtech market will require a great deal of political will, particularly in response to objections from would-be “national champions.”31 But the decade since the OPM hack has made one thing clear: data-dependent tech companies can champion the national economy or they can champion the national security bureaucracy, but doing the former through race-to-the-bottom data hoarding and sale will only put the latter in even greater jeopardy.