It's probably hard to imagine that you are the target of spycraft, but spying on employees is the next frontier of military AI. Surveillance techniques familiar to authoritarian dictatorships have now been repurposed to target American workers. Over the past decade, a few dozen companies have emerged to sell your employer subscriptions for services like "open source intelligence," "reputation management," and "insider threat assessment"--tools often originally developed by defense contractors for intelligence uses. As deep learning and new data sources have become available over the past few years, these tools have become dramatically more sophisticated. With them, your boss may be able to use advanced data analytics to identify labor organizing, internal leakers, and the company's critics.

More than 200 engineers and other workers have formed a union at Google, a breakthrough in labor organizing in Silicon Valley where workers have clashed with executives over workplace culture, diversity and ethics. Across half a dozen Google offices in the U.S. and Canada, 226 workers signed cards to form the Alphabet Workers Union, the group said on Monday. They are supported by the Communications Workers of America, which represents workers in telecommunications and media. The new union won't have collective bargaining rights and represents only a small fraction of Google's workforce. Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., has faced employee outcry over issues including sexual harassment, its work with the Pentagon and the company's treatment of its massive contract workforce.