Scott Alexander

There are eight others.

It would be great to get further clarification on this point.

Back to the text.

Mass analysis of third-party data is also legal.

That is, if they buy the data from some company, let's say Facebook, they can do whatever they want with it.

The main enforceable exception is certain kinds of cell phone location data, which were carved out in a 2018 Supreme Court case.

Whatever the president thinks is legal may also, in certain cases, be legal.

During the War on Terror, President George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel claimed that he also had the inherent constitutional power as president to lawfully authorize warrantless mass collection of internet metadata and telephone call records, a dragnet scooping up American and non-American's data alike.

The program was initially justified by counter-terrorism, but was far more expansive.

Footnote.

To be fair, there are some genuine technical reasons for this.

Because of how traffic routes across the internet's logical and physical structure, the government correctly notes that it's often hard to know before grabbing them whether a given set of internet packets is related to a foreign intelligence query or not.

But members of both parties and non-partisan inspectors general have repeatedly identified how this technical decision has enabled abuses.

Back to the text.

This was such a scandal within the US government that many DOJ officials threatened to resign.

Even DOJ officials who didn't know what was going on threatened to resign because they assumed it was so bad.

Later, the program was moved under statutory and FISA court frameworks, until finally Congress ended it by passing the USA Freedom Act.

So why should we be concerned about even lawful use of AIs for surveillance?

There are stories about each of these categories, but the most compelling is that the government can buy data from third parties, for example tech companies, cell phone companies, and surveil it as much as they want.

In the past, the strongest disincentive was scale and cost.