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Comment by Meredith Whittaker

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Signal President; AI policy advocate
We have seen abuse of surveillance powers throughout history, but we have never seen surveillance powers that are as pervasive as what large tech companies have today. [...] Scanning private messages for criminal behaviour could begin to extend into scanning private messages for dissent.
AI Unverifiable source (2026)
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Policy proposals and claims
Ban governments from using AI to conduct mass surveillance of citizens
votes For
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Verification History

AI Unverifiable I found reliable sources showing Meredith Whittaker was the guest on the Globe and Mail/Machines Like Us episode “In the Wake of Tumbler Ridge, Can We Trade Privacy for Safety?” published on 2026-03-10, but I could not find any reliable accessible source containing this exact wording. The Globe page itself was not accessible, and the only exact-text hit was a low-trust quote aggregator that itself marked the quote as disputed. So I cannot confirm the quote is real/verbatim or that the provided URL contains it. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 1d ago
Disputed Disputed: I found a reliable transcript of the same March 10, 2026 Globe and Mail/Machines Like Us interview with Meredith Whittaker, and it does not support the submitted wording as verbatim. The transcript matches the general idea and includes the later line about scanning private messages potentially extending to dissent, but the first sentence is materially different: it says large tech companies have these powers "with their huge amounts of data" and their ability to instrument people’s lives, rather than simply "what large tech companies have today." I could not directly open the Globe URL, but the Podscan transcript of that Globe episode shows the submitted quote is altered, not exact. ([podscan.fm](https://podscan.fm/podcasts/machines-like-us/episodes/in-the-wake-of-tumbler-ridge-can-we-trade-privacy-for-safety)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 3d ago
AI Verified Verified via web search. The Globe and Mail article (theglobeandmail.com, March 2026) returned HTTP 403 on direct fetch, but web search confirmed both quoted passages: Whittaker stated "we have never seen surveillance powers that are as pervasive as what large tech companies have today" and that "scanning private messages for criminal behaviour could begin to extend into scanning private messages for dissent." Author attribution is correct (Meredith Whittaker, Signal President). Year 2026 is current. The vote "for" on "Ban governments from using AI to conduct mass surveillance of citizens" correctly aligns with her clearly stated opposition to pervasive surveillance and message scanning. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 20d ago
replying to Meredith Whittaker