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AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

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191–200 of 349 posts

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#191

Post by kenjackson »

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…

> Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime,

I think this depends on the law. For jaywalking, sure. For murder and robbery probably less so. And law enforcement resources seem scarce on all of them.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#192

Post by blueyes »

this has been true for a long time. most data is garbage, so the data collection phase of mass surveillance punched below its weight in terms of consequences felt by the surveilled. AI is one way to extraction actionable meaning from that data, and when people start feeling the everyday consequences of all that collection + meaning extraction, they will finally understand.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#193

Post by digging »

JCharante wrote: post #86
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…

I don't think it'd be chaos. I think the laws would be adjusted.

I think that's an optimistic view, but even if it's right, it will be years-to-decades of semi-chaos before the laws are updated appropriately.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#194

Post by pwillia7 »

yonaguska wrote: post #165
indigo0086 wrote: post #144

"Bitcoin will enable terrorism" "Ghost guns will enable criminals to commit murder" "Social media will enable hate speech" AI will be a useful and world changing innovation which is why FUD rag articles like this will become more prevalent until it's total adoption, even by the article writer themselves

Do you see how the examples you posted are somewhat problematic though? Governments are actively cracking down on all of those examples- it stands to reason that they will classify AI as a dangerous tool as well at some point, as opposed it becoming a ubiquitous tool. Ghost guns are far from common at least.

They would ban Ghost AIs -- They need non ghost guns or you wouldn't be a State

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#195

Post by pacifika »

passion__desire wrote: post #167
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That's just your phone. That is how most people will interface with their "personal assistant bot". Don't be surprised if it listens to all your phone conversations, reads all your text messages and email, and curates all your contacts in order to "better help you". When you login to your $LARGE_CORPORATION account on your laptop or desktop computer, the same bot(s) will be there to "help" and collect data in a si…

It already does. I asked a friend about a medical condition on whatsapp. I started getting ads about quack solutions immediately on instagram.

Your life insurance just went up.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#196

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#197

Post by n8cpdx »

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…

In democracies at least, the law can be changed to reflect this new reality. Laws that don’t need to be enforced and are only around to enable pretextual stops can be dropped if direct enforcement is possible.

There are plenty of crimes where 100% enforcement is highly desirable: pickpocketing, carjacking, (arguably) graffiti, murder, reckless and impaired driving, to name a few.

Ultimately, in situations with near 100% enforcement, you shouldn’t actually need much punishment because people learn not to do those things. And when there is punishment, it doesn’t need to be severe.

Deterrence theory is an interesting field of study, one source but there are many: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14773708211072...

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#198

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

gentleman11 wrote: post #183
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #126

This is why AI software must not be restricted, so that ordinary people and the civic minded can develop personal and public AI systems to counter corporate AI. The future of AI is adversarial. Now freedom to develop AI software doesn't mean freedom to use it however you please and its use should be regulated, in particular to protect individuals from things like this. But of course people cannot be trusted, so you n…

How does an adversarial ai help protect anyone's privacy or freedom to act in public in ways that big brother doesn't condone?

Adversarial attacks can be made on face recognition systems and the like, defeating them, and AI models can be poisoned with adversarial data, making them defective or ineffective.

As it stands, AI models are actually quite vulnerable to adversarial attacks, with no theoretical or systemic solution. In the future it's likely you'll need your own AI systems generating adversarial data to defeat models and systems that target you. These adversarial attacks will be much more effective if co-ordinated by large numbers of people who are being targeted.

And of course we have no idea what's coming down the pipe, but we know that fighting fire with fire is a good strategy.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#199

Post by digging »

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…

> 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?

Wow, that's a hell of a comparison. The former case being a documented case of basic racism and political repression, assuming you're talking about cannabis. And the latter being designed for almost exactly the opposite.

Restricting, um, "wrong opinions" on who a business wants to serve is there so that people with, um, "wrong identities" are still able to participate in society and not get shut out by businesses exercising their choices. Of course "wrong opinions" is not legal terminology. It's not even illegal to have an opinion that discrimination against certain groups is okay - it's just illegal to act on that. Offering services to the public requires that you offer them to all facets of the public, by our laws. But if you say believing in discrimination is a "wrong opinion"... I won't argue, they're your words :)

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#200

Post by willismichael »

JohnFen wrote: post #67
127361 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also stylometric analysis of your writing can be used to identify you.

This is one thing AI really can help with: rewriting what you wrote in order to make stylometric analysis worthless.

Feed your writing into AI so that it can rewrite it so that AI can't identify you by your writing?

Sounds like a startup idea to me. When we're ready for the evil phase, let's classify everybody by their inputs to the system and then sell the results to the highest bidder.

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