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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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