If it required ~700 servers in ~150 locations (mostly US military bases and embassies) to surveil a small slice of internet and other traffic back then, how many would it require now? How many locations would those servers need to be situated? And how would NSA positions situated in embassies capture all of that Internet traffic in a foreign country without getting noticed?
Just think through the logistics of all of this and try to think of a way that any agency could accomplish it in 2026. And now think of all the people in the industry who would have to have at least some knowledge of it, or be able to discover a part of it.
Those are just some of the things one would need to explain and rationalize to even suggest that the NSA is doing what some of the people here are claiming.
One is where their hardware for storing data is. The other commenter was talking about global taps (the sources for the data), of which the Wikipedia article is not speculating the number of.
> how would NSA positions situated in embassies capture all of that Internet traffic in a foreign country without getting noticed?
ISP taps globally, undersea cable taps, the list goes on.
You think the politicians are going to say "The career employees made some convincing arguments about why this is impractical / immoral, guess we'll give up our unregulated power/omniscience"? Or, they will raise the military budgets and continue skipping the audits.
i am a big fan of llms and the possibilities they enable. but i also find this type of behavior extremely rude! ai;dr for life. :is-your-human-around: is my preferred emoji for reacting to such behavior
> The problem is not that AI is evil, but most of the people would have to learn new skills and adapt because the profession or job they trained at college doesn't exists anymore.
isn't the problem then capitalism? the promise of AI is to deliver efficiencies, leverage, and consequent surplus. AI does not itself allocate the surplus.
Nope, capitalism is not perfect, but it has lifted billions of people out of poverty and elevated their living standards. The hatred towards capitalism is as irrational as the hatred towards data centers. If you really want to find something to hate and blame all your problems, then blame it on corruption and incompetent politicians.
what surplus are you talking about? do you expect free wealth handout to people? that's not how capitalism works. You don't get rewarded for doing/contributing nothing. Capitalism provides you the opportunity to work and build something without being limited by the state or authority.
What is the exact value proposition of AI as it exists right now for the average person who lives where these things are being built? They don't even get jobs. With golf, they can enjoy the outdoors and escape a little bit.
I'm not entirely certain, but I think a data center might just provide more temporary and permanent jobs than a golf course, and with likely higher mean and median wages.
The golf park isn't even the best natural-adjacent use of the space.
A regular park or a trail will service a significantly larger portion of the population than a private property that transfers wealth from the community to a single person or corporation.
>I'm not entirely certain, but I think a data center might just provide more temporary and permanent jobs than a golf course, and with likely higher mean and median wages.
Well, you're right to be uncertain. After they're built, once the crews that built them move on to the next one, they don't even bother to keep the lights on. They might hire private security guards to patrol the exterior, but that's hardly an infusion of capital into the community.
> The golf park isn't even the best natural-adjacent use of the space.
> A regular park or a trail will service a significantly larger portion of the population than a private property that transfers wealth from the community to a single person or corporation.
Ok. Then they can decide to build a nature trail instead. The local community should make the decision and not be coerced because someone from the coasts thinks that they're a minor annoyance that needs to be lectured on the future of humanity or whatever lessbad rational-du-jore is being peddled.
> going to go out on a limb here and guess that net-net, a datacenter provides more benefits to a broader spectrum of society than a golf course does.
Is that true locally though? Having a golf course nearby your home is better than the golf course just existing somewhere, at least if you play golf, but that is decidedly not true of data centers. You might benefit from at least some of them existing, but derive very little benefit from having one in your backyard and a lot of potential downsides.
> Having a golf course nearby your home is better than the golf course just existing somewhere, at least if you play golf, but that is decidedly not true of data centers.
Isn't that the standard NIMBY argument, which ensures nothing ever gets built? Who wants a power plant, or dump near their house? Even if there's some vague local benefit (eg. a dump that benefits the county), you could always make the argument to put it on the other side of the county or whatever.
the companies and their customers, whose systems openai and anthropic hacked and abused. including all incidental damages of repairing said systems.
on top of that the public, who have a right to see that the law is applied universally, without fear or favor.
finally our future selves, who will thank us for maintaining a rule of law. such that we can prevent now the enormous risks to society of dario amodei and sam altman, their hubris, self-absorbtion, and greed.
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