{"id":64930,"date":"2026-10-02T08:26:07","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T13:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=64930"},"modified":"2026-10-02T08:26:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T13:26:07","slug":"abaj-could-the-use-of-ai-upend-privacy-and-security-expectations-in-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=64930","title":{"rendered":"ABAJ: Could the use of AI upend privacy and security expectations in court?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

ABAJ: Could the use of AI upend privacy and security expectations in court?<\/a> by Amanda Robert:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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As AI becomes more powerful and users become more savvy, will this sort of sleuthing become more frequent in the future? Legal experts say yes, especially since it was already happening long before AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier in his career, Jonah Perlin was a litigator at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he used the internet and paid and unpaid search tools to pull together information that wasn\u2019t provided in a single court document.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAI is providing us, for better or for worse\u2014and most of the time, I think it\u2019s for the better\u2014with opportunities to do things that were always possible but maybe not scalable,\u201d says Perlin, now a professor at Georgetown University Law Center whose scholarship includes legal ethics and the technology of law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perlin doesn\u2019t anticipate that AI will do a \u201ccryptographic hack\u201d of properly redacted and sealed information. But as the Above the Law example illustrates, but he does expect details that are \u201chiding in plain sight\u201d to continue to be uncovered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the information that you can find if you\u2019re able to read between the lines,\u201d Perlin says. \u201cWhat would have taken a human a lot of knowledge and maybe 20 hours of searching can now be done in seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, agrees that AI could connect information that may have been fragmented or flew under the radar in the past. For example, he says if someone uses an AI tool in a court management system, which isn\u2019t typically open to the public, it could reveal patterns that wouldn\u2019t ordinarily be noticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat said, most people will not have access to a closed system, so court data might be a bit more protected than some other types of data,\u201d says Ferguson, the author of the book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Ferguson notes there is a danger that public-facing data, such as information about criminal cases on court websites, could \u201cbe scraped by bots\u201d and moved to separate private datasets. AI could make new connections using that approach, he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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