The first was the discovery of the scope of nation states’ digital surveillance of populations, and in particular Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the US National Security Agency (NSA). These revealed that surveillance programmes set up in the wake of 9/11 piggy-backed on the algorithmic data collection of US social media and search engine corporations, all of whom collaborated with the NSA’s PRISM programme. What Snowden also showed was that the NSA processed the information gathered from PRISM and other projects by means of its own advanced AI programmes, collecting data and metadata, storing it on NSA cloud servers, and applying ML to identify suspect activities and associations (Gallagher 2013a, 2013b; Grothoth and Porup 2016). While the ostensible target of such AI-driven surveillance was terrorism, its technologies could unquestionably be applied to other purposes. Protestors already subject to ‘cyber-crackdowns’ via CCTV, mobile phone and social media surveillance were now potentially subject to a new extreme of scrutiny, if not necessarily from the NSA itself, then by the downward creep of AI-driven surveillance from elite intelligence agencies such as the NSA and GCHQ to police forces, private security firms and corporate labour spies (Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko 2019).
The second pulse of AI-driven decomposition into internet politics can be summed up in the name ‘Cambridge Analytica’, if we take this as a shorthand for the convergence of alt-right networks, electoral digital strategy and Russian cyber-war interventions around Donald Trump’s election campaign. The contribution of AI to this scandal, which is still ramifying, has several levels. First, while the details of the voter profiling and targeting programs used by billionaire Robert Mercer’s company to assist Trump remain opaque, his background as an AI pioneer make it a virtual certainty these involved ML. Second, the Trump campaign relied on Facebook, an ML pioneer, both for the data obtained by Cambridge Analytica, and for the overt assistance Zuckerberg’s company provided Trump’s campaign in tailoring its digital advertising. Third, Trump’s electoral strategists, his alt-right supporters and friendly Russian operatives all relied for the circulation of their messages on social media algorithms promoting provocative, attention-grabbing, and hence advertising-lucrative content. By 2016, these algorithms were engineered with the assistance of ML. It is not for nothing that Robert Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, devised a parlour game based on Trump’s campaign called ‘The Machine Learning President’ (Mayer 2018).
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inhuman power