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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

This happened during the last big technological advancement -- search. Suddenly it became possible for a government to theoretically sift through all of our communications and people online made constant reference to it talking directly to their "FBI agent."

But it was and still is a nothingburger and this will be the same because it doesn't enable anything except "better search." We've had comparable abilities for a decade now. Yes LLMs are better but semantic search and NLP have been around a while and the world didn't end.

All the examples of what an LLM could do are just querying tracking databases. Uncovering organizational structure is just a social graph, correlating purchases is just querying purchase databases, listing license plates is just querying the camera systems. You don't need an LLM for any of this.

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Search has become a mass surveillance tool for the government. That is the article's point. If you think it's a nothingburger, you aren't aware of how often a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials. Also, they can be used to bolster probable cause for search warrants and arrests.

Also, check out geofence warrants. Essentially, the government can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area.

Of course, don't commit crimes but this behavior by the government raises the spectre of wrong search, wrong place, wrong time. This is one of the article's points, it causes people to self-censor and change their searches out of fear of their curiosity being misconstrued as criminal intent.

> a person's Google searches are used to establish criminal intent in criminal trials. > > can ask google for the IP's of people who searched for particular terms within a geographic area

These aren't mass surveillance. The threat of search is government systems passively sifting through all information in existence looking for "criminal activity" and then throwing the book at you.

In both of these cases the government is asking Google to run a SQL query against their database that wouldn't be aided by an LLM or even the current crop of search engines.

It is mass surveillance. It's just not being looked at by anyone until you are targeted by the government. If you are targeted, your entire life is within keystrokes of the authorities. This is the same thing the article is saying.

The article is making the point that it's not feasible to spy on every person to monitor them for wrongdoing currently. It doesn't scale and it's not cost effective. With AI that will change because it can be automated. The AI can listen to voice, monitor video cameras, and read text to discern a level of intent.

> it's not feasible to spy on every person to monitor them for wrongdoing currently

Sure it is! That's the whole point of search being the previous big technical hurdle. YouTube monitors every single video posted in real time for copyright infringement. We've had the capability to do this kind of monitoring for huge swaths of crimes for a decade and it hasn't turned into anything. We could for example catch every driver in real time for all across the country for speeding but we don't.

Mass is the opposite of targeted surveillance. If you need to be targeted and get a warrant to look at the data then it's not mass. And AI isn't going to change the system that prevents it right now which is the rules governing our law enforcement bodies.

I get the impression you didn't bother reading the article.

Your two examples are flawed and don't address what the article is saying. The algorithm to check for copyright violations is relatively simple and dumb. Speed cameras: many countries do use speed cameras (i.e. Australia, UK). The problem with speed cameras is that once you know where they are, you simply slow down when approaching.

Again, mass vs. targeted surveillance is irrelevant now. You've already been surveilled. It's just a matter of getting access to the information.

It will eventually end, though, accompanied by the chatter of a gaggle of naysayers chicken-littling the people trying to raise the alarm. I'm delighted to be here to witness the death of liberty and descent of the West into the throes of everything it once claimed to represent the polar opposite of, and also delighted to be old enough that I'll likely die before it becomes Actual Big Brother levels of oppressive.

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