This Needs Fixin'

Today’s links come via Schneier on Security.

It’s time to look at the what the coup has been doing with government data.

TLDR: it’s not good.

You should read these two articles:

• American Panoptocon, from The Atlantic
• ‘This Is What We Were Always Scared of’: DOGE Is Building a Surveillance State, from The New York Times (paywalled)

While both of them are absurdly uncritical about whether DOGE’s “AI” ambitions have any connection to the real world at all (spoiler: they don’t), they do demonstrate that the media are finally taking notice of how world-breaking the coup’s shenanigans actually are.

Very, very world-breaking.

TLDR²: DOGE, The IT Consultants From Hell, has been getting their grubby little hands into all kinds of previously-isolated government data and mixing it together in both stupid and dangerous ways.

All of them very, very illegal.

There are three distinct ways the coup has been misusing federal government data:

• inappropriately accessing, and exfiltrating, need-to-know-only data
• cross-connecting previously-isolated silos of need-to-know-only data
• feeding all this data into LLMs

Each of these by itself would be terrible, but together they are catastrophic.

And, as these articles point out, what this enables is genuinely world-breaking.

And though the panopticon aspects of this are extremely bad, they are at least mitigated by the fact that the “AI” these people believe in doesn’t actually exist.

So, a hallucinating surveillance state rather than an effective one.

Kind of like “The Minority Report”, but if the precogs were constantly taking acid.

Which, from a practical perspective, may actually be worse.

So, to recap: the United States has fallen, and it’s State apparatus is now in the hands of Artificial Intelligence cargo-cultists.

I did not have that on my apocalypse bingo card at all.

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