Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 349 posts

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#11

Post by iAMkenough »

naveen99 wrote: 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.

AI reduces the labor involved, reducing barriers to invest time or money.

Spying isn't just for troublemakers either. It's probably worth the trouble to the vindictive ex-husband willing to install a hidden microphone in his ex-wife's house and in order to have access to a written summary of any conversations related to him.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#12

Post by miyuru »

The TV show "Person of Interest" portrayed this beautifully and it came out 12 years ago.

Strange and scary how fast the world develops new technology.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#13

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

A friend of mine was recently a witness for the FBI. He was working in a small office in the middle of nowhere and happened to have a very loud argument with the suspect. A few minutes later he left the building and when he was about to start his car, he got a call from an agent asking him if he wanted to be a witness in the case they were working on.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#17

Post by yonaguska »

It's already happening. See this DHS memo issues on August 8th - page 3.

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/23_0913_mgmt...

Fortunately the DHS has put together an expert team of non-partisan, honest, Americans to spearhead the effort to protect our democracy. Thank you James Clapper and John Brennan- for stepping up to the task.

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2023/09/19/secretary-mayorkas-annou...

And just in time for election season in the US AI is going to be employed to fight disinformation- for our protection of course. https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/08/31/ussocom-ai-disinfo...

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#18

Post by ben_w »

ilovetux wrote: post #4
naveen99 wrote: 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.

That would resolve the spying cost, but not the punishment cost. My go-to example here is heroin: class A drug in the UK, 7 years for possession and life for supply, so far as I can see nobody has anything good to say about it, and it has around three times as many users in the UK as the entire UK prison population.

Could implement punishment for that specific crime, at huge cost, but you can't expand that to all crimes. Well, I suppose you could try feudalism mark 2 where most of the population is determined to be criminal and therefore spends their life "having to work of their debt to society", but then you have to find out the hard way why we stopped doing feudalism mark 1.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#19

Post by stillwithit »

kozikow wrote: post #8
naveen99 wrote: 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.

Humans existed under religious nonsense, and other forms of nonsense (sure, sure legal racism and sexism up until the last 30-40 years and obviously politically contrived social norms means the “right people won” free market capitalism)

What’s one more form of BS hallucination foisted upon the meat based cassettes we exist as?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#20

Post by jdthedisciple »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #13

A friend of mine was recently a witness for the FBI. He was working in a small office in the middle of nowhere and happened to have a very loud argument with the suspect. A few minutes later he left the building and when he was about to start his car, he got a call from an agent asking him if he wanted to be a witness in the case they were working on.

This stopped to soon.

What happened next?

Post reply on HN