How AI arms surveillance and warfare

404 Media and The Intercept sat down to talk about private companies powering government surveillance and how AI is showing up in warfare.

The question isn't whether the tech works. It's who owns it, who pays for it, and who ends up on the other end of the lens. When a startup sells a tool to a federal agency, that tool often reaches communities the agency is already watching.

The panel focused on the pipeline: data flowing from sensors and feeds into algorithms, algorithms feeding decisions back to officers, pilots, and border agents. The same architecture that flags a face in a crowd or reads a license plate from a mile away is the same one guiding drones and targeting systems overseas. Different scale, same guts.

Private firms keep the contracts. Government agencies keep the authority. The line between them blurs fast.

Why this matters for us: la gente on the border and in neighborhoods is living inside the same systems that are being tested and scaled for warfare, which means the tools we use and the ones we're watched by are converging. 404 Media, The Intercept, surveillance, AI, border, drones, private firms, government contracts, brownborders, bordersurveillance