Silicon Valley is piling in to the business of snooping
increasingly common sight in America. According to a recent survey by researchers at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, about a quarter of police departments now use them. Even more surprising is where the technology is coming from.
Among the NYPD’s suppliers is Skydio, a Silicon Valley firm that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make drones easy to fly, allowing officers to control them with little training. Skydio is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital (VC) giant, and Accel, one of its peers. The NYPD is also buying from BRINC, another startup, which makes flying machines equipped with night-vision cameras that can smash through window panes.
Among BRINC’s investors are Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT; and Index Ventures, another VC stalwart. That Silicon Valley is helping American law enforcement snoop on troublemakers may seem odd. Supporting state surveillance sits awkwardly with the libertarian values espoused by many American tech luminaries who came of age in the early days of the internet.
Although Silicon Valley got its start supplying chips for America’s defence industry in the 1950s, its relationship with the state withered as its attention shifted from self-guided missiles to e-commerce and iPhones. Now, as the tech industry seeks out new frontiers of growth, selling to the state is coming back into vogue. Government is “the last remaining holdout from the software revolution", wrote Katherine Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz in a blog post last year.
Earlier this year the firm launched an “American Dynamism" fund to invest in government-related industries. Slowly but surely, the state is dragging itself into the digital age. At the end of 2022 the Pentagon
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