SRI

Back from the FutureTime-traveling AIs and privacy

Brad Templeton

Electronic Frontier Foundation

(& Foresight Institute)

brad@eff.org

SRI

• Value of Privacy• Threats to Privacy

– Now– Near– Future

• AI and Time Travel

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Privacy is Freedom – the Heisenberg problem

• A Watched Populace never boils• Surveillance doesn’t chill all freedom, but

why give up any important freedom?• Anonymous communication the foundation

of free societies• “Privacy is what you take away from

someone when you want to torture them.”• Stasi -> Stagnation

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Blinded me with bad science

• Look hard enough, in a big enough sea of data

• You’ll probably find whatever you’re looking for

• Seattle firefighter learned this

• Scientists barely know this, ordinary people and juries don’t.

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Shy people need privacy

• Can't function the same as extroverts

• Should we just force them into personality mod?

• Homosexuals of the 60s might not have minded only government knowing

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Why be a privacy Zealot?

• You don't care about your privacy until after it's invaded– They’ll trade it for a chance to win an iPod

• You must protect other's privacy to protect yours• There really is a slope -- "we accept this, why not

more?“• You must not walk even near the edge of the

police state

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Pushbutton police state

• Build the apparatus of a police state it will be used.

• Whether we live in a police state becomes a question of policy, not of implementation

• The sanity check of tanks in the streets is gone

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EFF vs. AT&T

• President orders NSA to do wiretaps

• The phone companies do the dirty work

• Boxes installed in secret rooms at major switching centers

• Suspicion of data mining everybody’s call records

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RFID

• They won’t burn it out

• Going in your passport

• Going into clothes, shoes, wallet, glasses, car keys, under your skin.

• Readable much further away than specified

• Not very secure when cheap

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CALEA

• We must become the instruments of our own surveillance

• So few legal wiretaps, so few for real crimes

• Innovation killer

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Airport privacy invaders

• Automated Targetting System

• CAPPS and CAPPS II

• Clear Card

• TIA

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Capability for Nanosurveillance

• Cheap, ubiquitous sensors

• Micro power supplies

• Cheap, ubiquitous networks

• Undetectable communications

• In private as well as public hands

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What’s coming very soon

• Electronic noses that can sense minute traces of chemicals, drugs

• Cheap DNA detectors and sequencers

• Cheap cameras, digital recording and bandwidth

• Low power electronics

• Sound transducers

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More coming soon

• Face recognition

• Speech recognition

• Speaker recognition

• The scalability of surveillance

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What will they use it for

• Drug testing 24/7

• Sobriety, cholesterol testing 24/7

• Your toilet betrays you

• Health insurance pricing

• Neighbourhood security – cameras owned by your neighbours

• Plain old-fashioned espionage

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What’s coming later

• Smart dust

• Mesh networking with UWB

• Artificial insects and microbes

• Focus light without lenses

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AI Privacy Invasion

• Understanding natural language documents in bulk

• Face and person recognition• Speech recognition• Facial expression and body language

recognition• Patterns of network activity

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Scalability is the Key

• Always been possible to follow people• It didn't scale• Computers have scaled a lot of it• AI can scale the rest

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Time Travel

• We don't have good AI today• We will have more of it in the future• We do have cheap storage today• We're recording what goes on• AI systems will be able to scan the past• “Are you now or have you ever been...”

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Sins of the Future Are visited in the Past

• We know what to look out for today• We keep private what could hurt us• We don't know what will be the sins of the

future• What we consider bad today they may not

care about

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What to do?

• Consider privacy invasive uses of what we design today

• Consider its use in other regimes and future regimes

• Be a bit paranoid, even with things you don't think you have to protect -- yet.

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They’ll abuse it

• Hey, it’s not like they would tap people without warrants

• Echelon program and international cooperation

• The scalability of good and evil

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Views of the future

• “Privacy is dead, get over it.”

• European Privacy Laws

• Children raised without privacy

• The transparent society

• Privacy must die

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The Transparent Society

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Three competing forces

• Freedom to observe, record, share and publish information

• Desire for security

• Need for privacy

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Not always a tradeoff

• It’s not necessary security vs. privacy

• For each problem, we must find the “strengthened cockpit door.”

• It’s not always so obvious, it may be more work, but it’s worth it.

• The boogeymen: Terrorists, kiddie pornographers, music pirates

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Can we stop the surveillance?

• Not with laws

• Perhaps with tech

• Perhaps with convention

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Extreme Suggestions

• Watch everybody • Watch the profiled• Rewire the brains of the profiled• Rewire everybody!• Hope prosperity discourages attack?• Will prosperity (destroying ideology)

trigger the attack?

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Is surveillance that effective?

• Not even in china or prison camps

• Oppressed always win, at least in the small

• But it’s always abused

• And what we build is used in less enlightened places

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You can't stop terrorism with enhanced security

• You can't win a "war on terrorism", not with technology, not with surveillance

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The more you ban privacy, the more people will want it

• And the more people will help them

• The blind eye

• Deliberate noise

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We've always used social convention

• This is not like trying to command the tide not to come in.

• Human behaviour is much more fungible than gravity.

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Live Free or Die

• If privacy is freedom it's worth defending

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Thank you