S. Smith

The terminator has been dethroned as sci-fi’s most terrifying killer robot. That honor now, and probably forever, belongs to the headless, robotic, murder dogs from Black Mirror’s episode ‘Metalhead’. Set sometime in the future, with pretty much no details given on how the world ended up in such a state, except for the fact that a pack of almost invincible, quadrupedal drones stalk the land, murdering as if on auto-pilot, forever carrying out some outmoded directive of a long-ago ended war.

But seriously, watching one of these headless robot dogs break out into full, high-speed lope as it chases a fleeing van is unsettling on some primal level. Maybe it’s the lack of a face, or the fact that it clearly has only one goal in mind: murder anyone it comes into contact with, as quickly and efficiently as possible. I won’t spoil the rest, but it’s the best episode of the new season.

It’s unsettling in a different way as well, in that this future is entirely within the realm of possibility. It’s not that far-fetched a notion that the military would create an army of almost invincible dog drones, equipped with weapons and one task. Imagine if Google’s Go-mastering AI were uploaded to each drone as well? How would any military stop a drone army that could learn and adapt in order to carry out its assigned task?

The robot apocalypse doesn’t require a fully self-aware AI, but maybe just a military drone that we built a little too well.

01/03/17 Midday links

Posted on January 3, 2018 by S. Smith

Global Research: Draconian State Surveillance: Britain’s falling press freedom tells of another disturbing story

The Hill: Bulk surveillance is the wrong way to approach security

National Defense: Big Data, artificial intelligence to advance modeling and simulation

Bloomberg: Americans should have more control over their data

Techdirt: Texas cops arrest journalist for publishing confidential info given to her by a cop

Patch: Will ABC really tell us what happened at Waco in 1993?

Washington Times: The Bundy cases bear remarkable, and unsettling, similarities to 1993 Waco standoff

American Conservative: Washington’s gutless reaction to our addiction crisis

FEE: The Postal Service is the problem, not Amazon

Ars Technica: Meet “raw” water: ludicrously-priced unfiltered water with random bacteria

Wired: Why artificial intelligence is not like your brain…yet

USA Today: Elon Musk says AI could doom civilization. Zuckerberg disagrees. Who’s right?

01/03/2018 Overnight links

Posted on January 3, 2018January 2, 2018 by S. Smith

FEE: Insane Homeland Security spending doesn’t make us any safer

The New American: DHS to spend $1 billion to expand illegal facial scanning program at airports

And for a comprehensive look into the expansion of facial recognition tech in US airports, Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology recently released a detailed report, Not Ready for Takeoff

Axios: Surveillance and sex-trafficking on Congress’ to-do list

Reason: RAND PAUL: No foreign spy program reauthorization without citizen protections

Techdirt: Police training firm dumps interrogation technique linked to multiple false confessions

Defense Daily Network: Pentagon begins year of restructure with uncertain funding

Slate: 2017 was a great year for alien-hunting

The National Interest: Who watches the watchers in the US navy?

Futurism: An AI-powered network could save the navy billions of dollars

Cipher Brief: Pandora’s Bot: how cyber weapons can wreak havoc

01/02/18 Morning links

Posted on January 2, 2018 by S. Smith

Techdirt: DHS documents show harassment and intrusive device searches are a common occurrence at US borders

National Herald India: Will 2018 be the year of Aadhaar-linked deaths?

Planet Biometrics: Ukraine starts collecting biometric data at the border

The Register: UK security chief: how about a tax for tech firms that are ‘uncooperative’ on terror content?

WESA: Pittsburg readies expansion of camera, gunshot surveillance city-wide. Coming to your city, unless you stop it

IB Times UK: NSA leaker Edward Snowden speaks out as Iran silences dissent on the internet

Silicon UK: China’s WeChat denies storing users’ data after spying claims

STAT: The statistics can’t capture the opioid epidemic’s impact on children

Gizmodo: In 2018, we will CRISPR human beings

RT: Bitcoin billionaires and privacy crusaders: Tech leaders to watch in 2018

Coindesk: Aim, fire: bulletproofs is a breakthrough for privacy on the blockchain

InterAksyon: Silicon Valley keeps trends as artificial intelligence goes mainstream

Antiwar.com: Iranian protesters raise stakes, attack police stations

Huffington Post: The ‘Merchants of Death’ survive and prosper. First-World global weapons dealers to Third World tyrants now call themselves ‘defense contractors’.

