Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I hope what is happening in the US right now, with people getting deported for writing Op-Eds criticizing US foreign policy, is a temporarily thing and not the direction we are heading into.

But if it isn't temporarily, we should expect surveillance like discussed in this article to grow and our opinions to be monitored in a more pervasive fashion. It is a relatively trivial matter from a technology standpoint to feed in live feeds of opinions from FB, X, WhatsApp, BlueSky, as well as advertising data collections (from TVs, Taxi's etc) into a LLM powered summary of people's opinions and views and threat factors to the regime.

I could see a scenario where companies like Palantir create such a system for domestic usage in the US, and we should be honest that the big cloud providers like AWS and GCP and Microsoft would jump at the chance to host those systems, lots and lots of $$$ for them in this. This is just applying the technology in the US that has been pre-tested by Israel against the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It can definitely suppress dissidents and solidify state control.

This is just extrapolating into trends as a thought experiment that I hope are just temporary blips in the US's commitment to free speech and right to disagree with the government.

> Could see a nightmare scenario where companies like Palantir create such a system for domestic usage in the US.

I can guarantee you such a system already exists.

> I can guarantee you such a system already exists.

There is a limited one the US has built just to deport pro-Palestinian students from the US on visas: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/u...

The history of such "technology innovations" is that they generally do not stop at the initial scope, and likely will greatly expand its applicability to other groups, other opinions and for other purposes.

Clearview already wrongly identifies suspects for the police. It's definitely going to be used to _wrongly_ ________________ to benefit far right fascist ethnostate.

The question is really how much momentum has the accelerationists of whatever strips succeeded in.

This sort of thing has been talked about since Echelon and Cointelpro. The missing bit is the final one, which is now arriving: enforcement. Which is why the Abrego Garcia case is so important.

(as always, I think people have underestimated the extent to which some people want the awesome power of an authoritarian state to be wielded against other people.)

Right. We've had mass data collection tools for a long time, web trackers, CCTV, microphones etc.

But what AI brings to the table is how much easier it makes it to combine and analyse all that data, build peoples' profiles. It scales infinitely better than hiring human analysts to track someone. It's too cheap and too tempting.

At this point i came to the conclusion that people are generally okay with being recorded and everything.

Were they not, there would ben an ever growing market for home-server appliances capable of hosting not only files but also some chat services (probably matrix?) and stuff like that.

But there isn’t.

Yeah some nas vendors do something similar, but it’s still a small market.

> This is just extrapolating into trends as a thought experiment

The late 2000s and early 2010s are here to deliver their "I told you sos". This is the surveillance systems they were warning you about. And then so many people ended up taking paychecks to go build those systems that it's now cringe to care about how morally abhorrent they are.

What, you think it's only the US government and only under rulers you dislike who we should be against having surveillance data?

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