HKS Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy

With the current political climate and advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the stakes are higher than ever to advance new laws that make technology work for the people and promote access, equity, and justice in the digital age. When we were last at a similar historical crossroads in the early 1970s—at the cusp of massive technological change with the rise of computerization and fights for the future of this country raging across movement issues—the people of California passed the constitutional right to privacy. It is the last truly comprehensive privacy law passed in the United States. This modern right to privacy, enacted in 1972, addresses both autonomy privacy and informational privacy and protects against privacy invasions by both government and business. At its core is an allocation of power to the people to control how technological advances can invade private lives and undermine fundamental rights. But, by the mid-1970s, political energy for similar robust substantive privacy protections that limited information collection, use, and disclosure had been undermined. United States privacy protections had been pummeled into weak procedural due process frameworks, like notice and choice, that have now occupied the privacy field for decades. It is urgent to explore what we can learn from history and interrogate current US privacy law and movement power to light a path to defend existing protections and enact stronger privacy laws that can properly support rights and democracy in the AI age.

Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, sparking global concern over its risks, from misinformation and wealth concentration to discrimination, surveillance, and weaponization by state and non-state actors. While efforts like the EU AI Act and national initiatives in the U.S. and Netherlands seek to regulate AI, many frameworks remain fragmented, corporate-friendly, or insufficiently grounded in human rights. The UN argues existing human rights law provides a foundation, though some scholars call for new protections against the intrusiveness of digital surveillance capitalism. Latin America faces unique challenges due to structural dependencies on foreign technology and regulatory models, leaving its institutions vulnerable amid global power asymmetries.

This paper examines legislative initiatives in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru, assessing their rights-based provisions and institutional capacity, and asks whether these measures effectively protect rights and enable democratic oversight. It concludes by identifying key gaps—including environmental justice, epistemic rights, and participatory governance—and suggesting directions for reform.

The encroachment of surveillance capitalism into healthcare takes place as healthcare becomes increasingly industrialized. The industrialization and datafication of healthcare create a receptive environment for firms that concentrate the means of computation—companies that have grown thanks to technologies of surveillance and remote behavioral actuation.

In healthcare, Big Tech finds a massive business opportunity as it becomes fundamental to infrastructure and an unavoidable mediator of medical services. Also, Big Tech can now capture the missing piece in its quest to harvest, control, and use the complete human experience as raw material for their business interests. Central to this encroachment is the misguided notion that the problems of care are problems of information. Big Tech is best situated to address problems of information using powerful data platforms and artificial intelligence systems. Care, a practice by which a human sets out to solve the problematic situation of another human, is replaced by the processing of their data. Care becomes depersonalized, dehumanized, disembodied.

Evidently, advances in information technology can make significant contributions to the project of offering careful and kind healthcare to every person. And yet, the realization of this vision would require outlawing Big Tech’s parasitic practices as they commodify humans to advance these firms’ anti-human and anti-democratic project of domination. Abolishing surveillance capitalism and its contribution to corrupting the mission of healthcare may help ensure that information technologies can be harnessed to advance the core mission of healthcare: the care of people.

This paper investigates how surveillance capitalism enables a convergence of state authoritarianism and digital monopolies, posing an existential threat to fragile democracies by examining its corrosive effects on the news media in Turkey and Hungary. Drawing on document analysis and interviews with 24 journalists and media executives, it argues that a system of “dual domination” has emerged, wherein the state-led construction of an “economy of domination” through media capture and legal repression is amplified by the market-driven “instrumentarian power” of Big Tech platforms like Google. This symbiotic relationship creates a uniquely corrosive environment that systematically dismantles the free press, pollutes the information ecosystem with propaganda and disinformation, and makes independent journalism economically unviable. The analysis, framed by Shoshana Zuboff’s theories, concludes that this dynamic constitutes a “Second Tragedy of the Commons” and a slow-motion coup des gens, seizing sovereignty from the public and eroding the “right to the future tense.” In response, the paper proposes a framework for solutions grounded in Mathias Risse’s concept of justice, advocating for two pillars of action: first, the establishment of journalism as a legally protected global public good, and second, the formation of a global civic alliance to enforce structural and regulatory reforms that hold tech platforms accountable for their role in demo- cratic backsliding.

Surveillance capitalism is a new form of capitalism that turns human behavior into data to be tracked, analyzed, and monetized. However, this narrow framing obscures the deeper architecture that allows surveillance capitalism to thrive. Surveillance capitalism is not just a business model. It is a geopolitical system with institutional scaffolding. It is grounded in regulation (or lack of), legitimized by economic theory, promoted by trade rules, and protected by powerful countries. Its sustainability depends on more than market incentives; it is built on a distributed architecture of norms, institutions, actors, and governance failures.

At its core, surveillance capitalism is an extractive political economy built on the systematic capture and monetization of human experience. As Shoshana Zuboff argues, this system represents an “epistemic coup,” in which corporations unilaterally assert ownership over behavioral data, undermining both privacy and democratic legitimacy. This is not only the privatization of information, it is also the expropriation of the very condition of self-knowledge and collective autonomy. This coup did not occur by accident. It was made possible by deliberate political choices, neoliberal market ideologies, legal loopholes, and the strategic retreat of the democratic state (Zuboff 2022a).