The Hill: A year later, an investigation in search of a crime

Well this hits close to home: New York Post: Why poo p toys for kids are flying off the shelf. Ed: Parents know why their kids love this stuff, and why we buy them: they’re hilarious, and watching a kid’s raw, feral delight at these toys is too good not to buy. Basically, no other toy elicits a reaction anywhere near the level that these do.

More from New York Post: The 5 craziest things we learned about the universe in 2017

I now support GMOs FirstPost: No more chocolate by 2050? Scientists say fragile cocoa plant likely to be victim of global warming

LA Times: Trump’s border wall through the eyes of an architecture critic

Counterpunch: Guantanamo remains a global symbol of injustice

Bigger government means more cops, which means more killings, beats, kidnappings, etc.

Posted on January 2, 2018 by S. Smith

One thing I’ve never understood about the Left is the fairly obvious cognitive dissonance between their desire for greater, or even total, government intervention into the economy on the one hand, and their desire to end police brutality on the other. As 2017 comes to an end, initial numbers of “officer-involved shootings” for the year come out at 976, according WaPo’s database. This is slightly more than the 963 killed in 2016, which means that pretty much all the activism from the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as other civil liberties organizations focused on the subject, has had pretty much no effect whatsoever on policy. This number doesn’t include the number of arrests, beatings, taserings, and general day-to-day harassment of American citizens by cops. Which probably runs into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of such negative interactions. What policy is responsible for these interactions even existing? Simply, the War on Drugs. Now, the War on Drugs is an intrusive, tyrannical government program of prohibition, which criminalizes voluntary behavior, creating an entire class of “criminals”. Strangely, every single person who considers themselves a part of the ‘Left’ opposes the Drug War, and wishes to see it abolished. I wonder what they think they’re silently supporting by opposing drug prohibition? Freedom to choose what we ingest. Yet they are still in favor of government control of the economy, of a top-down redistribution of “wealth”, a strict control of economic activity, ostensibly to eliminate “inequality”. But they see the Drug War. They see how just one single policy can employ hundreds of thousands of cops, how it can provide the justification for a militarization of said cops, and how it directly leads to the incarceration of hundreds of thousands, the ruination of the lives and livelihoods of families, of entire generations.

Just one single policy in the United States is almost solely responsible for the rise of the Police State here. The prohibition of just a few substances has lead to this. Now, the Left essentially desires prohibition to extend to as many areas of life as possible. And, to jump straight to the point, there is no other way to accomplish this than to employ an army of cops to enforce it. Restriction of voluntary activity requires police states of varying scale, depending on how much activity you wish to restrict. And ponder a moment the types of people who will be filling the occupation of “police officer” in an environment of prohibition. As the list of prohibited activities increases, it will be necessary to enforce it. Hiring more cops as quickly as possible means lowering the standards for applicants. (Just look at the Border Patrol, or the TSA, both of which routinely hires thugs of every stripe. Airline passengers are kept any safer, but their belongings are stolen by agents at a rate of 200 thefts per day. From 2010 to 2014, TSA agents stole $2.5 million worth of belongings from checked luggage. The Border Patrol, on the other hand, appear to hire on personalities that delight in dragging the innocent out of their car, giving them a body cavity search on the roadside

Thugs, criminals, physically violent, and really anyone not burdened with an overabundance of brains gets to be a cop in a Police State. But a Police State is only necessary when a government needs to enforce the prohibition of previously legal voluntary behavior.

