More Big Brother Tech

This week Axios reported a scoop that takes us to another extension of the surveillance state. Big Brother wishes he could have pulled this off.

The State Department has set out to catch foreign students who support Hamas and eject them from the country, and they are going to do it by using AI to scan student social media accounts. 

I don't want to argue about Hamas vs Israel here. I do want to note the absolute terrifying level of surveillance being used here. AI will scan the internet, scrape up whatever, and flag anyone who has displayed a Double Plus Ungood idea so that the government can then take action against that person. 

Today it's foreign students who express too much sympathy for Hamas. But tomorrow? There are no limits, other than legal guardrails, a bureaucratic sense of decency, and a lack of imagination. So maybe tomorrow we scan teacher social media accounts to see who is doing forbidden diversity stuff. Maybe we search through government employee accounts to see who can be fired for insufficient loyalty to Dear Leader. 

And of course this would have to be done badly, by training the AI to work from the administration list of Forbidden Words, which gets us such genius moves as removing archival reference to the Enola Gay and various people whose last name was Gay, because, you know-- Don't Say Gay. 

Tying repressive, invasive, rights-violating surveillance to Artificial "Intelligence" is just the chef's kiss to bad policy. AI doesn't read, doesn't understand, doesn't interpret. It acts just as badly as it is trained to act. It does not know better. To use it as a means of tracking down Unapproved Ideas is irresponsible and just plain wrong.

It's an alarming first step, a whole new kind of cyber attack.