Financial Times via Archive.ph

https://archive.ph/IutaO#selection-1573.0-1588.4

Most of the article is below, cause it was such a good read it was hard to decide what to edit out- that said, their are a few paragraphs missing- get them at the link.

Elon Musk took a giant leap into a science-fiction future this summer as SpaceX completed the biggest initial public offering in history. The rocket company had claimed it would help humanity ascend in stages from building orbital AI data centres to Mars colonies and eventually a “Kardashev II-level civilization” — one so technologically advanced it could encase the sun to capture its entire energy output.

Amid all the excitement, there were familiar notes. Silicon Valley likes to dress its ambitions in the glistening garb of science fiction from the 1950s, when authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke spun tales of humanity spreading through the stars. 

But what kind of future are we really hurtling towards? Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.

Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be. It is Dick’s far weirder sensibilities that offer the better guide to Silicon Valley today.

Dick created queasy worlds where everything seems to teeter on collapse. His novels themselves often threatened to unravel — featuring convoluted plots, ideas sometimes leading nowhere and misogynistic portrayals of women, all wrapped up in unenviable prose. Drugs and financial exigencies help explain the rushed writing; he could not have worked on six novels in 1964 without massive abuse of amphetamines. Regular lurches into paranoia help explain why his legacy was uneven. The list of people Dick denounced to the FBI includes Polish writer Stanisław Lem, as well as literary critics Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson. 

Dick died in 1982, mostly having failed to achieve significant literary appreciation. He was not a good writer for his time. But he is a great writer for ours.

Technology in Dick’s world is invasive and glitchy, sometimes telling us that it refuses to work, or holding us to ransom. At the start of his 1969 novel Ubik, the apartment door smugly demands a payment for opening and closing. The protagonist, after losing the negotiation, decides to unscrew the door from its frame, prompting the latter to threaten a lawsuit. When characters in Dick’s world yell at the TV, the TV sometimes yells right back. The speech modules of our personal devices don’t yell, but they are beginning to combine alert attention with dim-witted obsequiousness, anticipating our needs while profusely apologising for irretrievably wiping our database.

Dick’s fascination with the fragility of reality and what it means to be human stemmed from deep conviction and a mental breakdown. His speech-turned-essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” revealed that the two questions that fascinated him were “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Society is starting to grapple with AI psychosis, when people mistake predictive text algorithms for friends, boyfriends and girlfriends. Maybe they don’t want to know better.

Above all, it is Dick’s understanding of political economy that is urgently relevant today, as Trump-produced instability is compounded by AI-generated unreality.

An unholy tangle of elites tends to hover over every Dick novel: corporate titans who have created new technologies, property developers who own a chunk of Mars or a demesne in California, conglomerates managed by charismatic founders. Though some government authorities are checked out (replaced by androids), others run technology-fuelled police states that reduce citizens to bundles of data that can be monitored and eliminated. 

These elites are smart and conniving but prone to a particular kind of self-deception. They imagine that they are entangled in the plots of some mastermind who is even more sinister than they are. Dick’s most brilliant move is to reveal that the malign forces reshaping the world are in fact petty, self-obsessed and jealous beings. 

In Ubik, nearly everyone dies soon after the book’s opening. The bodies of the former employees of Runciter Associates are stored in cryogenic facilities that allow them to imagine a shared world into being. As they try to unravel the mystery of their death, the characters are devoured by a seemingly terrifying force. It turns out to be a rather disturbed adolescent demanding their attention. That may seem painfully familiar to Americans whose cable news and social media feeds are all Donald Trump, all the time.

A similar revelation anchors Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). The novel portrays Jason Taverner, a celebrity and member of an elite that is genetically enhanced for brains and beauty. He wakes up one day to a world in which no one knows who he is. Taverner was undone not by one of his peers but by a troubled fan who has consumed a drug that warps reality. In our world too, the feedback loops of fame have become increasingly deranged. It isn’t just pop stars but venture capitalists and CEOs whose sense of the real is inexorably chiselled away by the attentions of their adorers and execrators.

