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AI and Mass Spying
71–80 of 349 posts
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#72I don't know why this isn't being discussed more. The reality of the surveillance state is that the sheer amount of data couldn't realistically be monitored - AI very directly solves this problem by summarizing complex data. This, IMO, is the real danger of AI, at least in the short term - not a planet of paperclips, not a moral misalignment, not a media landscape bereft of creativity - but rather a tool for targeting anybody that deviates from the norm, a tool designed to give confident answers, trained on movies and the average of all our societies biases.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#73Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the technology would get there. Rather than debating how to stop this (which is mostly futile and requires all of us to be nice, which we just aren't), the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this being the reality. Related to this is the notion of ubiquitous surveillance. Where basically anywhere you go, there is going to be active surveillance literally e…
> Both were always going to be kind of inevitable as soon as the technology would get there
This is my take on everything sci-fi or futuristic. Once a human conceives something, its existence is essentially guaranteed as soon as we figure out how to do it.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#74Is mass spying not already going on?
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#75"has", not "will".
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#76Schneier is wrong that "hey google" is always listening. Google does on-device processing with dedicated hardware for the wake-words and only then forwards audio upstream. Believe it or not, the privacy people at Google really do try to do the right things. They don't always succeed, but they did with our hardware and wake-word listening. Am Google employee, not in hardware.
What he says is " Siri and Alexa and “Hey Google” are already always listening, the conversations just aren’t being saved yet". That's functionally what you describe. Hardware wake-word processing is a power saving feature, not a privacy enhancement. Some devices might not have enough resources to forward or store all the audio, but audio is small and extracting text does not need perfect reproduction, so it's quite likely that many devices could be reprogrammed to do it, albeit at some cost to battery life.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#77This 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 o…
COINTELPRO
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#78Then people will start using AI to generate random traffic noise to fool AI watching them.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#79This 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 o…
In the USSR and GDR, not everyone was under constant surveillance. This would require one surveillance worker per person. There was an initial selection process.
Re: AI and Mass Spying
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pe…
> a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials. > > can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area These aren't mass surveillance. The threat of search is government systems passively sifting through all information in existence looking for "criminal activity" and then throwing the book at you. In both of these cases the governme…
It is mass surveillance. It's just not being looked at by anyone until you are targeted by the government. If you are targeted, your entire life is within keystrokes of the authorities. This is the same thing the article is saying.
The article is making the point that it's not feasible to spy on every person to monitor them for wrongdoing currently. It doesn't scale and it's not cost effective. With AI that will change because it can be automated. The AI can listen to voice, monitor video cameras, and read text to discern a level of intent.