Anthony "Bingy" Arillotta waited years to become a made man in the Genovese crime family, and when the call came in August 2003, he was strip-searched for electronic devices before meeting the boss. Until recently, only spies and criminals worried about their private statements being picked up by electronics. But soon, the average person might need to deploy surveillance countermeasures as AI-enabled wearables become widespread.

In March, tech start-up Deveillance announced Spectre I, a device that prevents others from recording you. The company was founded by Aida Baradari, who was worried by the surge in people wearing AI-enabled recorders. Apple is rumored to be developing an AI pin or pendant; many other products are on the way. New surveillance technologies breed new countermeasures, leading to more sophisticated surveillance.

During WWII, the Royal Air Force used metallized paper strips to jam German radar. Today, jammers emit ultrasonic sound to exploit microphone quirks. In 2020, a team led by Yuxin Chen mounted 23 ultrasonic transducers on a bracelet. But AI wearables now use speech-recovery algorithms to strip away noise. De Liang Wang has trained neural networks to recognize speech patterns, allowing them to reconstruct speech from noisy recordings.

Defeating these algorithms may require a different approach. Finn Brunton suggests supplying data with a junk version. The artist Adam Harvey developed makeup that frustrates facial recognition. Woodrow Hartzog mentioned "babble tapes" used by defense attorneys. In 2023, a team led by Ming Gao created Mic Frozen, which generates ultrasonic "anti-speech" to mislead algorithms. However effective Spectre I turns out, it won't end the recording arms race. AI models may eventually bypass audio altogether, reading lips like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.