Asklemmy

You're distrust of AI hype is fine, but you're missing the point. OP said AI makes it simple to compile dossiers on everyone, meaning it's now far less labor intensive to take all of the data being gathered by SIGINT and turn it into reports. The amount of labor required to build 10M dossiers on mostly impotent randos makes it completely unfeasible, but with generative AI being able to quickly summarize a dataset, suddenly we can have shitty, somewhat lossy dossiers on every moron shitposter.

Not chatGPT. But AIs are good at one single thing and that is pattern recognition. And there is a lot of data to train and use those AIs on. Decades of data from your PCs, phones and tablets is on NSA servers. And yes, the NSA did shit like recording you through your notebook camera or recording your phone calls with your first girlfriend.

AI will probably never replace human workers/engineers/artists/..., but sorting through your online history is exactly what AIs excel at.

Also Dragnet policies are used by the police for a long time now. This is pretty much just that. Imo the main question is more if they want to burn that data on this task, because once they do this some people will adjust and it will get harder to get new data.

It's not even an AI thing; look at how widespread domestic surveillance was back in the 60s. In the years since it's only gotten easier to record messages and calls, match those records back to addresses or GPS-given locations, catch people on video, etc.