An American Privacy Emergency
Scott Aaronson argues America faces a privacy emergency due to mass data collection by corporations and government, erosion of Fourth Amendment protections, and normalized digital surveillance. He warns the public is largely unaware of how their activities are tracked, creating a system prone to abuse.
Background
Scott Aaronson is a prominent computer scientist at UT Austin, best known for his work on quantum computing and computational complexity. In this post, he reacts to the revelation that Luigi Mangione—the suspect in the December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—allegedly kept a notebook containing strikingly similar rhetoric to Aaronson's own past writings.