Benj Edwards – Dec 5, 2023 8:53 pm UTC
In a thought-provoking editorial for Slate released Monday, distinguished security scientist Bruce Schneier warned that AI designs might usher in a new era of mass spying, allowing corporations and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, essentially reducing barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor.
In the piece, Schneier notes that the current landscape of electronic surveillance has already transformed the modern age, becoming the business model of the Internet where our digital footprints are constantly tracked and analyzed for commercial purposes. Spying, by contrast, can take that kind of financially motivated monitoring to an entirely new level:
“Spying and monitoring are different but related things,” Schneier writes. “If I hired a private investigator to spy on you, that investigator might hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private investigator to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you spoke to, what you purchased, what you did.”
Schneier argues that current spying methods, like phone tapping or physical surveillance, are labor-intensive, but the advance of AI significantly reduces this constraint. Generative AI systems are increasingly adept at summarizing lengthy conversations and sorting through massive datasets to organize and extract relevant information. This capability, he argues, will not only make spying more accessible but also more comprehensive.
“This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers,” Schneier writes. “Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri and Alexa and ‘Hey, Google’ are already constantly listening; the conversations just aren’t being saved yet.”
From action to intent
We’ve recently seen a movement from companies like Google and Microsoft to feed what users create through AI models for the purposes of support and analysis. Microsoft is also building AI copilots into Windows, which require remote cloud processing to function. That means private user data goes to a remote server where it is analyzed beyond user control. Even if run locally, sufficiently advanced AI models will likely “understand” the contents of your device, including image content.
Microsoft recently said, “Soon there will be a Copilot for everyone and for everything you do.”
Despite assurances of privacy from these companies, it’s not difficult to imagine a future where AI agents sifting through our sensitive files in the name of assistance start telephoning home to help tailor the advertising experience. Ultimately, government and law enforcement pressure in some regions could compromise user privacy on a massive scale. Journalists and human rights workers could become initial targets of this new form of automated surveillance.
