As a counterterrorism analyst who supported US European Command and the Pentagon, I worked inside the machinery of modern surveillance. I reviewed reporting derived from communications intercepts, metadata analysis, financial tracking, and network mapping. We collected aggressively because the threats were real — ISIS, Al-Qaeda, state-sponsored saboteurs, proliferators. Plots disrupted rarely make headlines. I understood then, and understand now, that without robust collection capabilities, innocent people die.

But effective intelligence work has always required more than capability. It has required restraint — and the institutional architecture to enforce it.

Even at the height of our most aggressive operations, we were governed by a fundamental property of the intelligence world: friction. Analysts were limited by the hours in a day, the number of available linguists, and the procedural requirements of individual queries. Targeting required justification. Pattern recognition at scale demanded time and manpower. This friction was not a defect. It was a democratic safeguard. It ensured that the state’s gaze remained a scalpel rather than a dragnet — and it forced the security apparatus to prioritize the most imminent, credible threats rather than expand indefinitely into the political landscape.

That friction has now evaporated. And what is replacing it should concern everyone who values democracy.

The Terrain Has Shifted

Artificial intelligence does not merely speed up analysis. It dissolves the operational limits that made targeted, accountable surveillance possible. Advanced models can now ingest location data, financial transactions, encrypted metadata, and social media sentiment across millions of people simultaneously, identifying correlations at machine speed. The marginal cost of adding one more person to a watchlist approaches zero. That is not a technical upgrade. It is a constitutional problem.

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is not AI alone — it is AI arriving simultaneously with a significant expansion of what the government has chosen to target. Recent policy directives have broadened the definition of domestic terrorism to encompass concepts as vague as “organized doxing,” “civil disorder,” and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)