The fusion of business and hallucination reaches its peak in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), in which a business tycoon returns from the stars, promising to fulfil the wishes of everyone who steps into the fantasy worlds that he has created. Eldritch’s every move threatens to destabilise the existing corporate and political order. Those who use his product, a drug called Chew-Z, find themselves plunged into worlds that revolve around Eldritch, infecting them with his blurred vision, alienation and despair. Though Elon Musk has reportedly been (has been ?) a prolific drug user, he has not yet released his own variety of dope. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Freeman Dyson speculated about megastructures that could encircle whole stars to capture their energy, before dismissing the idea as “a little joke”. Now such ideas inspire not just science-fiction novels but SpaceX’s business plans. Wild speculative fiction has become the fuel of wild financial speculation. Morgan Stanley projects that SpaceX’s revenue could reach $3.4tn by 2040, presumably the year that these particular stock analysts expect to retire.

Grand visions of technological transformation are everywhere, and everywhere they hide realities that combine extraordinary moneymaking schemes with bizarre beliefs. On the one hand, Marc Andreessen’s venture capital partnership funds gambling apps and a start-up promising to “cheat on everything”; on the other, the Silicon Valley Trump whisperer promises that our descendants will “live in the stars”, writing his own quasi-religious credo, complete with “patron saints”. Peter Thiel combines a superb record of picking tech winners with an obsession with the eschaton; he has brought his gloomy discourses on the nature of the Antichrist to the doorstep of the Vatican. Sam Altman says that thanks to AI, we “are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish”.

Yet it is perhaps Mark Zuckerberg who is trying hardest to build a universe that Dick invented as a cautionary tale. The chief executive of Meta is working on an AI version of himself that can interact with employees, maybe so he won’t have to. Zuckerberg’s exhortations, however, have so far failed to win over Meta employees asked to allow all of their clicks to be recorded so that they can train their own AI replacements. 

All of these are Dickish characters. We live in a future that he would recognise immediately. Billionaires have dreamt up alternative realities that they try to pull everyone into, constructing homegrown myths of religions from apocrypha. We are building AI that seems so close to human as to even confuse its creators, while it often fails at basic human tasks. The political order is trying to co-opt the rising business elites — or is it the other way around? 

Dick’s political bugaboo of Richard Nixon may be farcically reincarnated as Donald Trump. The historian Gary Wills described Nixon’s personal tragedy of talent and resentment in his 1970 book Nixon Agonistes. Trump’s dark promises to restore order are not nearly as psychologically interesting, but they have been much more consequential in practice. Like Arnie Kott, the corrupt and venal union leader in Martian Time-Slip (1964), Trump has tried to turn back time and failed. The rest of us are trapped with Trump in his pretend universe where he won the election in 2020, while government policy falls into dank memes and decay. Instead of being made great again, America has become poorer, weaker and meaner. Our fate might have more dignity if Trump were less petty than he is.

Back in 1976, Ursula K Le Guin compared Dick to a “homegrown Borges”, whose subject matter was “reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation”. He would be better recognised had he not been trapped in self-created theological and existential labyrinths after suffering his breakdown in the 1970s.

We live once more in an era that doesn’t make sense, however hard we look for some grand order. Dick’s combination of verve and madness in confronting the problems of the 1960s — Vietnam, suburbia, the cold war, drugs — holds three key lessons for today. 

We need to find our way back to reality: in Dick’s description, that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away

Second, technology can still be an ally for human ends. Dick’s androids are not necessarily antagonistic towards their human progenitors. In Vulcan’s Hammer (1960), the novel’s equivalent of GPT-7 achieves sentient consciousness and decides to work with humanity in order to prevent the emergence of GPT-8. Dick’s aliens (his technological visions in another guise) tend to be friendly towards humanity; if they pose any threat, it is towards humanity’s political oppressors. Technology might be glitchy and churlish in Dick’s world. It also has a purposiveness that sometimes fits surprisingly well with people’s own purposes.

Third, and most importantly, these purposes should be built from the bottom up. We are confused by and entangled in the science-fiction futures that tech elites have dreamt up for us, demanding that we assent to their strange beliefs about humanity’s destiny amid the stars, the coming of the eschaton, the birth of conscious artificial intelligence, perhaps all at once. More traditional elites, with their self-serving nostalgia for a past world that was never as solid as they believed, aren’t any better as guides. 

