The rise of tech in public governance
A Texas A&M legal scholar says tech companies are increasingly shaping public policies and services without the constitutional oversight that guides government institutions.
During the Cold War, the United States became deeply entrenched in a nuclear arms race, continually escalating the development of weaponry in a battle of supremacy.
Hannah Bloch-Wehba, professor of law at Texas A&M University, draws a parallel between that era and today’s escalating race in artificial intelligence (AI) development, arguing the U.S. is now engaged in a similarly high-stakes competition for technological supremacy without the legal infrastructure to hold private tech companies accountable.
“I think we’re in a political milieu in which the administration and the Silicon Valley elite are committed to no-holds-barred innovation as the vehicle to achieve American technological dominance, and I don’t think the political powers that be have any interest in imposing oversight mechanisms that aren’t forced upon them,” she said.
“There is no end point in an arms race. It could be a conflict that lasts forever. It’s a way of legitimizing investment in the industry that benefits stakeholders and it’s arguing for an ‘all gas, no brakes’ approach to innovation. I’m arguing that we’re already seeing the results of this entrenchment between the state and the tech sector.”
Bloch-Wehba’s research explores how technological changes, such as cloud computing and AI, are transforming public governance and impacting civil liberties while lacking transparency and accountability. In a recent presentation at Princeton University, she argued that tech companies are playing a growing role in critical decisions regarding citizens’ lives and livelihoods through their association with government agencies. Subsequently, there is limited insight into this relationship due to a lack of legal and political consequences from pre-existing laws.
Through the current framework of the law, Bloch-Wehba said tech companies are immune from certain accountability methods like the Freedom of Information Act due to the information being considered “trade secrets.”
“The doctrines we’ve developed to distinguish between government actors who are constitutionally restricted in what they can do and private actors who are not constitutionally restricted are incredibly limited,” she said. “I’m not confident that in the long term we have the constitutional mechanisms that we need to have meaningful accountability.”
Tech companies hold a vast amount of data on an individual and collective scale. Government agencies could get a hold of this information for intelligence, fraud detection or law enforcement purposes, Bloch-Wehba said.
“We’ve seen government agencies turning to the private sector as data sources because the government can’t collect this information directly, either because they don’t have statutory authorization or because the Constitution wouldn’t allow it,” she said. “It’s hard to say that it’s the product of democratic decision-making, because many of us don’t really understand what’s going on, and it’s often happening under the cover of opacity or secrecy.”
Bloch-Wehba also argues that cloud computing has expanded over the last few years, enabling the government to see data differently and access it more easily, affecting how citizens are governed.
“We’re seeing increasing engagement with tech companies as these infrastructural providers, and although you could see that as an efficiency enhancing tool, the partnerships are changing the ways the government accesses and uses data,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of insights into how those relationships are unfolding or exactly how access to data and data flows are changing.”
Bloch-Wehba said many people have been surprised by how tightly aligned Silicon Valley and the federal government have become over the last year, but the relationship is one that has been in the works for a long time. Creating a constitutional framework to hold these hybrid forms of power accountable may be difficult, but not impossible.
“As a legal scholar, I am accustomed to looking to the administration and the courts to solve these kinds of problems,” she said. “However, at the same time, it seems obvious to me that when the answers are not found within these institutions, there are still answers to be provided by the people. In other words, the answers to oversight and accountability don’t have to be purely legal answers. They can also be political answers provided by normal people who are skeptical of these kinds of claims to authority.”
