Think of all the complete garbage interactions you'd have to sift through to find anything useful from a national security standpoint. The data is practically obfuscated by virtue of its banality.
"We kill people based on metadata." - National Security Agency Gen. Michael Hayden
Raw data with time-series significance is their absolute favorite. You might argue something like Google Maps data is "obfuscated by virtue of its banality" until you catch the right person in the wrong place. ChatGPT sessions are the same way, and it's going to be fed into aggregate surveillance systems in the way modern telecom and advertiser data is.
This is mostly security theater, and generally not worth the lift when you consider the steps needed to unlock the value of that data in the context of investigations.
-The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s 2014 review of the NSA “Section 215” phone-record program found no instance in which the dragnet produced a counter-terror lead that couldn’t have been obtained with targeted subpoenas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Civil_Liberties_...
-After Boston, Paris, Manchester, and other attacks, post-mortems showed the perpetrators were already in government databases. Analysts simply didn’t connect the dots amid the flood of benign hits.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/whole-haystack
-Independent tallies suggest dozens of civilians killed for every intended high-value target in Yemen and Pakistan, largely because metadata mis-identifies phones that change pockets.
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/36962/pdf
Search engines have been doing this since the mid 90s and have only improved, to think that any data is obfuscated by its being part of some huge volume of other data is a fallacy at best.
Searchable? You have to know what to search for, and you have to rule out false positives. How do you discern a person roleplaying some secret agent scenario vs. a person actually plotting something? That's not something a search function can distinguish. It requires a human to sift through that data.
> How do you discern a person roleplaying some secret agent scenario vs. a person actually plotting something?
Meta data and investigation.
> That's not something a search function can distinguish.
We know that it can narrow down hugely from the initial volume.
> It requires a human to sift through that data.
Yes, the point of collating, analysing, and searching data is not to make final judgements but to find targets for investigation by the available agents. That's the same reason we all use search engines, to narrow down, they never produce what we intend by intention alone, we still have to read the final results. Magic is still some way off.
You're acting as if we can automate humans out of the loop entirely, which would be a straw man. Is anyone saying we can get rid of the police or security agencies by using AI? Or perhaps AI will become the police, perhaps it will conduct traffic stops using driverless cars and robots? I suppose it could happen, though I'm not sure what the relevance would be here.
And yet billions of dollars (at least) has gone into it. A whole group of people with access to the data and the means to sift it disagree and are willing to put their money behind it, so your bare assertions count for nowt.
Great. What do you think that proves? That doesn't negate my inital argument. The data is largely useless, and often counterproductive. The evidence shows the vast majority of plots are foiled through conventional means, and ruling out false positives is more trouble than it's worth. I cited sources in this thread. Where are your sources?
"Corporations and the US government are spending money on it, so it must be useful." Are you serious? Lmao.
