“I research how technology makes the state and the state makes technology,” Vera Katelyn Wilde says. Her work has proved that automation can inflame racial issues—she’s working on creating the nation’s first police profiling database—and that lie detectors are ethically questionable. Government-run technology, Wilde says, “lets the state assert the right to look through people’s bodies and other boundaries, often without probable cause.” So far, she has won more than a dozen awards, including a hard-to-get National Science Foundation disser...