[landl0rd]

Of course I can't even begin trying to prove you wrong. You're making an unfalsifiable statement. You're pointing to the Russel's Teapot of sigint.

It's well-established that the American IC, primarily NSA, collects a lot of metadata about internet traffic. There are some justifications for this and it's less bad in the age of ubiquitous TLS, but it generally sucks. However, legal protections against directly spying on the actual decrypted content of Americans are at least in theory stronger.

Snowden's leaks mentioned the NSA tapping inter-DC links of Google and Yahoo, so I doubt if they had to tap links that there's a ton of voluntary cooperation.

I'd also point out that trying to parse the unabridged prodigious output of the SlopGenerator9000 is a really hard task unless you also use LLMs to do it.

[tdeck]

> Snowden's leaks mentioned the NSA tapping inter-DC links of Google and Yahoo, so I doubt if they had to tap links that there's a ton of voluntary cooperation.

The laws have changed since then and it's not for the better:

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/congress-passing-bill-th...

[tuckerman]

Even if the laws give them this power, I believe it would be extremely difficult for an operation like this to go unnoticed (and therefore unreported) at most of these companies. MUSCULAR [1] was able to be pulled off because of the cleartext inter-datacenter traffic which was subsequently encrypted. It's hard to see how they could pull off a similar operation without the cooperation of Google which would also entail a tremendous internal cover up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR

[onli]

Warrantlessly installed backdoors in the log system combined with a gag order, combined with secret courts, all "perfectly legal". Not really hard to imagine.

[tuckerman]

You would have to gag a huge chunk of the engineers and I just don’t think that would work without leaks. Google’s infrastructure would not make something like that easy to do clandestinely (trying to avoid saying impossible but it gets close).

I was an SRE and SWE on technical infra at Google, specifically the logging infrastructure. I am under no gag order.

[dmurray]

> You're pointing to the Russel's Teapot of sigint.

If there were multiple agencies with billion dollar budgets and a belief that they had an absolute national security mandate to get a teapot into solar orbit, and to lie about it, I would believe there was enough porcelain up there to make a second asteroid belt.

[cwillu]

> I'd also point out that trying to parse the unabridged prodigious output of the SlopGenerator9000 is a really hard task unless you also use LLMs to do it.

The input is what's interesting.

[Aeolun]

It doesn’t change the monumental scope of the problem though.

Though I’m inclined to believe the US gov can if OpenAI can.

[Yizahi]

Metadata is spying (c) Bruce Schneier

If a CIA spook is stalking you everywhere, documenting your every visible move or interaction, you probably would call that spying. Same applies to digital.

Also, teapot argument can be applied in reverse. We have all these documented open digital network systems everywhere, and you want to say that one the most unprofitable and certainly the most expensive to run system is somehow protecting all user data? That belief is based on what? At least selling data is based on evidence of the industry and on actual ToS'es of other similar corpos.

[jstanley]

The comment you replied to isn't saying that metadata isn't spying. It's saying that the spies generally don't have free access to content data.

[rl3]

>However, legal protections against directly spying on the actual decrypted content of Americans are at least in theory stronger.

Yeah, because the definition of collection was redefined to mean accessing the full content already stored on their systems, post-interception. It wasn't considered collected until an analyst views it. Metadata was a laughable dog and pony show that was part of the same legal shell games at the time, over a decade ago now.

That said, from an outsider's perspective it sounded like the IC did collectively erect robust guard rails such that access to information was generally controlled and audited. I felt like this broke down a bit once sharing 702 data with other federal agencies was expanded around the same time period.

These days, those guard rails might be the only thing standing in the way of democracy as we know it ending in the US. AI processing applied to full-take collection is terrifying, just ask the Chinese.

[zer00eyz]

> However, legal protections against directly spying on the actual decrypted content of Americans are at least in theory stronger.

This was the point of the lots of the five eyes programs. Its not legal for the US to spy on its own citizens, but it isnt against the law for us to do to the Australians... Who are all to happy to reciprocate.

> Snowden's leaks mentioned the NSA tapping inter-DC links of Google and Yahoo...

Snowden's info wasn't really news for many of us who were paying attention in the aftermath of 9/11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A (This was huge on slashdot at the time... )

[komali2]

There's no way to know, but it's safer to assume.

[Workaccount2]

My choice conspiracy is that the three letter agencies actively support their omnipresent, omniknowing conspiracies because it ultimately plays into their hand. Sorta like a Santa Claus for citizens.

[bigyabai]

> because it ultimately plays into their hand.

How? Scared criminals aren't going to make themselves easy to find. Three-letter spooks would almost certainly prefer to smoke-test a docile population than a paranoid one.

In fact, it kinda overwhelmingly seems like the opposite happens. Remember the 2015 San-Bernadino shooting that was pushed into the national news for no reason? Remember how the FBI bloviated about how hard it was to get information from an iPhone, 3 years after Tim Cook's assent to the PRISM program?

Stuff like this is almost certainly theater. If OpenAI perceived retention as a life-or-death issue, they would be screaming about this case from the top of their lungs. If the FBI percieved it as a life-or-death issue, we would never hear about it in our lifetimes. The dramatic and protracted public fights suggest to me that OpenAI simply wants an alibi. Some sort of user-story that smells like secure and private technology, but in actuality is very obviously neither.