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In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor.

In the piece, Schneier notes that the existing landscape of electronic surveillance has already transformed the modern era, becoming the business model of the Internet , where our digital footprints are constantly tracked and analyzed for commercial reasons. Spying, by contrast, can take that kind of economically inspired monitoring to a completely new level:

"Spying and surveillance are different but related things," Schneier writes. "If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did."

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Contributor | Photothek )

While based in the United States from 2008 to 2014, human rights activist Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan tweeted critically about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) to more than 160,000 followers. After he returned to Saudi Arabia in 2015, his anonymous account allegedly became unmasked by former Twitter employees who were charged with conspiring with the Saudi regime to silence dissidents. Now, his sister, Areej Al-Sadhan, is suing Twitter for allegedly violating its terms of service and giving her brother's "identifying information to the government of Saudi Arabia" when his Twitter speech should've been protected.

"This puts every Twitter user at risk," Areej alleged in an affidavit supporting her complaint . "As a result, Saudi Arabia kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and—through a sham trial— sentenced my brother to 20 years in prison, simply for criticizing Saudi repression on his Twitter account."

Areej is a US citizen who alleges that she has been stalked, threatened, and targeted by the KSA ever since she began speaking out on her brother's behalf—including on Twitter, where her account currently has nearly 15,000 followers. She filed the lawsuit on behalf of Abdulrahman in a US district court in San Francisco, claiming that her brother is an incompetent (unable to help their attorney) because he disappeared after the KSA sentenced him to prison and thus cannot defend himself. He has not been heard from since 2021, the lawsuit said.

The internet has transformed our lives. But while we use the internet to access information and talk to our friends and family, we are exposed to extensive commercial tracking online. This tracking is another way of saying surveillance. Not from governments, but from private companies, who only wish to use it to manipulate us.

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