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.

Last week, the Justice Department announced a newly revised policy for when prosecutors should charge people under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the decades-old, controversial anti-hacking law. Many of the fights around the CFAA have hinged on what is--and is not--illegal hacking: If a mother violates a website's terms of service by creating a social media profile with a photo of someone else and a fake name, for instance, does that qualify? Or if a police officer searches a government license plate database for personal reasons, instead of work reasons, is that hacking? What about if a Major League Baseball team guesses a former employee's password and uses it to download information about his new team? Or a college student tries to find bugs in a voting app as part of an election security course?

Sexual harassment has made plenty of headlines in recent months, but more often than not, bad behavior doesn't happen in the spotlight. As Oprah said in her Golden Globes Lifetime Achievement speech, sexual harassment happens in factories and in fields everywhere, to people of all colors, classes, and creeds. In the modern office, there is one type of harassment that HR teams could solve using the very same innovation that enables it. I'm speaking, of course, of the kind that happens regularly online over Slack, Skype, or work computers. For sexual harassment that occurs in cyberspace -- and, like bullying, it often does -- technological solutions like AI could be the savior victims didn't know they needed.