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I find it hard to believe that the federal government is capable of building a perfect panopticon in any reasonable timeframe. There are just too many leaky gaps in how info is collected. I imagine that criminals long since abandoned cellphones and facebook for sending business communications, and even chat gpt doesnt know what criminals are up to. What i think will be interesting is when we will see a sort of parallel construction of evidence using AI- the feds could feed their mega cache of comms data into a gpt-esque thing and ask who the likely ne'er do wells are and then go and start busting doors. Presumably, if the input data is solid and the AI isn't seeing rainbows, you could get some hits even if they are mixed in with some misses. Presumably some agency or PD will eventually try this, and presumably at some point it will become a point of evidence in trial that this is happening.
Parallel construction is super illegal. would using an AI be a loophole until further noted? who knows but ultimately its probably a bad decade to be starting up a scarface type situation.
Interestingly, i bet gpt would also be super amazing at figuring out who is dodging taxes, but what with the IRS having only 2 rusty pennies to rub together i doubt this will happen either.
The smart ones have but we mostly catch the dumb ones. I recall one instance where they did a drug deal under a live CCTV camera. Other times, they all switch their phones off at the same time when going out to do some crime. There are also occasional sting programs where they import phones that are supposed to be secured but the game was rigged from the start.
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It doesn't have to be perfect to be almost unimaginably harmful. Removing the bottleneck of human labor in surveillance and analysis is a serious threat to the idea of limited or even responsive government.
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