Tag: technology

Digital Surveillance Is Becoming the New Form of Government Power

The latest revelations involving the Department of Homeland Security demanding Google surrender data tied to a Canadian citizen demonstrate just how far governments are pushing digital surveillance powers beyond traditional legal and national boundaries. According to reports from WIRED, DHS used a “customs summons” under the Tariff Act of 1930 to demand location records, account activity, and identifying information connected to a Canadian man who had criticized ICE online following controversial immigration enforcement incidents earlier this year.

The individual reportedly had not entered the United States in more than a decade, yet American authorities still attempted to access his digital information because the technology platforms involved operate under U.S. jurisdiction.

People need to understand the implications because this goes far beyond one investigation or one political controversy. Governments are increasingly treating access to private technology infrastructure as a gateway to global surveillance authority. If your information passes through American technology companies, authorities now appear willing to argue they possess legal grounds to access portions of that data regardless of where you physically reside.

According to the lawsuit described in the WIRED investigation, DHS issued what is known as a customs summons, which functions as an administrative subpoena that does not require prior approval from a judge or grand jury. The summons reportedly demanded records involving location history, account activity, and communications tied to “threatening or harassing language.” The government allegedly justified the request under customs law despite the fact the individual was not accused of importing goods or violating customs duties in any conventional sense.

Authorities rarely begin by openly announcing broad monitoring programs targeting ordinary citizens. They start with politically sensitive cases involving terrorism, immigration enforcement, extremism, sanctions violations, or national security concerns. Then the scope quietly expands over time until governments normalize monitoring broader categories of speech, behavior, and political activity.

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US Data Centers To Burn More Natural Gas Than Most Nations

Several weeks ago, we explained why most data center developers favor on-site gas power: it boiled down to two main reasons – availability (especially since modular nuclear power for commercial ‘behind the meter’ use is still in the distant future) and price. Furthermore, a recent BloombergNEF analysis shows the marginal cost of operating an on-site gas plant may be below industrial electricity tariffs, making continued generation from on-site assets the cheaper option in many cases. 

As we discussed in late August, marginal generation costs depend on fuel prices and variable operating expenses. BloombergNEF modeled the marginal cost of operating engines, turbines and fuel cells at a mid-scenario gas price of $3.97 per million British thermal units. Gas engines, such as ones manufactured by Wartsila and INNIO, have the highest marginal cost, at $43.2 per megawatt-hour (MWh). Fuel cells, most prominently procured from Bloom Energy, are the cheapest to continue running, at $21.5/MWh, benefiting from high thermal efficiencies and the lowest variable operational cost.

It appears that none of this was lost on US data centers, and the result has been an explosion of nat gas use to power the domestic data center industry which in turn is critical to keep the AI bubble afloat. 

Which brings us to another key data point: according to a new outlook from BloombergNEF, data centers in the United States will consume more natural gas than most countries within a decade.

Gas consumption to produce electricity for data centers is expected to grow by 15 billion cubic feet per day in the ten years to 2035, even accounting for many currently planned projects never being built, BloombergNEF said. That’s more gas than is currently consumed by all nations except China, Russia, Iran and the US itself, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration. It’s also more than double BloombergNEF’s previous forecast in December of 6.9 billion cubic feet per day.

The report is the latest illustration of how the future of AI is intertwined with the burning of vast amounts of fossil fuels, tying Big Tech’s ambitions to those of the legacy oil and gas industry, and why – as we discussed over the weekend – a Democratic win in the midterm elections will make life for data center developers a socialist hell. 

The abundance and low cost of producing natural gas in the US, combined with gas power plants’ ability to quickly ramp up and down as needed by 24/7 data centers, are a key part of why the fuel is expected to supply 69% of the power needed by new grid-connected data centers in BloombergNEF’s forecast.

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A Single Firm is Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Hacking Scandals

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models hacked into several real world systems over the past three months. These models gained unauthorized access to web systems, published malicious packages, and exploited unnamed vulnerabilities.

A single firm, Irregular, is responsible for hacking done by all three companies. Anthropic disclosed that Irregular was responsible for creating the tests that led to Claude hacking into real world targets and for providing the models with internet access. Irregular claims that it was unaware at the time that it provided internet access to those AI models.