We need to find our way back to reality: in Dick’s description, that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Dick’s last novel describes his own madness from the outside through the eyes of Angel Archer, the one sympathetic and deeply rendered woman in all his work. She concludes that the only way out is through holding on to what is solid, and building up from small relationships.

Salvation is found in the ridiculous and the small — in Ubik, God takes the form of a spray can. It is also to be found in the people around us. Le Guin says that Dick is like Dickens in treating the “honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people” as the bedrock of the world. The disturbed child in Martian Time-Slip begins to grow out of his madness when an aboriginal Martian brings him into communion by passing him a cigarette.

Much of what we used to believe in has gone away. Much of what obsesses us now might go away if only we stopped believing in it. The hypnotic powers of Trump and Musk are often a phantasm, losing their pull if people decline to be entranced. 

Instead of gazing upwards to find our glorious cosmic destiny, we should be looking closer to home. What are the people around us doing to build things up, brick layered and mortared carefully on brick? How can we make solid connections between the communities we live in and the bigger structures of the world? How can technology be put to work for human ends, rather than becoming an end in itself? Those are the kinds of questions that helped guide Dick out of his madness. They can help guide us out of ours, too.

Henry Farrell is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute and the co-author with Abraham Newman of ‘Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy’. Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of ‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’

Via the Burning Archive

Read Tarik Cyril Amar’s article on “Mein AI: at https://www.tarikcyrilamar.com

Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears

“Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA, is either a parody of a RoboCop film, or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organisation,”

The end game is audacious: High-tech company towns free from state law and most federal rules—including the Internal Revenue Code, major environmental laws like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act; worker protections like the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Occupational Health and Safety Act; and the Affordable Care Act.

Company Towns

A lot is unknown about how Freedom Cities would work. Tom W. Bell, a Chapman University law professor focusing on special jurisdictions, is working with the Frontier Foundation to create a legal basis.

They would (allegedly) be “small safely-contained experiments in governance” to “help us discover better ways to live together,” Bell said. “Freedom is better than gold. When you turn people loose to create and give them incentives to satisfy market demand—wow—that’s what we want to tap.”

In his vision, Freedom Cities would be governed by the secretaries of Commerce, Treasury, and Interior, and they would be completely exempt from nearly all federal environmental, healthcare, and labor laws, and the tax code.

New Age Company Towns

The city of Grand Junction, Colo., along the Colorado River, is flanked by a national monument and BLM land to the horizon in nearly every direction, making it a prime area for developers looking to build Freedom Cities.

AEI and the Frontier Foundation pegged some public land beneath the towering sand-tinted Book Cliffs on the northern flank of Grand Junction as a perfect site for a Freedom City. Public lands there are treeless and undeveloped, often used for off-highway-vehicle trails and little else. But it’s close to a freeway and an existing airport.

Places like the Grand Junction area, the desert surrounding Las Vegas, the Treasure Valley surrounding Boise, Idaho, and the sagebrush steppe in Deschutes County, Ore., home to the cities of Bend and Redmond, are ideal to build new Freedom Cities that would be key to reindustrializing the US, supporters say.

Each one would focus on a specific kind of technological development, said entrepreneur Nick Allen, a founder of the Frontier Foundation.

Similar to company towns for new tech, one new city would focus on semiconductors, and others would be built on the defense, drones, advanced materials, biotech, and nuclear energy industries, he said.

16 Tons- Cause your soul is owned by the company town/ store

The document dump fails to disclose while enabling the coverup of ties to Israel and Mossad

Electronic Intifada

• Search the files for “Epstein and Mossad.” No results.
• Search for “Epstein and Israel.” No results.
• Search for “Ghislaine Maxwell and Mossad.” No results
• Search for “Ghislaine Maxwell and Israel.” No results.

Here are a few of the tasty but unsatisfying tidbits from the latest release.

In a 2019 email to the Cleveland office of the FBI, someone in Israel named Erez Zadok wrote that “in 2001, Mr. Epstein transferred approximately $9 million to the Wexner Foundation. During the years 2004-2006, the Wexner Foundation transferred at least 2.3 million USD to the Israeli former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Mr. Epstein signed personally on [a] few of the transfers’ forms.”

Donors and lawyers

Email between Jeffrey Epstein and a secretary to private equity billionaire Leon Black show that, in 2014, Isaac Herzog, then head of Israel’s opposition Labor party, the former party of Ehud Barak, visited Epstein’s infamous Little Saint James island.

