Category: Xen

‘This Is What We Were Always Scared of’: DOGE Is Building a Surveillance State

LINK: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/opinion/musk-doge-data-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.D08.wM9J.LUKIOA-Md2ip&smid=url-share

“… President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).

What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.

“This is what we were always scared of,” said Kevin Bankston, a longtime civil liberties lawyer and a senior adviser on A.I. governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy and civil rights organization. “The infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism is there for an administration willing to break the law.”

Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security. This month House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from such federal agencies as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data…”

And if you can’t get to the NYT article due to the paywall, here’s a PDF of the NYT article.

Opinion Elon Musk’s Legacy DOGE’s Construction of a Surveillance State - The N

 

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares

To understand the deepening divide between AI boosters and doomers, it’s necessary to unpack their common origins in a bundle of ideologies known as TESCREAL.

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares

LINK: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/

‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday

Liberals in the US make up about 15% of the prepping scene and their numbers are growing. Their fears differ from their better-known rightwing counterparts – as do their methods

‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday

One afternoon in February, hoping to survive the apocalypse or at least avoid finding myself among its earliest victims, I logged on to an online course entitled Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics.

Some of my classmates had activated their cameras. I scrolled through the little windows, noting the alarmed faces, downcast in cold laptop light. There were dozens of us on the call, including a geophysicist, an actor, a retired financial adviser and a civil engineer. We all looked worried, and rightly so. The issue formerly known as climate change was now a polycrisis called climate collapse. H1N1 was busily jumping from birds to cows to people. And with each passing day, as Donald Trump went about gleefully dismantling state capacity, the promise of a competent government response to the next hurricane, wildfire, flood, pandemic, drought, mudslide, heatwave, financial meltdown, hailstorm or other calamity receded further from view.

READ ARTICLE: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/17/preppers-liberals-climate-collapse

The Internet’s Obsession With Luigi Mangione Signals a Major Shift

On Monday, police arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old app developer, in connection with the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Online reaction to his apprehension reveals a new form of fandom.

Luigi Mangione, currently the internet’s main character, probably isn’t who you think he is. Main characters are like that. As soon as someone achieves main character status, they become the screen onto which the world’s opinions and preconceptions get projected. Mangione, who was arrested Monday in connection with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, fits that bill.

LINK: https://www.wired.com/story/internet-culture-luigi-mangione-major-shift-fandom/

The Ballot or the Bullet? Little Known (But Highly Entertaining) Assassination Trivia

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/black-powder-the-ballot-or-the-bullet-little-known-but-highly-entertaining-assassination-trivia
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/black-powder-the-ballot-or-the-bullet-little-known-but-highly-entertaining-assassination-trivia

Violence among humans seems to be worst when it is institutionalized (as in a standing army). Then it becomes the basis of the society’s economy. It becomes self-perpetuating and self-justifying. In addition to the death and destruction it causes, it re-enforces a masculinist character among the people. This is not the violence I am talking about, but rather the hit-and-run spontaneous violence of autonomous anarchist collectives. Not against the general populace, but against those in control. Anarchist violence still kills, but is quite a different thing from the massive, scientifically planned objective violence of institutions like the Pentagon. It is more like the violence of a cornered animal defending itself. Still, those who kill defile themselves, and they must be prepared to accept the consequences of that defilement. But at this stage in the crisis of international industrialism, I see no effective alternative to revolutionary violence. And revolutionary violence is effective — that’s why the U.S. government is so uptight about it.

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Person of interest in fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson ID’d as Luigi Mangione, an ex-Ivy League student

Police have taken a person of interest into custody in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The person of interest identified in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is an anti-capitalist former Ivy League student — who liked online quotes from “Unabomber’’ Ted Kaczynski raging against the country’s medical community.

Tech whiz Luigi Mangione, 26, of Towson, Md., was taken into custody Monday morning at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., after an intense manhunt following the coldblooded execution of Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel last week, sources said.

He has not been charged.

The former prep school valedictorian was caught with a manifesto that appeared to list grievances against the health care industry, including its taking of enormous profits and its alleged shady motives, sources said.

MORE INFO: https://nypost.com/2024/12/09/us-news/person-of-interest-in-fatal-shooting-of-unitedhealthcare-boss-brian-thompson-idd-as-luigi-mangione-an-ex-ivy-league-student/

He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?

Philip Agre, a computer scientist turned humanities professor, was prescient about many of the ways technology would impact the world.

Jean-Francois Podevin/for The Washington Post; images from iStock.) (Jean-Francois Podevin for The Washington Post; images from iStock)

In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.

That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then-UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful “big brother” government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.

“Genuinely worrisome developments can seem ‘not so bad’ simply for lacking the overt horrors of Orwell’s dystopia,” wrote Agre, who has a doctorate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an academic paper.

Nearly 30 years later, Agre’s paper seems eerily prescient, a startling vision of a future that has come to pass in the form of a data industrial complex that knows no borders and few laws. Data collected by disparate ad networks and mobile apps for myriad purposes is being used to sway elections or, in at least one case, to out a gay priest. But Agre didn’t stop there. He foresaw the authoritarian misuse of facial recognition technology, he predicted our inability to resist well-crafted disinformation and he foretold that artificial intelligence would be put to dark uses if not subjected to moral and philosophical inquiry.

Then, no one listened. Now, many of Agre’s former colleagues and friends say they’ve been thinking about him more in recent years, and rereading his work, as pitfalls of the Internet’s explosive and unchecked growth have come into relief, eroding democracy and helping to facilitate a violent uprising on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in January.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Menti

“We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal?”

In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention

In a pitch deck to prospective customers, one of Facebook’s alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users’ smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.

As 404 Media reports based on documents leaked to its reporters, the TV and radio news giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its so-called “Active Listening” software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.”

“Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the deck continues.

In the same slideshow, CMG counted Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients of its “Active Listening” service. After 404 reached out to Google about its partnership, the tech giant removed the media group from the site for its “Partners Program,” which prompted Meta, the owner of Facebook, to admit that it is reviewing CMG to see if it violates any of its terms of service.

An Amazon spokesperson, meanwhile, told 404 that its Ads arm “has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so. The spox added, confusingly, that if one of its marketing partners violates its rules, the company will take action.

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Ishmael Series

Ishmael Series

Descriptions: https://www.goodreads.com/series/96452-ishmael

Download: https://libgen.rs/fiction/4EE3B6D8E3F84E05A344237F3B8CEB30

12,000-year-old ritual passed down 500 generations may be world’s oldest

Professor Bruno David (L) and Uncle Russell Mullett (R) pictured in the cave. courtesy of Jess Shapiro for GLaWAC
Professor Bruno David (L) and Uncle Russell Mullett (R) pictured in the cave. courtesy of Jess Shapiro for GLaWAC

Buried deep in an Australian cave, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that an Aboriginal ritual may have been passed down 500 generations and survived 12,000 years, making it the oldest known continuous cultural practice in the world, according to a new study.

LINK: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/04/science/worlds-oldest-ritual-intl-scli-scn/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc