Experts have warned for years about using Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) technology (see 1, 2, 3). Embarrassing as well as tragic examples of A.I. inaccuracies continue to be reported (see 1, 2, 3, 4).
People have been accused and convicted of crimes based on inaccuracies (see 1, 2) including from the use of A.I. based ShotSpotter technology. Nevertheless, a new A.I. device is being marketed to American communities and police departments.
Technology rarely invents new societal problems. Instead, it digitizes them, supersizes them, and allows them to balloon and duplicate at the speed of light. That’s exactly the problem we’ve seen with location-based, crowd-sourced “public safety” apps like Citizen.
These apps come in a wide spectrum—some let users connect with those around them by posting pictures, items for sale, or local tips. Others, however, focus exclusively on things and people that users see as “suspicious” or potentially hazardous. These alerts run the gamut from active crimes, or the aftermath of crimes, to generally anything a person interprets as helping to keep their community safe and informed about the dangers around them.
These apps are often designed with a goal of crowd-sourced surveillance, like a digital neighborhood watch. A way of turning the aggregate eyes (and phones) of the neighborhood into an early warning system. But instead, they often exacerbate the same dangers, biases, and problems that exist within policing. After all, the likely outcome to posting a suspicious sight to the app isn’t just to warn your neighbors—it’s to summon authorities to address the issue.
And even worse than incentivizing people to share their most paranoid thoughts and racial biases on a popular platform are the experimental new features constantly being rolled out by apps like Citizen. First, it was a private security force, available to be summoned at the touch of a button. Then, it was a service to help make it (theoretically) even easier to summon the police by giving users access to a 24/7 concierge service who will call the police for you. There are scenarios in which a tool like this might be useful—but to charge people for it, and more importantly, to make people think they will eventually need a service like this—adds to the idea that companies benefit from your fear.
These apps might seem like a helpful way to inform your neighbors if the mountain lion roaming your city was spotted in your neighborhood. But in practice they have been a cesspool of racial profiling, cop-calling, gatekeeping, and fear-spreading. Apps where a so-called “suspicious” person’s picture can be blasted out to a paranoid community, because someone with a smartphone thinks they don’t belong, are not helping people to “Connect and stay safe.” Instead, they promote public safety for some, at the expense of surveillance and harassment for others.
America’s first spy couple since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the 1950s is facing additional charges related to espionage.
Jonathan and Diana Toebbe were indicted on Tuesday evening by a grand jury for communication of restricted data and conspiracy. Both had already been arrested and charged with a criminal complaint for violating the Atomic Energy Act on October 9th. During separate hearings in a West Virginia federal court on Wednesday, the couple pleaded not guilty to the charges, according to USA Today.
Jonathan is a Navy nuclear engineer and Diana was a teacher at Key School in Annapolis Maryland. Now, possible motives for their alleged espionage are beginning to come out as the media descends upon them.
Several dozen friends of the couple were interviewed by The New York Times, painting a somewhat complex picture of two people who were beset by various anxieties, mostly financial, as well as an ideological cast that put them in opposition to the United States government and, in particular, former President Donald Trump.
Important to the indictment of Diana in particular, both were alleged to be actively involved in the selling of the secrets and, while Jonathan reportedly did the actual smuggling of secret information out of his job, Diana allegedly had full knowledge of what was going on and accompanied Jonathan to the dead drops used to pass the information along.
It’s no secret that Diana in particular despised then-president Trump, and seriously considered leaving the U.S., according to friends interviewed. Political and ideological considerations were reportedly very important to her.
However, there may have been a bigger motivator at play: money. A desire for big-time cash is often the motivator behind such cases, and it appears to be true that they had financial woes, and the friends interviewed said the couple had seemed to feel undervalued, on top of the anxieties of money and raising two children.
The Freedom First Network made the following observations about another revolving door, this time in the drug industry.
In today’s America, you can buy yourself a former FDA commissioner, and use the public-sector private-sector revolving door system of corruption to impose your will on the American public, and make a windfall for your executives and shareholders in the process.
