Andrew G. Ferguson

Preorder today. “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.” #books #tech

Your Body Is Betraying Your Right to Privacy | WIRED “Your Data Will Be Used Against You” in Wired! wired.com/story/book-exc…

Your data doesn’t just get collected. It can be bought and used against you. On Against the Grain, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson explains how smart devices, data brokers, and law enforcement are reshaping privacy, protest, and policing. Listen at kpfa.org #kpfa #surveillance #ice #smartdevices #bigbrother @ProfFerguson

@ARozenshtein Anyone of us could hire someone to write our law review articles for us. We could come up with the idea, hire someone to research/write it, put our name on it, and get it published. Should that person be considered a scholar? How is using AI to write your article different?

Re the current debate over in AI in academic writing, the sharp distinction people are drawing between AI for writing and for research strikes me as based less on a coherent ethical distinction and more on the fact that, currently, a lot (most?) of AI writing is bad, whereas a lot of AI research can be quite good. And some are taking and hoping that it represents some fundamental feature of the technology (because if not then legal academics are cooked). But there’s nothing special about writing as a test of AI capabilities. Writing is just (like all forms of human cognitive capability, viewed at a high enough level of abstraction) pattern matching and AIs will hill climb that just as they have every other (pardon the mixed metaphor) previously moved goalpost. In a few years this will be inarguable, at which point debates about AI disclosure will become pointless and the real question will be: what are all of us who have spent our lives preparing for this narrow knowledge work career supposed to do with our lives? It’s a scary question! But it’s no excuse for clinging to a labor theory of value for our work, or to question-begging claims that only humans can produce “real knowledge,” or of making the argument that our salaries (which are mostly paid for by the tuition dollars of our students, who have no say in the matter) should primarily go to our own feelings of professional satisfaction and self expression. There are still good arguments against AI in scholarship, but they have to be about the harm to others/society, not to the people getting paid to produce the scholarship.

GW Law’s preeminent faculty are forging new paths in artificial intelligence scholarship—helping to shape the law surrounding AI and its implications for future lawyers. Read more in the GW Law Magazine ⬇️ law.gwu.edu/shaping-artifi…

The FBI has admitted it’s buying Americans' location data. trib.al/zODQuHU

Four GW Law students took the spotlight in the final round of the 76th Annual Van Vleck Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition, delivering impressive advocacy in one of the school’s most prestigious competitions. Check out highlights from a day of constitutional advocacy. ⬇️

Book launch day! “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self Surveillance” is out. politics-prose.com/search?q=Your%…

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a professor of law at George Washington University Law School, a former public defender, and the author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance. share.transistor.fm/s/884cf818

“Your Data Will Be Used Against You” in the Boston Globe. bostonglobe.com/2026/03/13/opi…

The Winter 2026 edition of GW Law Magazine is now live! In this issue, we highlight how the GW Law community is leading conversations at the intersection of law and technology. Meet the faculty and alumni shaping this rapidly evolving field. ⬇️ law.gwu.edu/magazine?utm_c…

"This is Maven Smart System—Palantir’s software as a service product that we are deploying across the entire department."

Evverything is bigger in Texas including surveillance tech. NPR “The Source” interview on “Your Data Will Be Used Against You.” tpr.org/podcast/the-so…

"The dog latched onto Upchurch's dreadlocks, rammed his head into the ground, and sunk its teeth into his arm. Your car has a stolen license plate on it, one of the officers said. The license plates weren't stolen, and he was the truck's registered owner." businessinsider.com/flock-safety-a…

"By the time DHS publicly disclosed the existence of Mobile Fortify, it already had been used more than 100,000 times since its launch, according to court filings". #facialrecognition motherjones.com/politics/2026/…

@YAppelbaum What we need is a well respected, intellectually-minded national magazine to do the same but virtually. Coincidentally, “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance” (NYU Press) releases next week.

Albuquerque turned a wall of its airport bookshop over to its local university press, and goddamn, now I want this in every airport.

Coming out March 17th “Your Data Will Be Used Against You.”

@anthonytassone_ I don’t doubt that, but the reason DNA is trusted took a lot of litigation because initially folks did not think about how to find errors, exculpatory evidence, etc. Processes were created (after litigation) to get to the point of trust. Not so with other forensic evidence.

the larger risk today is that relevant information is missed because investigators are drowning in data. There are more than 250,000 cold cases in the U.S., and clearance rates are at 50-year lows. Modern investigations involve massive datasets: license plate readers, cell phone records, and video. It is simply too much for humans to review effectively. TRULEO does not create evidence or restrict the underlying data. It helps investigators query records they already possess and surface patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. In that sense, tools like this may reduce the risk that relevant or even exculpatory information is overlooked. AI will become as essential to modern investigations as DNA evidence became a generation ago.

Police AI agents completed over 20,000 investigative tasks last month.

@anthonytassone_ Those close connections could be impeaching or exculpatory. It is true it is not on you to decide, but there is a record of what was surfaced and that data is in the hands of police. Happy to get answers not on this public platform. 2/2

@anthonytassone_ Thank you for responding. Just to play out your example. If the AI surfaces the equivalent of DNA connections (some which are accurate matches and some not), what happens to the “nots.” Your tech surfaced them for the detective, but those might well be other suspects etc. 1/2