Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is sounding the alarm on President Trump's push to expand AI-powered surveillance, warning that without new legal guardrails, the government could turn today's data loopholes into a full-blown surveillance state.
In a stark op-ed, de Blasio notes that New York City already has at least 25,000 closed-circuit TV cameras recording its residents. Soon, he argues, a powerful AI system could cheaply monitor all that footage simultaneously, creating a mass surveillance nightmare that would make Orwell's '1984' look tame.
The Trump administration's Department of Defense, de Blasio writes, is already taking the first steps to make AI surveillance a reality—with help from OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. The technology is here, he says, and the public must decide whether it will be used against them.
This week, Congress has a chance to amend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and ban the government from spying on Americans without a warrant. De Blasio calls this a precious opportunity to stop AI-powered surveillance before it begins—but only if Democrats hold the line.
In April, more than 40 Democrats broke ranks and voted to enable Trump's surveillance regime. De Blasio warns they cannot make the same mistake again. As the former mayor of New York City, he says he understands the national security stakes, having led a city that was the number one target of terrorism. But that does not mean throwing civil liberties out the window.
De Blasio points to the so-called 'data broker loophole,' which allows the federal government to access Americans' data without a warrant by buying it directly from Big Tech companies. He notes that Trump exploited this loophole to spy on Muslims by purchasing their data from a prayer app, and that FBI Director Kash Patel admitted under oath that the FBI is buying Americans' location data.
In February, the Trump administration pressured AI company Anthropic to let it use its technology to analyze such data. Anthropic refused. Hours later, OpenAI stepped in and took the deal. To protest CEO Sam Altman's capitulation, millions joined the QuitGPT boycott and deleted ChatGPT.
De Blasio highlights a bipartisan coalition in Congress, ranging from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) to Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), that is demanding warrant requirements in the FISA reauthorization. Trump, Senior Advisor Stephen Miller, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) are pushing for a 'clean reauthorization' with no reforms. Twenty House Republicans have stood up to Johnson, but on April 29, 42 House Democrats helped Johnson and Trump reauthorize FISA without real changes.
The former mayor acknowledges the national security argument but counters that the government's own reported numbers show the FBI conducting thousands of warrantless searches of Americans per year, on top of an unknown additional volume from a secret querying tool that was never logged. He also notes that Trump recently named Bill Pulte, a man with no prior national security experience and a history of weaponizing the justice system against political opponents, as acting director of National Intelligence.
De Blasio urges every American to delete ChatGPT and every member of Congress to stand firm on FISA 702. 'History is watching,' he writes, 'and if we get it wrong, the government's AI will be watching, too.'
