February 18, 2026
Say “surveillance”!
OpenAI, the US government, and Persona built an identity surveillance machine
Selfies to watchlists? Comment section screams Big Brother
TLDR: A viral report claims publicly exposed files and an “openai-watchlistdb” hostname suggest ID checks for chatbots may ping watchlists, with researchers saying no hacking was involved. Comments split between Big Brother alarm bells and roasting the site’s blaring music, with side-eye at Big Tech–government coziness.
The internet found its new villain-of-the-week: a viral exposé claims devs stumbled onto a government-tied server showing “openai-watchlistdb” hostnames and 53MB of exposed files, suggesting ID checks for chatbots could be pinging watchlists. The authors insist no hacking, saying it was all public info and citing court cases like Van Buren and hiQ v. LinkedIn. The headline-grabber for commenters? A code snippet named SelfieSuspiciousEntityDetection and the idea of being re-screened every few weeks just to chat with an AI.
Cue the meltdown. One camp yelled “1984 is here” and accused Big Tech and the feds of building an American “social credit” system. Another thread dragged rival AI tie-ups—“Anthropic x Palantir” got name-checked—as proof the whole industry is cozy with surveillance. Some took sarcastic aim at leadership (“be glad AI isn’t run by folks like Altman”), while a minority insisted this looks like standard fraud checks and compliance: boring, not dystopian.
Then the comments took a detour into pure internet chaos: everyone roasted the site’s autoplay soundtrack. “The music choice bro” turned into a meme, with others dunking on “trash music” and the web design. In short, righteous fury met meme energy—and the watchword of the day was watchlist.
Key Points
- •Authors state they used only passive reconnaissance (Shodan, CT logs, DNS, HTTP headers) to examine publicly accessible endpoints.
- •A Google Cloud IP (34.49.93.177) in Kansas City exposed hostnames openai-watchlistdb.withpersona.com and openai-watchlistdb-testing.withpersona.com.
- •Approximately 53 MB of unprotected source maps were accessible on a FedRAMP government endpoint, according to the article.
- •The article reports code references to facial recognition, watchlists, SAR filings, intelligence codenames, and a function label “SelfieSuspiciousEntityDetection.”
- •OpenAI and Persona are urged to audit purported FedRAMP compliance and respond to specific questions cited by the authors.