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Comment by agd | Hacker News Reader

Big data analysis + mass surveillance is a frightening prospect. Of course you can train software to look for 'terrorists', but you could also train it to look for:

- whistleblowers

- minority groups (e.g. gay people, particular religious beliefs, political affiliation)

- political dissidents

- journalists whose behaviour changes

- personal vulnerabilities (affairs, mental health issues etc)

Think what authoritarian governments could (and are) doing with this capability.

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- political dissidents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

And that's what it is used for. Australian gov. used their abilities to mark people who say against coal energy as anti-government, all they did was support renewable sources of energy. https://overland.org.au/2014/07/surveillance-of-activists-is...

and Canada: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/14/canada-en...

- minority groups

FBI was spying on black-rights activists, since ever. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...

- whistleblowers

No example needed.

- journalists whose behaviour changes

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/duncan-campbell/gch...

Campbell in '70s discovered ECHELON, NSA admitted he was their personal target since then.

- personal vulnerabilities (affairs, mental health issues etc)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEXINT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

>Australian gov. used their abilities to mark people who say against coal energy as anti-government

Even the partisan sources you've linked don't support that particular assertion AFAICS. It appears that gov.au placed a group of activists with the potential intent to disrupt energy supplies under surveillance.

'Green' activists suffer from a bad case of noble cause corruption which prevents them from understanding that things they think are wonderful and necessary - like disrupting power grids - are well within the scope of what other people would consider to be terrorism.

There is also no suggestion that any ML or mass surveillance was used in targeting them. Targeted, intrusive surveillance was authorised against them.

I don't know any good sources about it. I heard about it somewhere on reddit probably and it stuck in my head, there are more different kind of sources if you need more:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/ja...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-07/brown-slams-spying-on-...

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/afp-spies-targeting-green-...

I would call it "mass discrimination". Because, in principle, that is what this amounts to: you're using a few traits of a person to generalize into a whole group.

I find it strange that nobody seems to identify this. It is almost as if, because it is done on a big computer and no human is involved in the processing, suddenly it is not discriminating anymore.

But humans programmed these computers in the first place.

This has been identified, posted to HN, and discussed.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10872852

Israel allegedly identifies homosexual Palestinians based on mass surveillance data and exploits them for it [1, 2]

[1] http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.617280

[2] http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/gay-palestinians-are-being-bl...

Wow. To add on top of the stigma of being gay in a homophobic culture, now they're going to be targeted as potential traitors/informants too. That's just... wow.

Big data analysis + mass surveillance is just more efficient than previous methods.

Let's imagine: 1. citizens have right to fair trial 2. terrorist hunting is not done by police, but by military intelligence organization that cannot arrest, attack or sue anybody, just gather data and inform police/military or prosecutor 3. that military organization is supervized by democratically elected guy (president) 4. Law that defines clearly when such information can be used, and defensive attorneys are not excluded from using it.

That organization being part of military is inportant. If it's actually clandestine organization with priority of defence, it should be unwilling to reveal it's capability to foreign players. Unless it's actually matter of national security. This is probably happening already with multitude of military forces and we never hear about it. Shit only starts when police starts doing same stuff while disregarding fair trial. SS-troops and KGB we're pretty good at fucking up people even prior to mass surveillance and big data analysis.

To be honest, being someone interested in lots of things, just based on my browser history you could also put me in the terrorist box.

It seems like a safe bet that they will try to learn as much about people as possible. Not so different from classifying them into people who are likely to buy a new car or nutritional supplements.

But lots more churn and breakage.

>- minority groups (e.g. gay people

So there was this infamous incident of a Netflix machine learning competition for movie recommendations ...

Guess what somebody was able to do.

I can guess what you must mean but I can't find any references about it. Got a link?

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