I write this because I’ve recently had extended conversations with several people who openly desire an implementation of socialist policy of one stripe or another. Their reasoning rests on the very real inequalities that arise from a free market. Some people make far more money than others, people stratified by income do treat each other differently, and it generates resentment. But these genuine socialists oppose the Drug War because of the very consequences listed earlier. I don’t press them too much on their beliefs, I prefer to listen to their reasoning. What they don’t appear to do too much is compare socialist economies in reality to the predominantly market-based economy of the United States. All socialist experiments have descended into police states that systematically starved and murdered their citizens. While countries that have allowed even a slight amount of market activity has at least not starved. What is wrong with market economies are the vestiges of prohibition and regulation that haven’t yet been swept away, not the market itself.

What I don’t really get is the obsessive focus on “inequality” in a market economy to the exclusion of everything else. Should everything be sacrificed at the hands of a totalitarian government for the off chance that we’ll become more equal? The ability to shop for fresh groceries in the dead of winter, or sitting in a cafe drinking hot tea while using Wi Fi on a $200 laptop that holds a charge for 11 hours, is a miracle that no one else in the history of the human race has experienced.

To conclude, the argument for liberty is far more broad than just an absence of a Police State. But the point here is that support for a government that can prohibit every activity will create a massive police force to do just that. Socialism will be enforced by the low-IQ thug who previously could not find employment elsewhere. He, along with a legion of his now-deputized ilk, will be beat, kill, kidnap and harass because that is what’s required to enforce the socialist ideal. The people will wait in breadlines, eat their pets, eat the local zoo wildlife, and eventually starve. Society will rip itself apart, in the same way that Venezuela is today.

This concludes an extended rant on something I’ve noticed about supporters of socialism recently. To counter, offer comments, heckle me, etc., you can contact this writer at [email protected], until I can get the comments’ section set up.

01/02/18 Overnight links

Posted on January 2, 2018January 1, 2018 by S. Smith

Zero Hedge: California kicks off 2018 with statewide marijuana legalization

The Intercept: Documents reveal the complex legacy of James Angleton, godfather of mass surveillance

Law360: 5 cybersecurity and privacy policies to watch in 2018

Salon: The new JFK files reveal how the CIA tracked Oswald

Analytics Insight: What happens when data meets motion?

Economic Times: Google’s new AI talks like you, me, and everyone else

Daily Galaxy: Artificial intelligence is already out there, and it’s billions of years old

Yahoo: Opening AI’s black box

Geek: World ‘Go’ champ hopes to reclaim title in AI rematch

Forbes: The $15 minimum wage movement is winning, that’s bad news for cashiers

AIER: Sheldon Richman: make-work is wasteful

Activist Post: In 2017, nearly 100 times more Americans were killed by police than terrorists

The Intercept: Officer-involved 217

Counterpunch: Cops killing kids has got to stop

Year of the boomerang

Posted on December 31, 2017 by S. Smith

Glancing up to see a ‘Ron Paul for President’ hoodie meandering through my place of work was vertigo-inducing, to say the least. More so when he came directly up to me with a question, bypassing others closer by and more capable at giving assistance. I answered his question flatly, but walked with him, confessing my admiration for Paul and involvement in the two campaigns. Surprise registered on his face, followed by a shadow, then good-natured resignation. We had never met before, yet we both saw in each other ghosts of our respective pasts. Strange meeting there, on a New Year’s Eve, five years after hope died for Paul’s campaign. “They’re all still there, they just need someone to lead them”, were his last words before leaving. I wished him well, but disagreed entirely with his sentiment. What Paul created became something more than him. He didn’t lead, he began a revolution and stepped aside as we took over. Someone can start a wildfire, but they aren’t themselves the flames. I don’t like this attitude that so many have of waiting around for a savior, a prophet, a god, to drag them out and give them a religion to fight for. What we fight for is a world without a king, equals under the law, not subjects of a crown. A revolution for liberty should be no different. Ron Paul’s revolution was never about Paul himself. He gave us our black flag, but we flew it. Some still are. But they’re jaded in the way my acquaintance was. He sees an end, but it feels like a beginning, like something cycling back around, a boomerang thrown a decade into the future. It’s coming back around, you’ve better not given up on it.

“Let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security. Understanding the magnificent rewards of a free society makes us unbashful in its promotion, fully realizing that maximum wealth is created and the greatest chance for peace comes from a society respectful of individual liberty.”-Ron Paul