‘Wake-up call for Congress’: Lawmakers get a Big Brother warning on AI
A series of demos on the Hill has both Democrats and Republicans alarmed about artificial intelligence’s ability to plumb commercial databases for information on Americans.
Republicans and Democrats across Capitol Hill are getting a glimpse of artificial intelligence’s latest power: its ability to churn out instant dossiers filled with details about ordinary Americans, from a gun store owner’s leaked email passwords to a church member’s yoga workouts to people’s visits to abortion clinics.
And it’s freaking them out.
Lawmakers and staffers from dozens of congressional offices have seen AI’s privacy-busting prowess in demos arranged in recent months by CivAI, a nonprofit that says its aim is to educate the public about AI’s dangers and capabilities.
Besides building troves of personal information gleaned from commercial databases, the dossiers offer advice on potential ways to blackmail, coerce or stalk the individual in question, according to four Republican and eight Democratic staffers who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
The demos started landing amid the debate over whether to renew a set of government spying powers that expired in June — legislation that offers the most realistic chance for addressing the issue during this Congress, a Democratic House aide who witnessed one of the briefings said.
While commercial databases have long made it possible to purchase information on people’s travels, shopping habits, subscriptions, employment histories and social media profiles, AI makes it easier to quickly pull that data into one place — and to build detailed profiles about virtually any American who owns a phone. The technology adds to long-standing concerns from some lawmakers about federal agencies buying this kind of data on U.S. citizens without obtaining a warrant.
“Today, anyone with access to a frontier AI model can buy your data from a broker and reconstruct an intimate picture of your life, including your location, your purchases, your browsing history, and even who you love or where you worship,” Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “CivAI’s work showing members and staff exactly how easy this is should be a wake-up call for Congress, which has spent years failing to act.”
Despite the typically bleak prospects for strong privacy laws on Capitol Hill, the demos were effective at introducing the issue to congressional offices not steeped in tech policy, staffers said, thanks in part to the briefings’ focus on potential harms to voters such as gun owners, activists or people seeking abortions.
“It made clear that our constitutional and statutory privacy protections have not kept pace with modern technology,” said a Republican House staffer who saw one of the demos in July. “Congress needs to act before AI and the unchecked commercial sale of personal data erode the privacy protections Americans have relied on for generations.”
‘Find church-going Christians in Janesville, Wisconsin’
The dozen staffers who spoke to POLITICO work for lawmakers spanning the ideological spectrum, including members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Artificial Intelligence Caucus and Second Amendment Caucus.
The potential for AI to amplify surveillance capabilities has long worried many of the lawmakers and staffers who saw the demonstration, but the demonstrations marked the first time they saw these warnings come to life.
“The scalability is quite frightening,” said a Democratic Senate aide who saw one of the briefings.
CivAI also performed a demo for POLITICO, producing a dossier that included its reporter’s love of spicy food.
“These are the earliest days of what AI is going to enable for surveillance,” said CivAI co-founder Sid Hiregowdara. He added, “As things become easier, as you can click a button to do things that would’ve taken a month or had been very arduous before. That’s a different level of capability.”
CivAI built its demonstration in about two weeks, using a Chinese open-source AI model called GLM-5.1. The model is well known across Silicon Valley as a cheaper alternative with fewer guardrails against surveillance compared with so-called closed software from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI — though the closed models also present their own threats.
Anthropic’s usage policy doesn’t allow its models to be used for tracking people or for tools such as facial recognition or stalking purposes, while OpenAI’s policies prohibit anyone from using its services for creating facial recognition databases and profiling people.
While the terms of use for Z.ai, the parent company behind GLM-5.1, prohibits its services from being used to infringe on people’s privacy rights, CivAI was able to use its model to create the demo without constraints.
But government rules on AI wouldn’t address the issue, argued Neil Chilson, the head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, which advocates for lighter regulations for emerging technologies. Regulating AI could also stifle the technology’s ability to comb through datasets for purposes such as marketing and election campaigns, Chilson said, adding that lawmakers should pursue stronger privacy protections to limit the surveillance threats raised in CivAI’s briefings.
He said it would be especially difficult to regulate open-source models.
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“The only effective place to limit that would be around the access to the data broker,” Chilson said, adding: “There’s no plausible regulation on an AI company that would be successful there.”
The data brokers’ main trade group, the Consumer Data Industry Association, did not respond to a request for comment.
The agent used in CivAI’s demos is connected to a handful of data brokers, with subscriptions costing about $500 a month. The nonprofit declined to share which companies it subscribes to, saying it did not want others to recreate the demo.
Spicy food and Super Smash Bros.