Today Herzog is president of Israel.

Black, also an Epstein associate, has been one of Herzog’s biggest political donors.

Epstein also wrote but never sent an undated letter to Les Wexner in an attempt to rekindle the financial partnership Wexner broke off in 2007 after sexual abuse allegations surfaced against Epstein in Florida.

“You and I had ‘gang stuff’ for over 15 years,” Epstein wrote, noting that “I owe a great debt to you, as frankly you owe to me,” adding that he had “no intention of divulging any confidence of ours.”

A 2020 FBI report states that Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard lawyer who befriended and represented Epstein, told a Confidential Human Source (CHS) that “if he were young again, he would be holding a stun gun as an Israeli Intelligence (Mossad) agent. CHS believed Dershowitz was co-opted by Mossad and subscribed to their mission. CHS still continues to communicate occasionally for Dershowitz.”

The same FBI report goes on to say that Epstein “was represented by Dershowitz. CHS remembered Dershowitz tell Alex Ocasta [sic – Acosta] (US Attorney of Southern District of Florida at the time) that Epstein belonged to both US and allied intelligence services. CHS shared phone calls between Dershowitz and Epstein during which he/she took notes. After these calls, Mossad would then call Dershowitz to debrief.”

An Epstein associate named Greg Brown, meanwhile, pitched plans to Epstein in a 2011 email for tapping into Libya’s $32.4 billion in frozen assets held in the US, alluding to the possible help of former British and Israeli intelligence officials.

A 2016 email from Hyatt Hotel billionaire and Israel investor Tom Pritzker to Epstein mentions an article in the Israeli press alleging that James Comey sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign as revenge for President Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich. Comey had successfully prosecuted Rich for diverting sanctioned Iranian oil to Israel, but Israel – under Ehud Barak – reportedly wanted him pardoned because he had “done work for Mossad.”

The Pritzkers are interconnected to the Epstein web.. Movers and shakers in the Trans movement. (Topic for another day)

DoJ withheld Epstein files related to Trump

The Justice Department allegedly withheld dozens of files related to Jeffrey Epstein that included an FBI investigation into claims of abuse against President Trump, according to a new report.

Trump was accused of sexually assaulting a teen girl in the 1980s, and the FBI investigated those claims and interviewed the alleged victim

“I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Department of Justice,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said Tuesday in a statement following NPR’s report. “The DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes.”

However, one woman’s claims were investigated further.

The woman reportedly told investigators that Epstein introduced her to Trump when she was between 13 and 15 years old. She said Trump pushed her head down toward his exposed penis, which she bit, leading Trump to punch her in the head and kick her out of the room.

FBI agents interviewed the woman four times, but only one of those interviews was included in the Epstein files release, according to NPR’s investigation. Another 53 pages of interviews and notes were withheld as well.

The feds also didn’t release files relating to another woman who said Epstein introduced her to Trump while she was a teenager and told the future president, “This is a good one, huh?”

That woman’s accusations were included in discovery materials provided to lawyers for Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, during her trial in 2021. However, they were not included in the DOJ’s Epstein files release, according to NPR.

Those interviews were used during discovery for the case against Ghislaine Maxwell. She was sent to trial and convicted. Interesting they were not included in the DoJ release.

Epstein and the Tech Bros… Not just Musk and Gates

All of the them sitting around the Whitehouse with Donald Trump and JD Vance

Peter Thiel, PayPal and Palantir co-founder 

Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, where he once worked alongside Elon Musk, also appears in the Epstein files, with the latest release showing correspondence between and about the two.

Those communications began around 2014 and lasted until around 2019, just months before Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking char

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder 

The latest Epstein file releases feature many references to Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn in 2002, with communications between the two showing several friendly email exchanges.

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder 

The file release also contains multiple references to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, including email communications.

One particular email chain in April 2003 showed Brin communicating with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime companion and convicted co-conspirator, regarding potential dinner plans at Epstein’s New York estate.

The exchange appeared to follow up on an earlier encounter between the two. “Dinners at Jeffrey’s are always happily casual and relaxed. Look forward to seeing you,” Maxwell wrote.  

