Espionage and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a listening device in your house or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end I received a report of all the conversations you had and the content of those conversations. If I hired that same private investigator to keep an eye on you, I’d get a different report: where you went, who you talked to, what you bought, what you did.
Before the Internet, it was expensive and time-consuming to keep tabs on someone. You had to manually follow someone and note where they went, who they spoke to, what they bought, what they did, and what they read. That world is gone forever. Our phones track our locations. Credit cards track our purchases. Apps keep track of who we talk to and e-readers know what we read. Computers collect data about what we do with them, and as both storage and processing have become cheaper, that data is being stored and used more and more. What was manual and individual has become bulk and mass. Surveillance has become the business model of the Internet, and there is no reasonable way to abandon it.
Spying is another matter. It has long been possible to tap someone’s phone or place a listening device in their home and/or car, but this still requires someone to listen to the conversations and make sense of them. Yes, spyware companies like NSO Group help the government hack into people’s phones, but… someone still have to go through all the conversations. And governments like China could censor social media posts based on certain words or phrases, but it was crude and easily circumvented. Spying is limited by the need for human labor.
AI will change that. Summarizing is something a modern generative AI system is good at. Give it an hour-long meeting, and it will produce a one-page summary of what was said. Ask it to search through millions of conversations and organize them by topic, and it will do that. Do you want to know who is talking about what? It will tell you.
The technologies are not perfect; some are quite primitive. They miss things that are important. They do other things wrong. But that also applies to people. And, unlike humans, AI tools can be replicated by the millions and improve to an astonishing degree. They’ll be better next year, and even better the year after that. We are about to enter the age of mass espionage.
Mass surveillance has fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance. Because all data is stored, mass surveillance allows people to conduct surveillance back in time without even knowing who specifically you want to target. Tell me where this person was last year. Make a list of all the red sedans driven this gone in the past month. Make a list of all the people who bought all the ingredients for a pressure cooker bomb in the past year. Find all pairs of phones that moved toward each other, turned themselves off, and then turned back on an hour later while moving away from each other (a sign of a secret meeting).
Likewise, mass espionage will change the nature of espionage. All data is stored. It will all be bulk searchable and understandable. Tell me who has spoken about a particular topic in the past month and how the discussions on that topic have evolved. Person A has done something; check to see if anyone has told them to do this. Find anyone plotting a crime, spreading a rumor, or planning to attend a political protest.
There is so much more. To uncover an organizational structure, look for someone giving similar instructions to a group of people, and then look for all the people to whom they passed those instructions. To find people’s confidantes, look at who they tell secrets to. You can follow friendships and alliances in great detail as they form and fall apart. In short, you can know everything that everyone is talking about.
This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers. Just as cameras everywhere fuel mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass espionage. Siri and Alexa and “Hey Google” have always been listening; the conversations are simply not saved yet.
Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes the way people behave. They conform. They censor themselves, with the chilling effects that entails. Surveillance facilitates social control, and espionage will only make it worse. Governments around the world are already using mass surveillance; they will also engage in mass espionage.
Companies will spy on people. Mass surveillance ushered in the age of personalized advertising; Mass espionage will boost that industry. Information about what people are talking about, their moods, their secrets: it’s all catnip for marketers looking for an edge. The technology monopolies that currently keep us all under constant surveillance will not be able to resist collecting and using all that data.
In the early days of Gmail, Google talked about using people’s Gmail content to serve them personalized ads. The company shut it down, almost certainly because the keyword data it collected was so poor – and therefore not useful for marketing purposes. That will change soon. Maybe Google won’t be the first to spy on its users’ conversations, but once others start, they won’t be able to resist. Their real customers – their advertisers – will demand this.
We could limit this possibility. We could ban mass espionage. We could adopt strict data privacy rules. But we have done nothing to limit mass surveillance. Why would espionage even be a thing? different?
Future Tense is a collaboration between Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that explores emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
