The Banality of Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

The Banality of Surveillance

benn.substack.com

72 pointslimbicsystem24 comments

I'm in my 50s and when I was early 20s I crossed from US to Canada for a business meeting. "Why are you coming to Canada?" "To work." "Where's your work permit?" "Huh, I don't have one." That simple "wrong word" slip STILL gets me flagged and cordoned off into hours-long border diversions whenever I go to Canada.

Just imagine how it'll be now... for decades you'll be fending off some hidden receipts from an IG comment you made.

Had a similar experience: over a decade ago our firm opened an office in Canada and being scrappy and startup-like I had to cross into Canada with some networking equipment to help set up the new office. The amount of scrutiny was insane: thankfully it never stuck and I was eventually let on to do the work and return

Back in around 2012 or so, some friends and I decided to book a canal house in Amsterdam to all pitch in together and live there for about 2 months. Celebrating a few coinciding life achievements before moving onto the next phase of adult life sort of thing.

I worked remotely, so planned to simply do work for half the time I was there. As such, I brought a proper monitor, keyboard, etc. with me.

As I have my 20" boxed up LCD panel in my arms in the immigration/customs line at Schipol, a Dutch immigration officer comes up and asks me what the monitor is for. I of course like an idiot said "staying here for a couple months for a vacation, but I plan to work some while I'm here!". I got infinitely lucky with the officer in question - she very quickly told me I was incorrect and that the monitor was to play video games and that's what I was going to tell the immigration officer at the passport desk.

One of those early lessons learned that I'm sure looking young, naive, and stupid helped me in a way that I could not get away with in my mid-40's these days.

Not your fault but another lesson here is lying to border guards is ok if they say it is.

Which proves how much theater there is in security and that laws are not there to be blindly followed, but to enable the state to pursue its perceived enemies

I worked for a small company that did work for a cross-border manufacturer. Coming from Canada, we were told explicitly that "meetings" was a perfectly good reason for a day trip, and we were never there "to work". US customs has been historically as humourless a bunch as ever existed, and the factory on the other side was unionised, so meetings it is.

What cracked me up was driving back late one evening, arriving back at the Canadian side. The agent asked where I'd been, and I mentioned the town just behind me.

"Oh, _meetings_, eh?" wink

Of the seventeen countries (including China, Saudi, Thailand, USA, etc.) I have visited over the last four decades the only time I have been taken out of the queue at passport control to be interviewed was at Toronto flying in from Europe. Actually the tone of voice was more suited to interrogation than polite inquiry. It was very odd, and quite at odds with both my impression of and experience of Canadians themselves.

I was using Grok with speech and discovered their "paralinguistic" information storage. At first it claimed that the storage was temporary, but then admitted that long term data was stored for training.

Some of the dimensions they store are prosody, intensity, timbre, non-verbal vocalizations, pauses, timing and emotional inflection. In other words, another large layer of information on top of just the prompt text. This data doesn't get translated into text, it goes straight into a speech-to-speech model.

It strikes me that from just a few minutes of such data and the associated semantic content, an AI can assemble a detailed and accurate emotional/psychological dossier of any user, on demand. In the hands of a federal agent it would be a powerful tool to impose their department's will, or their own. Also it's an ad targeting mother load. And if that were already in place we would have no way to know.

Talking to a machine seems banal already, but the metadata contains an instruction manual on where your buttons are and how to press them.

Another factor is storing everything, forever.

It was highly likely confabulating about its inner workings, it was not trained on its tech specs.

  “The underlying model that brings Grok to life is a voice-to-voice model which understands the expressive range of human speech... The model is able to do this because of how it internally, within a single model, processes speech (including paralinguistic cues) and generates expressive speech output.” https://blog.livekit.io/xai-livekit-partnership-grok-voice-agent-api/

People overestimate the power of digital surveillance enormously. You'd think that's not a problem, but at the same time, most people underestimate more banal sources of repression.

You don't have to buy mouse click data on every John Smith when you've handed the handful of media empires to your buddies, reporters are jailed, dissidents are killed and CEOs willingly bend the knee to make a quick buck.

The most precious we normal people have are our attention and the most value is attached to our wallets. Guess what, we part with both when we willingly watch ads.

You don't need an LLM writing 600 lines of SQL, because Google already has a billion lines of code in production, serving ads. Stealing your attention when you should be meeting friends, or meeting a family member's gaze.

> People overestimate the power of digital surveillance enormously

For the average person it's the exact opposite. They have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

I'm fully expecting my next employer to grill me on my grocery purchasing habits and inferred medical history in my next job interview. Its all there for purchase and AI can put it all together into a compelling narrative. Suddenly my preference for prunes becomes a lifelong dire struggle with irregular bowel movement that may distract me from my work. Expect pointed questions about bathroom break lengths.

"Ah, now here's the thing about that. I wrote this custom 'surveillance countermeasures' tool a few years ago and have been using it ever since. It constantly emits false data about me to confuse these sorts of data collection services. Funny that it thinks I would like prunes."

It will be worse, they'll hire a "third party" to analyze it for then and return a yes/no or risk score. No information will be available about the third party and local laws won't apply because the score was calculated in the cloud.

> People were compensated for being in the Stasi, and they're compensated for participating on Facebook. It's just in Facebook, they're compensated by social credits - they get laid by their neighbour, instead of being paid off directly.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb

>they get laid by their neighbour, instead of being paid off directly.

If anything, they get laid less than before Facebook, less than ever, if the official polls are to be trusted...

The original quote is "The banality of evil", about the shoa in the third reich?

Yes, by Hannah Arendt.

But the concept is broadly applicable, and certainly applies here. The point is that evil actions at the state level depend on ordinary people who conform to expectations without thinking about the societal consequences of what they’re doing.

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Because of this I am finding the internet more and more useless. I cannot tell you how much reading this freaks me out. I mean, is anyone else here as freaked out as I am?

The only way out is to unplug. Something I am realizing is very hard to do mainly because of my conditioning. My goal it to become the next Jesus (in the human sense), or the next St. Francis.

Just like my compulsive intent to keep coming back here to make these useless comments. What does it really do for me?

The capitalists (and you cannot tel me this is not because of capitalism) have ruined everything about the internet.

My goal: A flip phone (with a faraday bag) and a laptop with no connection to me at all, just to use to look up things, like a library.

>Just like my compulsive intent to keep coming back here to make these useless comments. What does it really do for me?

The same thing it does for everybody else: gives them some rare in real life engagement in discussing topics they care about, and subtitutes for interested friends.

> It’s who’s looking at your profile; it’s the profiles that you’re looking at. That was the holy grail

Facebook actually implemented this as a user facing feature.

I think it was very early days, but I used it, it was fucking creepy, and everyone hated it. I think Facebook probably removed it because it drove people away. It made you feel like a creep for checking on your friends page.

> The Banality of Surveillance

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