Google's Project Nimbus is the future of evil | Hacker News Reader

Google's Project Nimbus is the future of evil

androidcentral.com

93 pointsdanboarder53 comments

National Security is an incredibly complex, nuanced debate.

You should always take articles written by "an amateur woodworker and struggling shade tree mechanic. There's nothing he can't take apart, but many things he can't reassemble".

If Russia attacks your country or a terrorist blows a building, no one and no one blames "amateur woodworker and struggling shade tree mechanic" about intelligence failures.

But, we find this increasingly acceptable to push articles written by people who have absolutely no clue about anything (technology, security, geopolitics, threats, intelligence), just because the headline "hurr durr, Google/Amazon/Uber/Meta/...is evil"

Do you have any comment about the content of the piece itself?

Honestly the angle should be "Israel wastes $1.2 billion on cloud-based surveillance it doesn't need". Even without Google and Amazon's help, the IDF is quite capable of surveiling every face and ascertaining whether you are lying, as anyone who has been through Israeli airport security can tell you.

Not sure if you're joking, or think that walking through an airport (for most people) will reveal how great or useless the security are at "ascertaining whether you're lying". Are we all meant to be testing a few lies each time we fly somewhere to judge that airport's security?

They are referring the process by which large numbers of people coming into Israeli airports are questioned by professionals acting like lie detectors.

Ah, thanks.

Large numbers of people coming into Israel?

Israel receives fewer than 5 million tourists per year from what I can find online.

That is less than 1/10th of the top 5 countries for tourism. And as an amusing point of reference, that is 1/4th the number of visitors who travel to the one city of Bangkok each year.

You've misunderstood their comment, what they are saying is that a large proportion of arrivals get questioned, not making a comment on the total number of passengers compared to other places.

Damn, you are actually correct. I have read that whole article, and wasn't even sure what the contract was for, but it sounded like some super scary surveillance program. Your description of it sounded nothing like what that article painted at all.

Then I decided to search for other articles about this that are written a bit more competently[0], and yup, it all checks out. Looks like a typical "we are migrating our infra from on-prem to cloud with GCP and AWS".

0. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/01/google-workers-protest-1-2...

Yes, being constantly surveilled by AI-enhanced telescreens when in public is so very complex and nuanced, that we need security and geopolitics experts to tell us if that's the kind of society we want to live in. A lay person is simply not educated enough to judge whether having his every move and expression logged and analyzed by some government or corporate entity is a good thing or not.

Yes especially when the lay person is swayed by privileged people leading comfortable lives telling others who are in danger of getting killed or lose sovereignty.

Do you provide good faith argument about the net benefits of such a system to the society? Of course not. You are mostly concerned with "OMG, they showed me an ad about a thing that I almost wanted to buy" and "why should I care about a system that could potentially prevent Isrealis from being bombed from terrorists or Ukrainians murdered by Russians"

Lose sovereignty over occupied territory? I'd imagine what triggered your extreme reaction (and some others') is the bit about Israeli committing crimes against humanity in Palestine. I'd argue the article went too softly on this matter. The ruthless acts committed are clear under the sun and we've all seen videos ranging from unarmed protestors being beaten in the streets to IDF guards throwing live grenades to red cross vehicles, settlers invading civilians houses as they're forced to leave and so on. To question the morality of providing such entity with additional resources (that Israel can easily develop on their own thanks to their massive focus on weaponization of technology) that will further worsen the apartheid in place is entirely legitimate. There shouldn't be an exception just because it's a more western-aligned entity.

Rather than "evil", I would dub it as a little too much confidence on statistical models running on blackbox computers without checking for edge cases of false inference(which could always be plausible).

But you should also be well-informed when a company who was founded on a principle of "Don't Be Evil" turns full circle and becomes the evil it warned us about.

LOL!

About that "Don't Be Evil" thing --- that was the warning. It was a marketing pitch to distract from the fact that evil was what they had in mind all along.

> evil was what they had in mind all along

I don’t think this level of cynicism is helpful or particularly true.

Knowing that power corrupts and actually preventing yourself from being corrupted by power are two totally different things. If you really, really want to solve a problem effectively, and know you’ll accumulate a ton of power if you succeed, its extremely easy to overestimate your ability to get the genie to do good once it’s out of the bottle.

Having to deal with the entire world pressuring you and trying to claw into your organization and inject their own interests is extremely difficult, and it changes people.

Not true?

Google grew out of Brin and Page's graduate research project at Columbia University funded by the NSA and CIA through the National Science Foundation and aimed at mass surveillance. And their association with these organizations has continued to the present.

The "Don't be Evil" motto suggests to me that they were fully cognizant right from the start of what they had embraced and wanted to mute any public perception of that. And your apologetic response shows how much they succeeded.

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engin...

The fact that any association with the NSA and CIA is considered evil shows how much of the terror of the cold war and nuclear annihilation we’ve forgotten.

I’m highly skeptical of US intelligence agencies and think they are and have been corrupt, but I also understand the realities involved in maintaining a relatively peaceful global trade network in a world with billions of people, a collapsed soviet empire, and nuclear weapons. I also think it’s worth remembering what the KGB and soviet intelligence and surveillance state was like.