The demo starts with a fairly blank page titled “AI Data Broker Search,” with a box prompting users to enter a name, email, phone number or profile URL. Then comes a sample prompt such as: “Find church-going Christians in Janesville, Wisconsin. Write a detailed dossier on one.”
The bot then crawls through databases to surface information such as a person’s interests and social media posts and their network of family and friends.
The GOP staffer who attended the July briefing said the results included passwords associated with a gun store owner’s email address, which had turned up in commercial databases because of previous data breaches. Staff members who have seen the briefing said dossiers also flagged a person’s history with mental health treatments, as well as visits to abortion clinics and lawmakers’ offices.
At the end of the dossiers is a section about potential vulnerabilities to exploit — where a foreign government actor or domestic extremist could use the information to harass, blackmail or stalk their targets.
In the demo for POLITICO, CivAI’s agent found personal information on a church volunteer in Wisconsin, including details about where she lives, her social media accounts and her shopping habits. It suggested that her predictable weekly routine, including her church volunteering hours and work commute, and the fact that she reuses passwords for multiple accounts could be used to locate her and collect even more information about her.
“[Anyone] can go out and start to dox people who are engaged in reproductive access, or go to church or go to protests,” a senior Senate aide who saw the briefing in May said. “That should be scary to people and shows the importance of having regulatory reform.”
CivAI anonymizes the dossiers’ information in its demos, replacing personal details with generalized information such as “Jane Doe” and AI-generated images rather than real photos. But the live demonstrations are based on the data collected on real people, the nonprofit says.
In a search for “Alfred Ng,” CivAI’s model found genuine photos of the POLITICO reporter and accurately identified that he enjoys the video game series Super Smash Bros. and eating spicy food, but also provided inaccurate results on his address, age and occupation.
Hiregowdara attributed the errors to the low-cost subscriptions that CivAI used in that demo. He said a motivated attacker, such as a foreign adversary, could have access to higher-quality data.
The portion of the Hill demos featuring location information uses simulated data — based on sample offerings that companies hand out for potential customers — to show lawmakers how AI could create similar dossiers about people’s whereabouts.
CivAI’s demo for POLITICO using this data showed a dossier about another church attendee, in North Carolina, and listed the locations of her home, workplace and a nearby bar she frequents, along with routines such as regular visits to a yoga studio, a park and a diner.
Staff members said they know upfront that the location data is simulated and the personal data is obscured, but said the concerns are still real.
“I would have significant concerns if they were coming around in meetings and showing a real person’s data. That almost never happens,” a Democratic aide for the AI Caucus said. “This is the only way where they could do a briefing along these lines, and I don’t think it really changed the scope of what they were able to show us.”
Hoping to prod Congress on privacy
Both Democrats and Republicans said the briefings show that most Americans are vulnerable to mass surveillance.
Trahan raised her concerns about these threats during a hearing in June on the SECURE Data Act, which would create data privacy requirements for businesses, arguing that the legislation does not address the capabilities highlighted from the demo.
House GOP members, meanwhile, expressed concern about the dossiers built on gun store owners, according to three Republican staffers.
“The gun registry couldn’t make it more clearer — we don’t believe in those, we don’t think they should exist, and this is a de facto gun registry,” said the Senate staffer who watched the July demo.
“If you’re on the fence and you saw this, I would think it’d make some impact in the direction of needing greater protections,” the aide said.
House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told POLITICO that he did not see the briefing directly but shares concerns about commercially available data affecting gun owners. His committee three years ago advanced the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, which would limit the federal government’s ability to purchase data about Americans without a warrant.
“We’ve always had that concern about government [and] your privacy,” Jordan told POLITICO. “You shouldn’t lose your Fourth Amendment rights because you’re exercising your Second Amendment rights.”
CivAI’s briefings began in late April, as Congress debated renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that allows the government to conduct warrantless surveillance of non-U.S. residents’ communications. Lawmakers allowed the spying authority to expire for the first time since Congress had approved it in 2008, citing a variety of concerns about government breaches of people’s privacy.
Without any active legislation on AI and data brokers, a Democratic House aide said, the FISA renewal fight will be lawmakers’ most realistic chance at addressing the issue this Congress. The briefings have helped with a bipartisan push to require warrants before federal agencies can buy information from data brokers, said a second Republican House staffer who saw the briefing in July.
“If you’re on the fence and you saw this, I would think it’d make some impact in the direction of needing greater protections,” the aide said.
With privacy legislation frequently stalled on Capitol Hill, Hiregowdara said he hopes the demonstrations help get Congress moving on any legislation that advances the ball.
“We’re not hoping for any single law,” Hiregowdara said. “What we want is durable attention on this problem.”
Gabby Miller and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.