How AI is changing the surveillance society

Many of us suspect that AI will somehow revolutionize the monitoring of people. But I haven’t read it in such clear terms as those of cybersecurity legend Bruce Schneier. On his blog he explains in his characteristic clear language what historical moment we are at. In addition to mass espionage – i.e. the surveillance of the entire society – there is now mass espionage: driven by AI, each person can be spied on individually – and automatically. Because now no one has to listen to the spies and understand their conversations and their data points. This is now done by an AI:Summarization is something a modern generative AI system does well. Give it an hourlong meeting, and it will return a one-page summary of what was said. Ask it to search through millions of conversations and organize them by topic, and it’ll do that. Want to know who is talking about what? It’ll tell you. Means: Mass surveillance, as we have known since the Snowden revelations about the NSA & Co., is a network in which we are all caught. AI-driven mass espionage now also makes it possible to screen individuals in a targeted, automated manner – in seconds.Schneier describes how this could work in concrete terms:All the data will be saved. It will all be searchable, and understandable, in bulk. Tell me who has talked about a particular topic in the past month, and how discussions about that topic have evolved. Person A did something; check if someone told them to do it. Find everyone who is plotting a crime, or spreading a rumor, or planning to attend a political protest. If there is enough intercepted text from a person’s life (and we all produce a lot of it on our cell phones), AI can recognize friendships and also when they fall apart. Who talks to whom and how, who gives orders to whom, and so on. Described in such concrete terms, it is creepy and raises completely new questions about how people – whether innocent or not – should communicate in the face of this problem. (Thanks to Johannes Kuhn for pointing this out )