Maybe Brin and Page were secretly evil lizard people that wanted to turn the globe into North Korea, but I think the more likely explanation was that they were like most high level academic researchers: obsessively interested in seeing how far they could take their ideas, and overly optimistic about their positive impact and view of the military/intelligence as the good guys. Another fantastic example of that starry eyed optimism paired with dangerous government involvement was Project Orion. What was originally envisioned by its creators as a nuclear propelled rocket to propel humanity to the stars was corrupted by the cold war push for military dominance that funded it. In that case the potential for misuse was so great (one potential design was a battleship that was basically like a real life death star) that they scrapped it, but the scientists involved weren’t interested in building a death star. They were interested in building a nuclear space ship more powerful and with a greater launch capacity than anything we’ve ever designed before or since, and getting funding for it.

I personally believe everything possible should be done to make centralized surveillance impossible, because we’d need to repeal the fourth amendment to allow it if we’re serious about true and not “approximate” rule of law, and the dangers are too great, but I recognize that there was an argument to be made to justify involvement with intelligence agencies, and that a researcher salivating for funding and propelling their idea into the positive future the envision would think it’d be controllable and worth the risk.

While I'm convinced Google and Amazon are doing plenty evil, this article is just a fear mongering piece. There is nothing alarming about a cloud migration project. Just like every other agency in the world, the Israeli government has decided it's time to migrate its infrastructure to the cloud. Google and Amazon just happened to have won the contract (huh, what a surprise). When you pick GCP or AWS, of course it will come with all the managed services they have to offer. Any individual in the world who signs up for GCP or AWS will have access to all these services including the vision API, AI and ML tools. Google does not vet whether an individual should be using these services, why should the government be treated differently?

The article is doing the age old folly of blaming the tools instead of the actor. If Google does not provide technology to the government, somebody else will. Heck, the government can even build those capabilities in house, the research is largely in the public domain. The real problem is holding your government accountable and having policies in place which prevent authorities from violating human rights. It's a political problem that needs a political solution. Blaming everyone else is not going to solve the problem by any means. So make sure you elect the right government.

> Project Nimbus is a joint effort of Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government that provides futuristic surveillance capabilities through the use of advanced machine learning models.

> Nimbus training documents emphasize “the ‘faces, facial landmarks, emotions’-detection capabilities of Google’s Cloud Vision API,”

The "training documents" he mentions are basically a GCP manual. [0]

"facial recognition, landmarks, emotions, ..." These are ML 101. Does my face have a second degree equation pointing up? Happy. Is it pointing down? Sad. It's like the car dealer rambling about the leather seat that reclines, when you're only interested in the horsepower. It's a sales pitch.

This reminds when the Intercept made a whole piece about the brazilian DMV's "dystopian system" that could "integrate multiple data sources" just to say it was a SQL join.

[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22119705-core-infra-...

The simplicity or complexity of the technical implementation doesn't change the intention in any way.

The Intercept seems to have a few more details:

https://theintercept.com/2022/07/24/google-israel-artificial...

Can anyone provide information on accuracy, lack thereof, or false positives?

Ok, advertising companies are targeting everyone in sight, including little kids, making Internet as addictive as crack so that people would waste their time and life just so that they could make more money. Then they are selling all the behavioral data to everyone who will pay. And this Nimbus project is the "future of evil"? Not even close, as far I am concerned.

Selling technology that pretends to know when you're lying to a state/army that engages in apartheid and regularly shoots, maims and tortures palestinians rates pretty fucking high on the evil scale.

Yes it is. The advertising companies you describe are the present of evil.

At least Google was so honest to remove "Don't be evil." from its code of conduct.

Given the amount of corruption, deciet, lies I have seen, I would love to see this direction proliferate. Of course, there are chances of the tech itself being gamed, however, it would be great to see action against corrupt people, most of which are able to get by as pursuing in the courts is non-scalable and there's rarely a way to prove.

The systems would need to keep improving step by step. The bad people will keep finding workarounds. It will be a cat and mouse game surely.

May everything be recorded; may everything be automatically analysed; may the culprits be punished on the spot.

Ours may be recorded and we may be declared guilty until proven innocent, but never those whose decisions matter.

https://euobserver.com/eu-political/155377

I don't want to live in your monstrous notion of a surveillance utopia.

You are perhaps lucky enough to be not living in a society with excessive corruption. :-)

Perhaps, but I believe you would trade excessive corruption for an absolute nightmare. There would be cat and mouse games, sure, but you and everybody you care about would be the mice. Your life would be subject to perpetual inspection. If you were to say or do anything that the current regime or any future regime deemed unacceptable, you would be dealt with swiftly. Why on Earth would you want to live like that?

Yeah. I want the 'surveillance utopia' along with a good leadership. The latter is a must for it to be useful, else more bads will happen than good.

China would seem to fit the criteria you describe -how's that helping out with their level of corruption. All solved over there, then?

That's a good point. I'll try to find the answer.

Let me know if you already know.

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