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AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

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Re: AI and Mass Spying

#51

Post by JohnFen »

_Nat_ wrote: post #37

Seems inevitable enough that we may have to accept it and try to work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying. I mean, even if we pass laws to offer more protections, as computation gets cheaper, it ought to become easier-and-easier for anyone to start a mass-spying operation -- even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on their personal-computer. A decent…

> we may have to accept it and try to work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying.

We do have to live in the nightmare world we're building (and as an industry, we have to live with ourselves for helping to build it), but we don't have to accept it at all. It's worth fighting all this tooth and nail.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#52

Post by renegat0x0 »

The author makes one mistake. He said that Google stopped spying on gmail.

- they started spying on user's gmail

- there was blowback, they reverted

- after some time they introduced "smart features", with ads again

Link https://www.askvg.com/gmail-showing-ads-inside-email-message...

I do not even want to check if "smart features" are opt-in, or opt-out.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#53

Post by yterdy »

bonyt wrote: post #42

I think another aspect of this is mass criminal law enforcement enabled by AI. Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime, and that this will limit the effective scope of the law. Prosecutorial discretion. Putting aside for the moment the (very serious) injustice that comes with the inequitable use of prosecutorial discretion, let's…

The software that already exists along these lines already exhibit bias against marginalized groups. I have no trouble foreseeing a filter put on the end of the spigot that exempts certain people from the inconvenience of such surveillance. Might need a new law (it'll get passed).

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#54

Post by zxt_tzx »

I tend to think the surveillance/spying distinction is a little fragile and this more a continuation of what Bruce has previously written insightfully about, i.e. the blurring of lines between private/public surveillance and, as the Snowden leaks have revealed, it's hard to keep what has been collected by private industry out of the hands of the state.

However, a more recent trend is companies that sell technologies to the state directly. For every reputable one like Palantir or Anduril or even NSO Group, there are probably many more funded in the shadows by In-Q-Tel, not to mention the Chinese companies doing the same in a parallel geopolitcal orbit. Insofar as AI is a sustaining innovation that benefits incumbents, the state is surely the biggest incumbent of all.

Finally, an under-appreciated point is Apple's App Tracking Transparency policy, which forbids third-party data sharing, naturally makes first-party data collection more valuable. So even if Meta or Google might suffer in the short-term, their positions are ultimately entrenched on a relative basis.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#55

Post by otteromkram »

bonyt wrote: post #42

I think another aspect of this is mass criminal law enforcement enabled by AI. Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime, and that this will limit the effective scope of the law. Prosecutorial discretion. Putting aside for the moment the (very serious) injustice that comes with the inequitable use of prosecutorial discretion, let's…

If it increases ticket issuance for passenger vehicle noise violations (eg - "sport" exhausts, booming stereo system, motorcycles), I'm down.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#56

Post by graphe »

>Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance.

Computers create and organize large amounts of information. This is useful for large organizations and unempowering to the average person. Any technology with these traits are harmful to individuals.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#58

Post by somenameforme »

This is a political problem, not a technological one. The USSR (alongside Germany and others) managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology: paperwork for everything and every movement, informants, audio surveillance, and so on. The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it.

And when one looks back at the past we've banned things people would never have imagined bannable. Make it a crime to grow a plant in the privacy of your own home and then consume that plant? Sure, why not? Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire? Sure, why not?

Going the nuclear route and making the collection of data on individuals, aggregated or otherwise, illegal would hardly be some major leap of reach of jurisprudence. The problem is not that the technology exists, but that there is 0 political interest in curtailing it, and we've a 'democracy' where the will of the people matters very little in terms of what legislation gets passed.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#59

Post by zxt_tzx »

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…

> 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.

I can't help but wonder if we live in the same universe. If anything, in my part of the world, I am seeing powerful surveillance tech going from the digital sphere and into the physical sphere, often on the legal/moral basis that one has no expectation of privacy in public spaces.

Would love for OP to elaborate and prove me wrong!

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#60

Post by JohnFen »

justinclift wrote: post #50
JohnFen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the not-so-distant technofedualist future you'll have [...] I guarantee that I won't. That, at least, is a nightmare that I can choose to avoid. I don't think I can avoid the other dystopian things AI is promising to bring, but I can at least avoid that one.

Wonder if some kind of ai-agent thing(s) will become so widely used by people, that government services come to assume you have them? Like happened with mobile phones.

At least in my part of the US, it's not hard to do without smartphones at all. Default assumptions are that you have one, but you can still do everything you want to do if you don't.
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