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AI and Mass Spying

schneier.com

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Re: AI and Mass Spying

#331

Post by aijoe5pack »

salawat wrote: post #272
w-m wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 affiliat…

Stop posting things like this, you're just giving them ideas, and you can't take it back once it's out there. I assure you, you may find the prodpect abhorrent, but there are people around who'd consider it a perfectly cromulent Tuesday.

Security by obscurity :). Accept that they will probably do this and work towards a counter-measure. Political solutions might be a counter-measure, as the Op of this thread is probably alluding to.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#332

Post by aijoe5pack »

mym1990 wrote: post #238
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…

A difference in today's world is that private companies are amassing data that then gets turned around to the highest bidder. The government may not have had an interest in collecting the data before but now the friction to obtaining it and the insights is basically just money, which is plenty available. Your opinion on bannable offenses is pretty bewildering. There was a point in time when people thought it would be…

And the highest bidder is often 'not spending legal fees on blocking the government requests'.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#333

Post by aijoe5pack »

landemva wrote: post #95
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 a democracy we would have a chance to vote on individual issues such as data privacy, or war against whomever. USA is a federal republic.

Correct. So get on the horn with your representative! Handling this through a democracy would be just horrible. Imagine the abuses that could be proffered to minorities with this.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#334

Post by gentleman11 »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #198
gentleman11 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, that will be illegal in 10 years, if not already, under hacking or sabotage rules. Next solution?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#335

Post by somenameforme »

sigilis wrote: post #295
JohnFen wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. I don't agree with this. I think it's entirely possible for a dystopian nightmare to happen without anyone acting in bad faith at all. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is a common phrase for a reason.

It may be a common phrase, but I’ve never seen such a road myself. Mostly bad outcomes are preceded by bad intentions, or lazy ones, or selfish ones. I’d be interested in a couple of examples, if anyone has good ones, but I’m pretty sure that if we put stuff like 737MAX MCAS, the Texas power grid fiasco, etc the count of badly paved roads would be greater.

All of the great wars of the 20th century are perfect examples. WW1 started when an assassin with Serbian state backing assassinated the heir (to an 80+ year old Emperor) of Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary demands Serbia effectively let them carry out an investigation and enact consequences at their discretion. Austria-Hungary refuses. So Serbia invades them. This causes Serbia's ally Russia to move in on behalf of Serbia. This causes Austria-Hungary's ally Germany to move in on behalf of Austria-Hungary. This resulted in Russia's ally France joining in on the war, and so on.

Soon enough you had Brits killing Germans because a Serbian assassinated an Austro-Hungarian royal. The most messed up thing of all though is that everybody had a very strong pretext of 'just' behavior on their side. It was just like an avalanche of justice that resulted in tens of millions of dying and things not only failing to get better, but getting much much worse.

Since the winners won, and the losers lost, the winners must be right. So they decided to brutally punish the losers for being wrong, Germany among them in this case. The consequences imposed on Germany were extreme to the point that the entire state was bankrupted and driven into hyperinflation and complete collapse. And this set the stage for a young vegetarian from Austria with an knack for rhetoric and riling up crowds to start using the deprivation the state was forced to endure to rally increasingly large numbers of followers to his wacky cause. He was soon to set Germany on a path to proving that WW1 was not only NOT the war to end all wars, but rather was just the warm-up act for what was really about to happen.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#336

Post by namaria »

okasaki wrote: post #92
namaria wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If it hurts people I hate I accept" - Every endorsement of authoritarian rule ever

Effectively enforcing laws we agreed to is hardly authoritarian.

Automatically enforcing all the laws is vastly different from the "effective enforcement of laws "we agreed to".

The full body of legislation is riddled with contradiction, inconsistency, ambiguity and the pretense that "legislated upon = fair" is at best a schoolroom fantasy.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#337

Post by namaria »

anigbrowl wrote: post #230
namaria wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If it hurts people I hate I accept" - Every endorsement of authoritarian rule ever

False equivalence. GP complained about a specific behavior, not about specific people.

Yes it's always some reasonably specific behavior that justifies the harsh new rules.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#338

Post by [deleted] »

anigbrowl wrote: post #234
AlexandrB wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't add up. At best your overall freedom remains the same. You gain quiet, you lose the freedom to make noise yourself. Seems like a net-negative to me. Consider how little freedom you would have if laws were enforced to the lowest common denominator of what people find acceptable.

I can go into the countryside and make noise all day. I don't see that there's a pre-existing freedom to inflict loud noises on my neighbors for no useful purpose.

[deleted]

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#339

Post by namaria »

anigbrowl wrote: post #234
AlexandrB wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't add up. At best your overall freedom remains the same. You gain quiet, you lose the freedom to make noise yourself. Seems like a net-negative to me. Consider how little freedom you would have if laws were enforced to the lowest common denominator of what people find acceptable.

I can go into the countryside and make noise all day. I don't see that there's a pre-existing freedom to inflict loud noises on my neighbors for no useful purpose.

You most definitely cannot disturb wildlife or rural communities with noise.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#340

Post by anigbrowl »

namaria wrote: post #339
anigbrowl wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can go into the countryside and make noise all day. I don't see that there's a pre-existing freedom to inflict loud noises on my neighbors for no useful purpose.

You most definitely cannot disturb wildlife or rural communities with noise.

Don't be pedantic, I specifically said my intention was not to inflict unwanted noise on my neighbors.
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