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AI and Mass Spying

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Re: AI and Mass Spying

#301

Post by chiefalchemist »

arka2147483647 wrote: post #252
petsfed wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I are in agreement that the surveillance needs to stop, but I think we differ on how to explain the problem. My explanation follows, but note that its not directed at you. At its peak, the KGB employed ~500,000 people directly, with untold more employed as informants. The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told you that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach, without meaningfully incre…

> The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told you that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach, You are, if anything, underselling the point. AI will allow a future where every person will have their very own agent following them. Or even worse, as there are multiple private addtech companies doing surveillance, and domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, so you might have a dozen AI agents…

Aren't we there already? Sure, perhaps the fidelity is a bit grainy, but that's not going to remain as such for long. With the amount of data (for purchase) on the free market, the FBI, KGB, MoSS (China), etc. all have a solid starting foundation, and then they simply add their own layer upon layer on top.

I read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" a couple of years ago and she was frighteningly spot on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#302

Post by jstarfish »

paganel wrote: post #181
jstarfish wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha. You'd like to think so, but it's going to be awfully hard to coordinate resistance when the mass spying sweeps everyone up in a keyword-matching dragnet before the execution phase. This is the problem with every outgroup being labelled "terrorists." Sabotage will be the name of the game at that point. Find ways to quietly confuse, poison, overwhelm and undermine the system without attracting the attention of the…

I get your point, I think along those lines quite often myself. As per the sabotage part, bad input data that does not accurately get labeled as such until way too late in the “AI learning cycle” is I think the way to go. Lots and lots of such bad input data. How we would get to that point, that I don’t know yet, but it’s a valid option going forward.

> How we would get to that point, that I don’t know yet, but it’s a valid option going forward.

Chaos engineering. As a modern example, all this gender identity stuff wreaks absolute havoc on credit bureau databases.

Tomorrow, we'll have people running around in fursuits to avoid facial recognition. After that, who knows.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#303

Post by digging »

gosub100 wrote: post #284
digging wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

plenty of white people were charged with growing cannabis. I don't know where you are getting that idea from.

I didn't say white people weren't included in political repression. The Nixon administration explicitly targeted cannabis-using white hippies.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#304

Post by dfxm12 »

pempem wrote: post #270
dfxm12 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. If their power is great enough, like maybe a government intelligence agency, it doesn't need things like due process, etc., to do what it wants to do. For example, Joe McCarthy & J. Edgar Hoover didn't need the evidence that could have been produced by AI-aided mass surveillance to justify getting people people who opposed…

I think it is greyer than this. Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, distasteful as they are, I believe acted in what they would claim is good faith. The issue isn't that someone is a bad actor. It is that they believe they are a good actor and are busy stripping away others' rights in their pursuit.

Maybe in their minds they thought the end justified the means, but there's no way anyone, even themselves, mistakes those means for good faith.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#305

Post by moose44 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #112
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?

Xkeyscore??

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#306

Post by rasz »

kubb wrote: post #79
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…

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.

Thats exactly how it worked. In fact there was always more than one pair of eyes on everyone, people were being coerced to snitch on each other. Im old enough to remember a nice man visiting my school asking us to listen carefully what parents talk about around the house and report to teachers any criticism of government or party. That was pre 1989 under Russian occupation of my country.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#307

Post by moose44 »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #87
moose44 wrote: post #74

Is mass spying not already going on?

There’s a difference. If they wanted to spy on me today, they’d have to look at the logs my ISP keeps into perpetuity to find my usernames on HN and then some unfortunate person has to read hundreds or thousands of comments and take extensive notes of the controversial political and social opinions that I hold. Additionally, even without ISP logs, an AI could find my accounts online by comparing my writing style and…

Xkeyscore?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#308

Post by mikepurvis »

trinsic2 wrote: post #276
mikepurvis wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, when it comes to road-related violations (speeding, yield issues, fulling stopping at stop signs or RTOR, etc), I feel similarly. The current state of affairs where it's a $300 ticket that you're probably never going to see because 99% of the time you get away with it is dumb— it makes people contemptuous of the law and also feel super resentful and hard-done-by if they do finally get caught. And it's a pos…

I wonder whats going on at the enforcement level. It seems like there is a dumbing down of that system. It would be interesting to see some research on this.

Oh I think it's a lot of exactly what's being discussed elsewhere in this thread— the cost of consistent enforcement is just way too high, so there isn't much of it. And that suits most people just fine since they're contemptuous about road safety anyway; they want to get where they're going unmolested and have the cops focused on "real" crimes.

Road safety in the end is a commons, just like littering. No one person's action is going to make the difference, but coordinated effort is only possible when there's enough public sentiment to get a central mandate together.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#310

Post by r00fus »

petsfed wrote: post #222
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…

You and I are in agreement that the surveillance needs to stop, but I think we differ on how to explain the problem. My explanation follows, but note that its not directed at you. At its peak, the KGB employed ~500,000 people directly, with untold more employed as informants. The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told you that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach, without meaningfully incre…

The other point is when technologies essentially make redundant an entire class of people then those people are more easily repressed.

In this case, it could be the entire US populace that is not part of the surveillance engine.

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