You just intercept the traffic after its decrypted on the server side, or are you suggesting you somehow send encrypted traffic that never gets decrypted?

Thank you.

Explain to me how you are going to encrypt your LLM API calls with your let's encrypt cert.

There are also multiple ways/places traffic you send to typical cloud/tech company is decrypted and can be intercepted. (Surprised I have to point this out to someone who 'actually works in security ' lol)

Not to mention US tech companies fully cooperate with the NSA in many cases and are aware of this going on.

you compel the host under similar threat of non-existance to grant you view of the hypervisor. you're not running on bare metal with alternate TPM's that arent the Intel IMU (also backdoor'd) so you're just as pwnable.

now say you're doing this on a raspberry pi or other openhardware like a librum machine with a yubikey hsm on local wifi or physical ethernet... you may have a shot at the privacy you're looking for.

Yes, twitter was used by US 3 letter agencies to assist in the arab spring. To be able to do it in a surreptitious way they were asked to move to that building and get access to all private DMs, and for doing so they got a fat tax break to move to "blighted" market street current location. All of those things fit the timeline and snowden capability disclosures.

The CIA venture arm InQTel invested in Dataminr a company that twitter was also a major shareholder. https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-inves...

I appreciate the balance here.

Some of the smartest people I know have worked on fighting NSA, but they had a drastically smaller budget than NSA itself, and the mental availability bias is skewed by the fact that the "fighting NSA" people talked about their work all the time, while the "being NSA" people generally didn't.

I do know one extremely smart person who went to work there, and I witnessed a failed recruitment of another extremely smart person.

> every math phd i am acquainted with has been approached by nsa recruiters.

how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles?

it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop, which at the end of the day is a government job... the only people they make rich are contractors

I'm not saying there aren't smart people working there but it's ridiculous to assume they have an iron grasp on all communication from the top tech companies in the world, while also monitoring half the world's governments... they just don't

I worked on these cases at EFF and I'm skeptical of the automatic "NSA has access to everything" intuition.

What we learned from that era includes things like

(1) spy agencies are incredibly aggressive and pursue tons of different angles to get access to things

(2) spy agencies have a lot of money

(3) spy agencies often have interpretations of law that would surprise the public or legal experts (and sometimes courts have issued sealed rulings permitting them to do things that surprise the public or legal experts later when they're unsealed)

(4) some people throughout different parts of society assume culturally that companies in a country "should" generally help the spy agencies of that country's government because they are the "good guys" or "on the same team" or whatever

These things are all pretty bad and scary, but they still don't imply absolutely infinite power or access, because all of them come with different kinds of pushback. People also just tell them no!

I want to write an article with a colleague about the continuing role of culture here, because I think there are companies or industries where the default reaction is to want to cooperate with the government, and others where the default reaction is not that.

There are certainly secret things that have never come out, e.g. whatever Senator Wyden keeps alluding to, and what kind of program or authority was behind the interception of hardware shipments to covertly tamper with them, and whether there is a bulk financial data interception program, and presumably lots of other stuff. I don't agree with these things, and I want them to be exposed and stopped, and I also don't think they constitute infinite power over all parts of the tech industry.

I don't think there is much overlap between people capable of building cutting edge LLM's and the people who want to build a cutting edge LLM for the government.

They probably also have an insane dataset

> Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs?

Given the evergreen discussion of "are these companies making a profit"*, I think any LLMs that the NSA (or any other government agency worldwide) may be making are quite far from the leading edge.

* Person A: "they are making a loss!" Person B: "Only if you count training, they make a profit on inference, look at what it costs to run comparable open models on generic cloud servers" A: "Sure, but if they don't train new models they'll be left behind, so they're still making a loss"

That and the way compute is now measured in GW, I think even random low budget vloggers just getting started would be able to spot if the NSA was doing anything significant just from the extra heat emissions or power plants getting built.

> do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs?

They probably already have access to Sentinel, so they wouldn't need to train their own.

You cannot really hide the amount of compute required to train an LLM. Do we have actual clues that NASA is training their own frontier model?

Serious question, do you realize that the NSA are mere mortals? Do you realize how much it takes to train a model? Does the NSA make their own chips or planes? The NSA buys a lot of technology because they can't make their own.

I can't say what they're doing now because I worked for the NSA 15 years ago but the view of them as an omnipotent power is a product of Hollywood. The government is good at throwing an ungodly amount of resources at something to get a result, and so they are often the source of original development of technologies. The private sector has always been much better at building a technology to greater sophistication and efficiency. There may be blue badgers in Fort Meade trying to train models but there is no chance they are competitive with the frontier AI companies. It's like saying the government has an amazing home-grown fighter aircraft that is beyond what Lockheed has ever made...they delegate that stuff to private companies for a reason.

The NSA is government agency. They are certainly not training any world class LLMs. They probably have some specialized fine tunings of existing models, but that's it. They don't have the capacity.

given some time, surely. but that seems harder with the model turned off.

So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity.

Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.

The point I'm trying to make is Anthropic's marketing about broad security risk related to the capability of its models is a valid concern though their dog and pony show really overdid it, probably to the detriment of us all for many reasons. It is indeed amplifying the abilities of people to find and exploit security issues.

The point of my anecdote is I was able to identify and fix an at least security adjacent bug in a language I could charitably consider myself a novice in. It happened to very unlikely have a security impact, but that was mere chance. LLMs expand the pool of people able to find and exploit security problems and we're all considerably more vulnerable as a result.

The biggest security threat was always someone bored with $20, a lot of attacks could be ignored or at least not prioritized with that threat model. This isn't true any more and our attack surface has gotten a whole lot larger.