Decoy messaging provides air cover and anonymity for whistleblowers

The CoverDrop and OpenOrigins founder warned that advances in AI and data surveillance tools would only increase the threat to privacy and anonymity over time, creating a need for more robust defenses against the emerging panopticon of the security surveillance state.

The mass surveillance state supercharged: Agentic AI and the loss of anonymity in the crowd

Dr. Ahmed noted that mass data collection by governments and intelligence agencies has been ongoing for over a decade but largely ineffective because there was no efficient way to filter through the large quantities of data collected.

“They needed to hire thousands of analysts to sit down and actually target people; with AI you do not need to do that anymore,” the executive told Cointelegraph.

The rise of agentic AI allows intelligence agencies to assign an AI agent for each individual that would track all their data and provide a much more comprehensive profile of a persons activity at a low computational cost, the executive warned.

“The threat has just escalated a lot. So, the defense has to escalate a lot as well,” Dr. Ahmed added.