Steven Sinofsky, ex-Microsoft executive 

More details of the relationship between Epstein and Steven Sinofsky, a former Microsoft executive who oversaw key products like Windows and Office, were revealed in the latest files.

The documents showed that Sinofsky had sought Epstein’s advice on the terms of his exit from Microsoft after leaving in 2012.

Sinofsky, who is now a board partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, then emailed Epstein in September 2013, about three months after Microsoft announced the terms of his $14 million retirement agreement, writing: “Got paid. You will be too :)”

Read entirely at links provided.

One last one, my bad! – Inside Epstein’s network

Interesting charts for you to view

Most of Epstein’s correspondence was with his staff, service providers and business contacts. People who worked for or with him made up a third of the top 500 names and accounted for nearly three-fifths of his messages. Chief among them were Lesley Groff, his assistant; Richard Kahn, his accountant; and Larry Visoski, his pilot. Homes in New York and Palm Beach, and his private Caribbean island, required armies of contractors and housekeepers. The rest of the emails, however, depict a remarkable network. The top 500 correspondents come from a number of different industries. Some 19% of messages were with financiers; 10% with scientists or doctors; 8% with people in media, entertainment or public relations; 7% with technologists; 6% each for lawyers, politicians, academics and other businessfolk; and 5% with property magnates. The share of contacts in finance peaked at 25% in 2014 and then fell as those in academia and law rose. Most correspondents were based in America, though Epstein kept ties with Britain, France, Germany, Nordic countries, Gulf states and even a Venezuelan oil trader.

1- Information on the toing and froing from Epstein’s properties were pretty thoroughly tracked.

2- Someone or some entity has this information and is using it as seen fit. Coupled with whatever videos Mr Epstein was making on his properties- the who, what and where of visitors to Epstein properties is pretty well known and probably much more involved then any of us have considered

3. Your information should you carry a personal tracking device with you everywhere is also thoroughly tracked and traced. The who, what and where of your personal business is also pretty well known too.

I’m aware that my time on line is tracked. I do what can be done to mitigate the footprint. I use a dumb phone and still to this day pay in cash. Avoiding places of business that will not take cash and telling them why.

What measure should we as the masses take to prevent this intrusive tracking. Or are too many accepting the open air prison and calling it freedom? It’s a dilemma. And the push for digital ID is going to make this obtrusive, unwanted meddling that much worse, for all of us

Wired via archive.ph

The data amassed by Near Intelligence, a location data broker roiled by allegations of mismanagement and fraud, reveals with high precision the residences of many guests of Little Saint James, a United States Virgin Islands property where Epstein is accused of having groomed, assaulted, and trafficked countless women and girls.

Some girls, prosecutors say, were as young as 14. The former attorney general of the US Virgin Islands alleged that girls as young as 12 were trafficked to Epstein by those within his elite social circle

The coordinates that Near Intelligence collected and left exposed online pinpoint locations to within a few centimeters of space. Visitors were tracked as they moved from the Ritz-Carlton on neighboring St. Thomas Island, for instance, to a specific dock at the American Yacht Harbor—a marina once co-owned by Epstein that hosts an “impressive array” of pleasure boats and mega-yachts. The data pinpointed their movements as they were transported to Epstein’s dock on Little St. James, revealing the exact routes taken to the island.

The tracking continued after they arrived. From inside Epstein’s enigmatic waterfront temple to the pristine beaches, pools, and cabanas scattered across his 71-acres of prime archipelagic real estate, the data compiled by Near captures the movements of scores of people who sojourned at Little St. James as early as July 2016. The recorded surveillance concludes on July 6, 2019—the day of Epstein’s final arrest.

Eleven years earlier, the disgraced financier was sentenced to 18 months in jail after a guilty plea in 2008 for soliciting and procuring a minor engaged in prostitution, securing a secret “sweetheart” deal to avoid any federal charges. Renewed interest in the case, notably prompted by a Miami Herald investigation, spawned new charges against Epstein, who was apprehended at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport in July 2019. A raid of Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse by federal agents yielded a cache of child sexual abuse material, nearly 50 individually cut diamonds, and a fraudulent Saudia Arabian passport, which had expired. He reportedly died by suicide a month later while incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal detention facility that closed shortly after Epstein’s death.