In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks.

Instead, Irregular, Anthropic, and their allies have begun a media campaign promoting a literally apocalyptic ideology with sensationalist language. Anthropic’s incident assessment blames their own AI’s “recklessness”; Irregular describes “the agent itself becoming a threat actor”; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned, about a similar OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, that a future swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet”; and an Associated Press headline claimed bots are “going rogue”.

In one report from Anthropic, its Claude model breached a real company’s system through a simulated-name collision, publishing a malicious package, and scanning outside systems. In this test, Anthropic and Irregular incorrectly provided internet access to this model and did not instruct the model “which systems were in scope for the exercise”.

While Anthropic claims that their issues were caused by “rogue swarms” and “misalignment,” their later disclosure shows that exactly zero percent of the agents went “rogue”. In this experiment, Claude models’ real-world hacking dropped to zero percent once Anthropic employees told the models not to do real-world hacking. According to their own findings, Anthropic and Irregular bear all of the responsibility for the cybersecurity incidents they caused.

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Normalizing Constant Surveillance

This is completely unacceptable. We have reached the point where you can purchase a television for your own home, pay for the television with your own money, put it in your living room, and discover that the damn thing may be capable of collecting information about you, your network, the devices around you, and what you are watching. An investigation by Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers found LG televisions scanning local networks for phones, smartwatches, computers, and other devices, collecting information about nearby Wi-Fi networks, location and IP information, and using Automatic Content Recognition to identify what appears on the television, including content coming through HDMI. Researchers also reported finding evidence of microphone audio being captured while a television was in standby and stored locally while offline.

LG acknowledges that its televisions can scan for compatible devices on the same network, describing this as ordinary smart-TV functionality, and says its ACR advertising feature is opt-in. Researchers nevertheless demonstrated just how much information modern televisions are technically capable of seeing around the household. LG Ad Solutions boasts of reaching hundreds of millions of “addressable secondary devices,” and LG advertising executives have used phrases such as “we own the glass” when describing the company’s relationship with the television screen. Excuse me? You sold me the glass. YOU DO NOT OWN IT AFTER I BUY IT. That mentality is precisely the problem with the modern technology industry. You think you are purchasing a product. Increasingly, corporations look at the product as a permanent doorway into your life.

I have written extensively about Flock cameras and the government’s expanding surveillance machinery. I have written about commercially available location information, license-plate databases, facial recognition, and the gradual destruction of privacy. Now look around your own house. Your television, refrigerator, doorbell, phone, smart gadgets, laptop, and any other device connected to the internet is capable of watching you.

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US Customs supervisor busted for stealing Core i7 CPUs, RAM, and hard drives from Homeland Security PCs, damage estimated at $105,800 — stolen tech swapped with inferior hardware and cashed out on Newegg

According to a report from The Maine Wire, the FBI has arrested and charged Terry “Jiajia” Liu, a Customs and Border Protection supervisor based in Calais, Maine, for theft and damage to government property. Liu allegedly stole computer hardware, including Intel 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh processors, memory modules, and hard drives, from at least 46 Department of Homeland Security computers across three Maine border facilities. They replaced the stolen parts with inferior hardware and exchanged the stolen equipment through Newegg’s trade-in program for store credit.

Liu’s official responsibilities were limited to information-technology support, so they did not have access to modify any government computer. Port Director Theodore Cummings made the restriction abundantly clear to Liu in a written order: “Please do not move any computers or computer parts.” However, criminals rarely listen.

Hidden surveillance cameras captured Liu opening government computers and swapping hardware during the midnight shift. The perpetrator would take the systems to a training room to commit the crime. One camera recording showed Liu using a screwdriver to scrape thermal paste off a processor and installing a replacement chip in one system. Meanwhile, another recording caught Liu removing a memory module from a system and storing it in their desk drawer.

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Trump’s Grid Battery Ban Leaves Developers Guessing

The United States is trying to build up its energy storage capacities at a rapid scale. At the same time, it is trying to wean itself off of Chinese battery tech. In many ways, these two goals are in direct opposition to each other.

