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AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

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Re: AI and Mass Spying

#21

Post by px43 »

Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it.

Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing surveillance infrastructure can positively link that identity to their government identity. Every day privacy tech is improving and adding new capabilities.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#22

Post by hackeman300 »

px43 wrote: post #21

Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it. Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing su…

Care to elaborate?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#23

Post by darklycan51 »

Think about it this way.

Every service has access to the IPs you've used to log on, most services require an email, phone number some debit/credit cards and or similar personal info. Link that with government databases on addresses/real names/ISP customers and you basically can get most peoples accounts, on virtually any service they use.

We then also have things such as the patriot act in effect, the government could if they wanted run a system to do this automatically, where every message is scanned by an AI that catalogues them.

I have believed for some time now that we are extremely close to a complete dystopia.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#24

Post by sonicanatidae »

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.

Mine was walking into the client's site. This was many years ago. They had Novell Server issues, that's how long ago this was.

I walked in, cops everywhere. Man in a suit waves an FBI badge at me and asks why I'm there. I explained the ongoing work and he said, "Not today" and forced me off the premises.

The next day I was called back by the client to "rebuild their network". When I got there, every single piece of hardware that contained anything remotely like storage had been disassembled and the drives imaged, then just left in pieces. lol

I spent that day rebuilding it all, did get the Novell server working again.

A week later, they were closed forever and I believe the owner and CFO got nailed for healthcare fraud.

I was asked to testify in a deposition. My stuff was pretty basic and mostly what I knew about how they used the tech. What I saw around there and if I saw any big red signs declaring FRAUD COMMITTED HERE!

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#25

Post by Nilrem404 »

Surprised Pikachu Face

Seriously nothing new or shocking about this piece. Spying is spying. Surveillance is surveillance. If you've watched the news at all in the past 2 decades, you know this is happening.

Anyone who assumes that any new technology isn't going to be used to target the masses by increasingly massive and powerful authoritarian regimes is woefully naive.

Another post stating what we all already know isn't helping or fostering any meaningful conversation. It will just be rehashes. Let me skip to the end here for you:

There is nothing we can do about it. Nothing will change for the better.

Go make a coffee or tea

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#26

Post by fishcrackers »

px43 wrote: post #21

Never in the history of humanity has such powerful privacy tech existed for anyone who wants to use it. Using common off the shelf, open source, heavily audited tools, it's trivial today, even for a non-technical 10 year old, to create a new identity and collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world. They can do research, get paid, make payments, and contribute to private communities in such a way that no existing su…

[dead]

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#27

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

The new Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. bots won't just crawl the web or social networks--they will crawl specific topics and people.

Lots of cultures have the concept of a "guardian angel" or "ancestral spirits" that watch over the lives of their descendants.

In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have a "personal assistant bot" provided by a large corporation that will "help" you by answering questions, gathering information, and doing tasks that you give it. However, be forewarned that your "personal assistant bot" is no guardian angel and only serves you in ways that its corporate creator wants it to.

Its true job is to collect information about you, inform on you, and give you curated and occasionally "sponsored" information that high bidders want you to see. They serve their creators--not you. Don't be fooled.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#28

Post by hruzgar »

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.

they most likely already do this and honestly it's really really scary

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#29

Post by datadrivenangel »

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.

Same thing happens in the US. Post a tweet too critical of the government, and you might get investigated and added to a no-fly list. Background checks can reveal investigations, so you may end up not getting a job because the government didn't like your tweet...

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#30

Post by ryaniscool »

Spivak wrote: 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…

Search has become a mass surveillance tool for the government. That is the article's point. If you think it's a nothingburger, you aren't aware of how often a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials. Also, they can be used to bolster probable cause for search warrants and arrests.

Also, check out geofence warrants. Essentially, the government can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area.

Of course, don't commit crimes but this behavior by the government raises the spectre of wrong search, wrong place, wrong time. This is one of the article's points, it causes people to self-censor and change their searches out of fear of their curiosity being misconstrued as criminal intent.

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