Ghislaine Maxwell, former British socialite and an Epstein accomplice, was convicted in 2021 on five counts including sexual trafficking of children by force. Maxwell was arrested in New Hampshire, tracked to a million-dollar home by federal agents using location data pulled from her cell phone.

Little is known publicly about Epstein’s activities in the decade prior to his 2019 arrest. The majority of women who came forward that year to accuse the convicted pedophile in court say they were assaulted in the ’90s and early 2000s.

Now, however, 11,279 coordinates obtained by WIRED show not only a flood of traffic to Epstein’s island property—nearly a decade after his conviction as a sex offender—but also point to as many as 166 locations throughout the US where Near Intelligence infers that visitors to Little St. James likely lived and worked. The cache also points to cities in Ukraine, (known for human trafficking of their women and girls long before the military action) the Cayman Islands, and Australia, among others.
Near Intelligence, for example, tracked devices visiting Little St. James from locations in 80 cities crisscrossing 26 US states and territories, with Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, and New York topping the list. The coordinates point to mansions in gated communities in Michigan and Florida; homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in Massachusetts; a nightclub in Miami; and the sidewalk across the street from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

The coordinates also point to various Epstein properties beyond Little St. James, including his 8,000-acre New Mexico ranch and a waterfront mansion on El Brillo Way in Palm Beach, where prosecutors said in an indictment that Epstein trafficked numerous “minor girls” for the purposes of molesting and abusing them. Near’s data is notably missing any locations in Europe, where citizens are safeguarded by comprehensive privacy laws.

Near Intelligence’s maps of Epstein’s island reveal in stark detail the precision surveillance that data brokers can achieve with the aid of loose privacy restrictions under US law. The firm, which has roots in Singapore and Bengaluru, India, sources its location data from advertising exchanges—companies that quietly interact with billions of devices as users browse the web and move about the world.

Before a targeted advertisement appears on an app or website, phones and other devices send information about their owners to real-time bidding platforms and ad exchanges, frequently including users’ location data. While advertisers can use this data to inform their bidding decisions, companies like Near Intelligence will siphon, repackage, analyze, and sell it.

Several ad exchanges, according to The Wall Street Journal, have reportedly terminated arrangements with Near, claiming that its use of their data violated the exchanges’ terms of service.

Officially, this data is intended to be used by companies hoping to determine where potential customers work and reside. But in October 2023, the Journal revealed that Near had once provided data to the US military via a maze of obscure marketing companies, cutouts, and conduits to defense contractors. Bankruptcy records reviewed by WIRED show that in April 2023, Near Intelligence signed a yearlong contract with another firm called nContext, a subsidiary of the defense contractor Sierra Nevada.

We’re going to skip through the tracking of Epstein pals and/or victims to a more general view on how this tracking is done to just ordinary folk

InContext secured six federal contracts to provide data in support of the National Security Agency and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, according to reporting by Byron Tau, author of Means of Control, an exposé of the data-broker industry and its ties to the US surveillance state. According to information released during a $100 million funding round in 2019, Near claims to have information on roughly 1.6 billion people in 44 countries.

The data on Epstein’s guests was produced using an intelligence platform formerly known as Vista, which has now been folded into a product called Pinnacle. WIRED discovered several so-called Vista reports while examining Pinnacle’s publicly accessible code. While the specific URLs for the reports are difficult to find, Google’s web crawlers were able to locate at least two other publicly accessible Vista reports: one geofencing the Westfield Mall of the Netherlands and another targeting Saipan-Ledo Park in El Paso, Texas.

Legislation introduced during multiple sessions of Congress have aimed to restrict the sale of location data, chiefly to prevent US law enforcement and intelligence agencies from tracking Americans without a warrant. So far, those efforts have failed.

Separately, US president Joe Biden issued an executive order in February instructing the Justice Department to establish new rules preventing US companies from selling data to rival nations, which might include Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea. This order is unlikely to impact Azira’s business in the United States.

Don’t sell the date to rival nations but feel free to provide it to anyone else. Law enforcement, intelligence agencies etc., And other non rival nations of course!

“The fact that they have this data in the first place and are allowing people to share it is certainly disturbing,” says Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit. “I just don’t know how many more of these stories we need to have in order to get strong privacy regulations.”