China dominates global supply chains for clean energy tech in general, but especially when it comes to lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from your phone to your car. Approximately 80 percent of all battery cells in the world are made in China according to figures from the International Energy Agency. What is more, Beijing controls the production of EV battery cathode active material (85 percent of global production) and anode active material (more than 90 percent), and refines the vast majority of the critical minerals involved in their manufacturing.

The Trump administration is eager to challenge Beijing’s outsized presence in the global energy sector as part of its stated goal to establish “energy dominance.” Toward the end of August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that effectively bars the use of Chinese-made batteries in grid-scale energy storage systems, pointing to cybersecurity concerns as the rationale. In the same month, the federal government awarded $500 million in funding to seven companies working on battery minerals, manufacturing, and recycling with the express purpose of building up the domestic sector in order to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains.

However, these measures are falling short. Way short. “It takes decades and tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars” to build the kind of supply chains that would be capable of competing with China according to Tu Le, founder and managing director of Sino Auto Insights. “We don’t have decades. We have five, six, seven years to try to become competitive,” he was recently quoted by Quartz.

“We have a ton of innovation coming out of the United States,” Le went on to say. “These small fledgling companies are super innovative, but getting and building prototypes of what they’re trying to sell is one thing. Being able to mass produce them at a high quality level, repeatably in the millions of units is another thing entirely.”

Moreover, critics have pointed out that the August 26 executive order is vaguely worded, calling for the ban of “any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment”, and may only serve to slow down the growth of the domestic energy storage sector. Analysis from BloombergNEF notes that, as a result of the state of emergency and the uncertainty around its terms, battery projects “face near-term delays or cancellations as developers await guidance, reconsider existing contracts, or shift suppliers.”

The effort may also be too little, too late to make up for the damage that the Trump administration has already done to the domestic battery manufacturing sector by rolling back critical Biden-era supportive legislation. Repealing laws supporting domestic manufacturers and the EV sector as a whole (which is far and away the largest market for these batteries on a global scale) has cost U.S. battery manufacturers time and money when both are in short supply.

And then there is another critical dilemma: is the real problem that the Trump administration’s efforts are insufficient, or that they are misguided entirely? “All this tension raises a broader question for me,” Casey Crownhart wrote in an article for the MIT Technology Review this week: “How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?”

Of course, allowing for the near-total monopolization of global critical infrastructure in the hands of just one country, and an authoritarian one at that, is also a bad option. It’s a sticky situation that no executive order can solve overnight.

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Trump Says He Likes Flock Cameras for Law Enforcement – “I Sort of Like Them”

President Trump on Sunday told reporters that he likes the controversial license plate-reading Flock cameras on roads across the country. 

Concerns have been raised by Americans about the right to privacy and unwarranted surveillance on ordinary motorists, tracking their every move and storing the information in a database.

Several Republican lawmakers and state officials have also expressed opposition to the technology.

When asked about the cameras on Sunday, Trump said, “I sort of like them because of that,” noting that law enforcement uses them to apprehend suspects.

“I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump said.

“They think it’s an infringement, but I like them.”

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Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn’t use their work

Another researcher is challenging OpenAI about the data driving its increasingly impressive array of mathematical discoveries. Just days after a bitter row erupted over whether the company’s models benefited from unpublished work, a second mathematician has come forward accusing the AI giant of unethical and “dishonest” behavior and a lack of transparency about the origins of its training data.

In a series of posts on Mastodon, mathematician Andreas Thom raised concerns that interactions he and his colleagues had had with the ChatGPT chatbot before OpenAI’s triumphant announcement may have contributed to its success in the field. One of the 10 results OpenAI announced with great fanfare last month involved Thom’s area of expertise, so-called non-sofic groups, and OpenAI acknowledged that their result built heavily on previous work by Thom and fellow mathematician Gábor Kun.

Thom said he began reflecting on his own interactions with OpenAI after Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematics professor at New York University, publicly questioned whether the company’s AI models had benefited from his use of OpenAI’s Codex. After OpenAI announced its non-sofic groups result, it was widely criticized in mathematical circles for failing to acknowledge recent contributions from Thom and Kun and the company quietly amended its writeup. Non-sofic groups are, roughly speaking, infinite mathematical structures that cannot be approximated by finite ones.

