Jesse Yarbrough, Chief of Louisville Metro EMS, presents his graduate thesis examining the “Digital Panopticon,” a pervasive surveillance ecosystem that allows virtually anyone to purchase shockingly detailed profiles on private individuals for next to nothing. From your smartphone’s sensors to your browser history, loyalty cards, and even your postal change-of-address form, data brokers are continuously harvesting and selling your personal information—with little to no vetting of who’s buying. That includes advertisers, but also foreign adversaries, criminal organizations, and terrorist groups. And unlike government surveillance, this practice falls almost entirely outside constitutional protections. Yarbrough argues this has moved far beyond a privacy issue and now represents a direct threat to public safety and national security—enabling hostile actors to geo-fence military bases, identify law enforcement officers’ home addresses, and micro-target government personnel with blackmail and influence operations. His proposed solutions include regulating data brokers as fiduciaries, limiting the sale of sensitive data for high-risk professions, and developing operational playbooks for law enforcement, military, and critical infrastructure workers to reduce their exposure.
Jesse Yarbrough’s thesis
Caveat Oculus: Data Brokers, Surveillance Capitalism, and the Threat to Homeland Security