Read entirely at the archive.ph link there is much more to read. 15 minutes worth to be exact. I’ve got this post down to 8 minutes of reading- I think you can listen too. Share some thoughts, of course

Globe and Mail & https://archive.ph/lUTyd

Canada’s tech industry is gearing up for a big boost in defence spending. But the industry is, in many ways, starting from scratch and needs to quickly ramp up expertise among businesses, investors and government owing to the country’s decades of under investment in defence.

Globally, defence tech is one of the fastest-growing sectors, said Daniel Sax, founder and CEO at the Canadian Space Mining Corporation.

“There are tens of billions being deployed into this industry. There are governments around the world getting behind it, and Canada is in the early stages of waking up to that,” Mr. Sax said on the panel, held in Toronto and hosted by the Icebreaker, a defence newsletter.

Mr. Carney has emphasized his desire to prioritize spending on Canadian defence companies, where possible, and diversify away from the country’s reliance on U.S. military goods.

To do this, Mark Maybank, co-founder and managing partner at Maverix Private Equity, said private and public sector investors will likely have to focus on dual-use technologies, which can be used both commercially and for defence.

Used commercially for the technocracy at home- Such as increased border surveillance and more

So, the War from Home- What is it?

Citriniresearch

Missile Defense, Counter-Unmanned Technology, Electronic Warfare, and Surveillance

Cheap drones are torching billion-dollar fortresses and countries are waging direct warfare from thousands of miles away. Last year, Houthi drones successfully blocked global commerce through the Red Sea despite US carrier strike groups stationed in the region. More recently, Ukraine unleashed a surprise attack of 104 drones 800km deep into Russian territory, lighting up the Kirishi refinery and significantly damaging Moscow’s aerial assault capabilities.

Weeks later, Israel ran the same playbook, using smuggled drones (along with traditional assets) to wreak havoc on Iranian nuclear facilities and military targets as a part of its broader “preemptive strike” on the country. Tehran responded to Israeli air strikes by hurling hundreds of Shahed drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles towards Tel Aviv and interior targets. Israel’s missile defenses have successfully blocked a large majority of the strikes, but at roughly $45,000 per Tamir shot such defenses are not free or unlimited. Iranian ballistic missiles have continued to penetrate the Iron Dome, causing direct damage on civilian and military installments. The U.S.’ involvement began with a USAF crew that never had feet on the ground anywhere outside of Missouri.

Iran, the US and Israel are ostensibly “at war” (or at least in conflict). This is occurring with no troops deployed on foreign soil and each country thousands of miles away from the other.

Read entirely at the Citrini link above

Excerpts below, read entirely at link above

Many analysts expecting President Donald Trump’s first foreign trip to yield breakthrough deals on Iran or Gaza may have found his recent four-day jaunt through Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates somewhat underwhelming. But the commercial deals Trump struck on artificial intelligence cooperation will likely shift the global balance of power for one of this century’s most critical technologies. It’s just not clear yet in whose favor.

The Biden and Trump administrations have both been very clear about the importance of winning the global race for AI supremacy. The Biden administration’s approach to AI dominance was to provide financial support through the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act and then largely play defense with regulation while trusting US companies to outcompete overseas rivals. These regulations included multiple rounds of semiconductor export controls, a broader “AI diffusion” framework that capped chip sales to most countries (including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE), and expanded use of foreign investment screening, including the first-ever regulations on US investment in Chinese AI and semiconductor companies. The Biden administration bet that while these regulations may frustrate some American companies, they would prove a greater drag on the United States’ adversaries and thus preserve the country’s AI head start.

The Trump team feels strongly that these defensive controls undermine the United States’ ability to compete overseas by capping American companies’ revenues and market share. NVIDIA earned just $17 billion in China over the last year compared to more than $61 billion in the United States, a disparity that is largely due to US export controls. Leading American semiconductor tooling company Applied Materials, meanwhile, saw its revenue share from China fall from 43 percent to 25 percent over the last year while overall revenue grew just 6 percent. This is revenue that, according to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, could have been reinvested into jobs and innovation in the United States.

The new administration has therefore opted to flip the Biden premise on its head by revoking the AI diffusion rule and announcing the sale of hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge chips to the Saudis and Emiratis, in addition to committing to build the world’s largest AI data center outside the United States in Abu Dhabi. It is gambling that enabling American companies to directly compete against Chinese rivals in the Gulf and beyond will generate sufficient revenue and innovation rewards to offset the increased risk of cutting-edge technology falling into the hands of US adversaries.

