Your Heartbeat Can Convict You

A man's house catches fire. He tells police he ran through the flames saving his belongings. Then detectives pull the data from the pacemaker in his chest. His own heartbeat tells a different story.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a professor of law at George Washington University Law School, a former public defender, and the author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance. In this conversation, he walks us through the criminal cases, the legal gaps, and the surveillance infrastructure that most Americans don't know they've already built around themselves. We talk about Google search histories used as confessions, smart home cameras that become prosecution witnesses, Palantir's expanding role in immigration enforcement, and what happens when the definition of "criminal" shifts but the data trail stays the same.

Ferguson proposes something he calls the tyrant test: design your privacy protections by assuming the worst possible leader will have access to your data. He argues it's not a thought experiment. It's the logic the country was founded on.

Book: Your Data Will Be Used Against You (NYU Press)
https://nyupress.org/9781479838295/your-data-will-be-used-against-you/
Guest: Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School