That appears to be the exact strategy utilized by Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and the company that founded Moderna, which have rostered a series of former top ranking government officials into top positions in their respective organizations.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, the ultimate personification of the revolving door mechanism, sits on the board of Pfizer. The frequent Pfizer-sponsored CNBC guest also maintains several thousand shares of Pfizer stock, and he is compensated well into the six figures on an annual basis. Gottlieb earns millions from his continually increasing board appointments to a plethora of pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.
The pandemic profiteer also sits on the boards of Illumina and Tempus Labs, which sell FDA-authorized COVID-19 test kits. Additionally, he sits on the board of Aetion, which has partnered with the FDA on researching COVID-19 policy.
“At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days,” the report states. “In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days.”
Additionally, the report points out that “The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.”
“Across the US counties too, the median new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the categories of percent population fully vaccinated (Fig. 2),” the report continues.
The left became impossible to parody somewhere in between “believe all women” and peak trans. The guys at The Babylon Bee are going to have to quit soon, if not because they cannot get any more bizarre than the left then because it seems like the left is using their headlines as an instruction manual.
Here is what I am reacting to, and it is not made up. It is real.
Not only did Joe Biden appoint a man who claims he’s a woman, and whose poor public health decisions led to thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths, as assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Biden has now made that man a four-star admiral and proclaimed we should all cheer at his administration appointing the “first” “female” “four-star officer.” I repeat, this is not a joke.
This official, Rachel Levine, has zero military experience. He’s as much a soldier as I am (although I am 100 percent more female than he is).
Here is the U.S. “surgeon general” saying “her [sic] service will undoubtedly advance the
@usphscc [U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps] mission to protect, promote, and advance the health and safety of our nation.”
Levine was also awarded the “Public Health Service COVID-19 Pandemic Campaign Medal.” Yes, a man whose pandemic “leadership” included: pulling his mother from a nursing home while forcing elderly people into those homes we now know were COVID death traps; getting promoted out of running a state “health” department that still “can’t find” crucial COVID-19 data; presiding over one of the slowest vaccine rollouts in the country; and openly advocating for the dismemberment and mutilation of children in the name of “health” — this man has been awarded a “public service COVID-19 pandemic campaign medal.”
In his new position, Levine “will join 6,000 other corps members offering COVID-19 shots and other health-focused initiatives on behalf of the federal government.” How can anyone take seriously any health recommendations from people who are willing to so deeply subordinate reality to political lies that are as obvious as the shape of my jaw?
Vikings from Greenland — the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas — lived in a village in Canada’s Newfoundland exactly 1,000 years ago, according to research published Wednesday.
Scientists have known for many years that Vikings — a name given to the Norse by the English they raided — built a village at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around the turn of the millennium. But a study published in Nature is the first to pinpoint the date of the Norse occupation.
The explorers — up to 100 people, both women and men — felled trees to build the village and to repair their ships, and the new study fixes a date they were there by showing they cut down at least three trees in the year 1021 — at least 470 years before Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492.
“This is the first time the date has been scientifically established,” said archaeologist Margot Kuitems, a researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the study’s lead author.
“Previously the date was based only on sagas — oral histories that were only written down in the 13th century, at least 200 years after the events they described took place,” she said.
Dr. Fauci, the Director of NIAID, was under oath when speaking with Senator Rand Paul. He denied that the NIH funded the gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
Today the NIH provided a document to the US House of Representatives that claims that the NIH did fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is reportedly marking up its hilarious Havana Syndrome Attacks Response Act this week which calls for sanctions upon whoever the president determines is responsible for inflicting US officials with hangover-like symptoms using high tech microwave beams. The condition has not been proven to actually exist in any tangible way and has been commonly attributed to psychogenic illness, Cuban crickets, and actual hangovers.
At the same time, virulent Russiagater Julia Ioffe has published an anonymously-sourced article proclaiming that the Kremlin is responsible for this mysterious alleged ailment.
In an article for Puck News titled “Havana Syndrome: A Cold War Saga in Biden’s Washington“, Ioffe reports that anonymous sources at the Walter Reed Military Medical Center have told her that this strange affliction now has so many victims among US government employees that the facility is at capacity, and that Russia is to blame for it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.