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AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

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Re: AI and Mass Spying

#2
The limiting factor is usually, someone has to pay for the spying and the punishment. A lot (most?) of troublemakers just aren’t worth the trouble of spying or punishing.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#3
post #2

The limiting factor is usually, someone has to pay for the spying and the punishment. A lot (most?) of troublemakers just aren’t worth the trouble of spying or punishing.

I suspect this will be the hoovering approach. Suck it all up, then figure out what you care to act on.

The government is a lot of things, and none of them are subtle.

Source: The ironically named PATRIOT ACT and similar.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#4
post #2

The limiting factor is usually, someone has to pay for the spying and the punishment. A lot (most?) of troublemakers just aren’t worth the trouble of spying or punishing.

The problem is that if AI enables mass spying, then the costs will no longer be prohibitive to target an individual because the infrastructure could be built out once and then reused to target individuals at scale with AI doing all of the correlation behind the scenes.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#5
next time they try to root out whatever 'vermin' defined; it will be a quick natural language prompt trained on ingested data from the last 2 decades to get that list of names and addresses / networks. AI is going to make targeting groups with differing ideologies dead simple. It will be used.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#6
This happened during the last big technological advancement -- search. Suddenly it became possible for a government to theoretically sift through all of our communications and people online made constant reference to it talking directly to their "FBI agent."

But it was and still is a nothingburger and this will be the same because it doesn't enable anything except "better search." We've had comparable abilities for a decade now. Yes LLMs are better but semantic search and NLP have been around a while and the world didn't end.

All the examples of what an LLM could do are just querying tracking databases. Uncovering organizational structure is just a social graph, correlating purchases is just querying purchase databases, listing license plates is just querying the camera systems. You don't need an LLM for any of this.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#7
Soon in the name of "security" you'll have your face scanned on average every few minutes and it's going to be mandatory in many aspects of our lives. That's the pathetic world IT has helped to build.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#8
post #2

The limiting factor is usually, someone has to pay for the spying and the punishment. A lot (most?) of troublemakers just aren’t worth the trouble of spying or punishing.

I don't think it's too far-fetched. To see where it's going look at social score in China.

You say something wrong about a party, suddenly you can't board a plane, take a mortgage, enter some buildings, ...

Your credit score would look at how compliant you are with policies that can get increasingly nonsensical.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#9
post #6

This happened during the last big technological advancement -- search. Suddenly it became possible for a government to theoretically sift through all of our communications and people online made constant reference to it talking directly to their "FBI agent." But it was and still is a nothingburger and this will be the same because it doesn't enable anything except "better search." We've had comparable abilities for a…

It will eventually end, though, accompanied by the chatter of a gaggle of naysayers chicken-littling the people trying to raise the alarm. I'm delighted to be here to witness the death of liberty and descent of the West into the throes of everything it once claimed to represent the polar opposite of, and also delighted to be old enough that I'll likely die before it becomes Actual Big Brother levels of oppressive.
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