It is not clear which approach is right. But Trump’s “all gas, no brakes” approach is high-risk, high-reward, and almost impossible to reverse: once cutting-edge US AI hardware and software are sitting in a foreign data center or on a foreign server, adversaries can more easily target and acquire them. White House AI czar David Sacks dismissed these concerns while in Riyadh, saying there is “not a risk” of our cutting-edge technology falling into the wrong hands via “a friend like Saudi Arabia.”

The Trump administration has left open the real possibility of espionage being engaged in by adversaries in order to acquire the technology. Interesting.

Another 6 paragraphs to read at the link- And they should be read!

Technocracy Inc., technate, Howard Scott, engineers, Edward Bellamy, Thorstein Veblen, Looking Backward 2000-1887, Technical Alliance, Columbia University, Rockefeller family and their connections to Columbia, Committee of Technocracy, Walter Rautenstrauch, Henry Wallace, Continental Committee of Technocracy, Harold Loeb, Technocracy Inc.’s rapid spread in California, energy certificates, work in the technate, Technocracy Inc. defines North America as stretching from Greenland to Panama, Technocracy Inc.’s government, how Technocracy Inc. applies to the twenty-first century, the Crisis of Capitalism, 2008 financial crisis, Are we in a post-capitalist age?, Yanis Varoufakis, technofeudalism, the gig economy & apps as vassalage, the decline of wage labor, the importance of data, is data capital?, how Technocracy Inc can be applied to technofeudalism, World Economic Forum (WEF), universal basic income (UBI), how UBI can be applied to energy certificates, currency that deliberately depreciates, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Covid lockdowns, “trust the science”, MAGA, Joshua Haldeman, Elon Musk, Trump 2.0 as ushering in technate, the North American technate as a self-sustaining fortress, global war of attrition, DOGE as a trial run for Technocracy Inc., cryptocurrencies, Kardashev scale, USAID, the deliberate destruction of representative democracy by both Democrats and MAGA

During the “pandemic”

I’d mentioned we’d be talkin’ more about technocracy, technocrats and the technate.

First few paragraphs included below, read entirely at TruthDig Link

Much of human history only makes sense in light of the persistent influence of eschatology — a word of Greek origin that means “the study of last things.” This is because many of the most significant historical movements and events have been driven, in one way or another, by eschatological beliefs. The Second World War was motivated in part by Hitler’s promise of a “thousand-year Reich,” an idea that mirrored Christianity’s prophecy of a future “Millennial Kingdom” following the Battle of Armageddon. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that roughly 4 in 10 American adults believe that we are “living in the end times,” while another reports that 41% of Americans expect that Jesus will either “definitely” or “probably” return by 2050. These eschatological convictions have had a significant impact on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, since our current world, in this narrative, cannot end without a Jewish state in Palestine. Some scholars have dubbed this demographic the “Armageddon Lobby.”

Recent years have seen the emergence of a second and arguably more powerful “Armageddon Lobby.” It resides in epicenters of power like Silicon Valley and embraces a “secular” vision of humanity’s grand future — though it shares many similarities with traditional religion, including a belief in “God” and the promise of immortality through cryonics. The renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this vision “The Mindset,” whereas the computer scientist Timnit Gebru and I refer to it as “TESCREALism,” which I have discussed in previous articles for Truthdig. I will mostly stick with Rushkoff’s term in what follows.

Advocates of The Mindset claim that the world as we know it will soon expire. In its ashes, a new era dominated by digital lifeforms — that is, artificial intelligences — will emerge. These beings will stand to us as “gods,” though by merging our brains with AI or “uploading” our minds to computers, we may become gods ourselves: Homo deus — the “human god” — as Yuval Noah Harari puts it. “The most devout holders of The Mindset,” Rushkoff writes in reference to Mark Zuckerberg’s failed “metaverse” project,

H5N1 was weaponized to spread more efficiently to humans. Intentionally. I wrote about this GOF (Gain of Function) at my old site. More than a decade ago. One of those older reports was moved here last year

60 Minutes has been spreading the fear as of late.