“’Cause we have a nice little database. And now you’re a domestic terrorist.”
On January 23, 2026, in Portland, Maine, that was the response a masked agent gave when a protester asked a simple question: “What are you taking my information down for?” The blunt
admission marked a chilling shift in the American public square.
What was once a marketplace for personal information has evolved into a permanent, powerful infrastructure: one that federal agencies, law enforcement, and even the Department of Defense
increasingly rely on to monitor, classify, and track people in ways the public rarely sees.
At the center of this shift is the data-broker economy, a vast, lightly regulated industry that buys and sells the intimate details of our lives. These datasets now feed into AI systems used for policing,
immigration enforcement, and risk assessment. More recently, they have also begun informing the Pentagon’s exploration of autonomous technologies capable of identifying and targeting
individuals without direct human oversight.
The implications for democracy are profound. When participation in a protest leads to an entry in a “nice little database,” what happens to the right to dissent?
Join Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Kade Crockford, Director of Technology and Justice Programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts, for a timely
investigation into how these systems work, who they empower, and what they mean for the future of democratic participation.