The surveillance capitalist order extends far beyond tech companies. It is built on a set of foundational assumptions about markets, innovation, and governance. It draws on economic theories that treat data as a neutral input and surveillance as the price of personalization. It is reinforced by legal doctrines, from trade secret protections to arbitration rules, that prioritize corporate control over democratic oversight. And it is institutionalized through international organizations, development finance institutions, and standard-setting bodies that diffuse and normalize extractive data practices as a form of modernity and progress. While the United States is often seen as the chief architect and promoter of surveillance capitalism, the system it anchors is far from national. Regional and bilateral trade agreements protect cross-border data flows while restricting the ability of other governments to regulate. Development institutions promote digital infrastructure projects that deepen surveillance logics in the Global South, often under the banner of inclusion. Multilateral forums and technical standards bodies entrench the norms of “trustworthy AI” and “data free flows with trust,” offering legitimacy without transparency. All these are geopolitical strategies embedded in regulation, code, and economics.

This paper takes a bird’s-eye view of the global surveillance eco- system. It maps the institutional foundations and geopolitical dy- namics that sustain it. It traces the actors, alliances, and narratives that normalize mass corporate surveillance and promote the glob- al surveillance capitalist economy. It goes beyond a Big Tech cri- tique and traces how power is produced, distributed, and enforced across this global order. Surveillance capitalism is a geopolitical system, and dismantling it requires more than privacy reforms or antitrust action. It requires structural transformation of the polit- ical, legal, and epistemic arrangements that have enabled it. This paper aims to lay the groundwork for coordinated action.

During the Cold-War-era, intelligence agencies in both the Eastern and Western blocs set up secret experiments to devise methods of mind control and brainwashing in order to gain an advantage over the enemy. The most notorious of these endeavours was the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) illegal MKUltra program, which ran from 1953 to 1973. In its quest for a truth serum that could be employed to force confessions from subjects who are not cooperating and the desire to be able to manipulate people’s behavior, the CIA experimented on thousands of subjects – partly without their knowledge or consent, and often with disastrous consequences. In this paper, I will first scrutinize the MKUltra program, investigating some of the experiments that it comprised. I shall then map the program’s aims onto the latest technology available for interfering with the brain – so-called “brain-computer interfaces” – to determine whether one could, in principle, use these novel devices for the purpose of mind control. Finally, I will be looking for indications that stakeholders may actually plan to employ the technology to achieve what had been beyond technological reach during the Cold War. I conclude that brain-computer interfaces could indeed be used to realize some of the original goals and that an interest in mind control still prevails.

A well-informed citizenry is essential in a democracy to preserve American values and make sound decisions in every area, from the school board meeting to the voting booth. Yet, arguably, in no other way have Americans fallen so short from what the Framers intended than in their understanding of and participation in democratic governance. A 2019 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania found that only 39 percent of respondents could name all three branches of government, and 22 percent could not name any. Voting rates average only 56 percent in presidential elections, and are as low as 40 percent in mid-terms, ranking the U.S. far below most other democracies in voting participation. In short, the American people are not well-informed about their own government, do not turn out to vote in high numbers, and do not engage significantly in politics and civics. In addition to providing a set of policy recommendations, this issue of the Reimagining Rights and Responsibilities paper series outlines historical origins of civic education, the status of state and federal requirement, the dearth of federal funding, and the current political tensions within civic education.

The Department of Justice began prosecuting federal hate crimes cases after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Thus, the literature on hate crime is new, though rapidly growing. The first American use of the term “hate crime” emerged during the Civil Rights Movement in the second half of the 20th century. The term typically refers to bias-motivated violence. But the variation in hate crimes laws and data collection policies per state has created disparities in protection against hate crimes, which leaves people vulnerable depending on where they live. Without proper hate crime statutes and data collection, it is difficult to know the true nature and magnitude of the problem of hate crimes in the United States. In order to allocate resources and deter future hate crimes, law enforcement agencies need to understand the problem at hand.

After more than a century of expanding the voting rights of previously disenfranchised groups, the American electoral system today is confronted by political and legal maneuvers to curtail the hard-won rights of these same groups, ostensibly in the name of combating fraud and regulating voting, but actually to change the outcome of elections.

Attacks on the integrity of the electoral system are not new. Throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century dominant political forces suppressed voting by African Americans and other minorities, women, immigrants, and young people. Manipulation of voting in the 20th century included racist suppression of African American votes, first by Democrats and later by Republicans. These practices are blatant examples of the vulnerability of the electoral process to partisan manipulation and the necessity of reform to safeguard voting rights, especially among these vulnerable groups.

In his timely addition to the Reimagining Rights and Responsibilites in the U.S. paper series, authors John Shattuck, Mathias Risse, and team outline the expansion of the vote through history, the disproportionate impact of voter suppression, and propose a set of policy recommendations accordingly.

Starting with the Nixon administration in the early 1970s, and gaining steam throughout the next decade, the prevailing view on criminal justice was that “tough on crime laws make crime rates go down.” That sentiment was predicated on the notion that criminals were not being sufficiently punished for their offenses, and that sentences must be increased—including mandatory minimums and “three strikes laws”—both to remove criminals from communities, and to deter others from committing crimes. The incarceration rate more than tripled between 1980 and its peak in 2008, from 310 to 1,000 prisoners per 100,000 adults—some 2.3 million people in all. Today, the United States leads the world in incarceration, with a rate more than 4 times that of comparable democracies in Western Europe. Reform of the criminal justice system must take into account each stage of the process, respecting the due process rights of individuals throughout their interaction with the system while at the same time bringing criminals to justice and improving overall public safety.