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AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

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111–120 of 349 posts

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#111

Post by Syonyk »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #38

Both 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…

> ...the more urgent debate is how to adapt to this being the reality.

Start building more offline community. Building things that are outside the reach of AI because they're in places you entirely control, and start discouraging (or actively evicting...) cell phones from those spaces. Don't build digital-first ways of interacting.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#112

Post by AlwaysRock »

moose44 wrote: post #74

Is mass spying not already going on?

Did you read the post?

The author delineates between surveillance and spying, primarily, by saying mass data collection has been happening for years. Actually doing something with that data has been more difficult. AI summarizes audio and text well, which will turn collection into actual analysis, which the author calls spying.

Did you disagree?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#113

Post by anonymousDan »

brunoTbear wrote: post #63

Schneier 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.

[flagged]

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#114

Post by nox100 »

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…

[flagged]

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#115

Post by righthand »

Only if you continue to invest time and energy into. Not everyone puts 99% of their life online. When’s the last time you left your house to do something without a cellular? Or compromised by not ordering something you think you need?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#117

Post by AlexandrB »

okasaki wrote: post #88
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…

> Is this a better world, If the same monitoring is present on buses and private planes, homeless hostels and mega-mansions then it absolutely is better.

You're describing a hypothetical world that will never exist. Basically if we solve all corruption and inequality in enforcement between economic/power classes - all-pervasive surveillance will be a net benefit.

It's like pondering hypotheticals about what would happen if we lived in Middle Earth.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#118

Post by jtbayly »

127361 wrote: post #32

Time to decentralize everything. I think we are already in the early stages of this new trend. We can run AI locally and hard drives are so large we can have a local copy of an entire library, with millions of ebooks, in our own home now. That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well. Bye bye Big Brother.

Until you walk out your front door...

Or use the internet for anything...

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#119

Post by w-m »

somenameforme wrote: post #58

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 o…

Sure, everything is ultimately a political problem, but this one is completely driven by technological change. In the USSR (and GDR), it took them a staff of hundreds of thousands of people to write up their reports.

Now it would take a single skilled person the better part of an afternoon to, for example, download a HN dump, and have an LLM create reports on the users. You could put in things like political affiliation, laws broken, countries travelled recently, net worth range, education and work history, professional contacts, ...

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#120

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

kaibee wrote: post #61
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #27

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,…

You're just describing TikTok/Youtube algorithm.

That's only a small piece of it.
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