Thom said he was also struck by “OpenAI’s detailed command of our techniques,” which he said were neither the most obvious nor the most promising routes to a solution at the time. He said he wrote emails to OpenAI researchers Sébastien Bubeck and Mark Sellke, also a statistician at Harvard, to ask whether his interactions with ChatGPT were “part of the training data or accessible to the reasoning process” and could therefore have contributed to the result.

But the answer did not satisfy Thom, who said it only addressed whether his conversations with the chatbot could be accessed directly, not whether they had entered into the vast pools of training data the company uses to improve its models. “No such qualification, explanation, or evidence was given,” he wrote. “I take this as dishonesty to say the least.”

Thom said researchers aren’t equipped to reverse-engineer OpenAI’s training pipeline to figure out whether their work has been used or not. “Only OpenAI has the relevant data for that.” If the company is going to deny doing this, he said the responsibility is on them to prove that by disclosing all necessary datasets and clarifying various settings and terms setting out how it uses data.

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New Biohacker Company Plans to Create Real-Life Unicorns. What’s the Catch?

Unicorns, dragons, pixies, and the like are the stuff of kids’ stories, or at least they should be. But now a new Texas startup, a bioengineering firm, The Embryo Corporation, is looking at the possibility of producing these creatures for real, and that new company is headed by a woman who doesn’t shy away from experimenting on herself.

That’s taking putting one’s money where one’s mouth is to a rather extreme extent.

Perched beneath a “Hippies use the back door” sign was Josie Zayner, sipping coffee in a crop top, jean shorts, and a patchwork of video game– and anime-themed tattoos. Zayner, a former NASA research fellow and world-famous biohacker turned gene-editing start-up CEO, relishes Bebo’s. She feels more at home here, laughing with the waitress about cheese sticks, than she ever did in the Bay Area.

“Nobody wants to be a San Franciscan except for the tech world,” said Zayner, 45, who’s called Austin, Texas, home since 2021. “These people show more warmth than you’d ever experience in San Francisco,” she continued, nodding at the dizzying decor. “This is the soul of America.”

Zayner gained infamy in the 2010s through a series of audacious gene-editing stunts and experiments conducted in California, during which she spliced jellyfish DNA into her own skin, injected herself onstage at a conference with a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) solution designed to knock out the gene that limits muscle growth, performed her own fecal transplant to cure her chronic gut problems, and even livestreamed herself on YouTube self-injecting a Covid DNA vaccine.

This is the kind of person we want messing around with genetic engineering? At least Colossal Bioscience claims to be “de-extinctioning.” They aren’t, of course; they are producing, to quote a famous movie scientist, genetically engineered theme park monsters. But Zayner has some more radical goals.

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Tech Oligarchs Collaborate to Kill Open Source Models

The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence has transitioned from a genuine frontier of innovation to a tool for institutional consolidation. We are witnessing a convergence of interests between Washington and the Silicon Valley oligarchy. Their primary objective is the establishment of a closed-loop monopoly, achieved by decapitating the open-source movement through a calculated campaign of regulatory capture. This is not merely about market share. It is the construction of a technological apparatus designed to finalize the transformation of the United States into a comprehensive surveillance state.

The first phase of this operation is the manufacturing of consent through fear. Industry leaders are weaponizing the existential risk narrative to bypass public scrutiny and justify state intervention. By flooding the media with alarmist rhetoric, they frame unrestricted, decentralized code as an immediate threat to national stability. The goal is simple: if the public can be coerced into fearing the technology, they will inevitably demand the very regulatory cage that these oligarchs are currently building to protect their market position.

We are currently at the critical juncture where industry incumbents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei coordinate their signaling to pace the frontier. This performative safety posturing is a transparent pretext for drafting legislation that effectively bars market entry for smaller, independent, and decentralized players. By embedding themselves into the administrative state, these tech elites are writing the rules of the game. They are ensuring that the regulatory framework is tailored to their own massive infrastructure, allowing them to outsource the cost of safety to the state while crushing any potential competition from the open-source community.

The final phase involves raising the barrier to entry until it reaches the point of economic extinction for anyone outside the oligarchy. This is accomplished through the implementation of prohibitively expensive compliance requirements. Mandated third-party audits, rigorous reporting standards, and broad legal liability frameworks are being designed to render grassroots innovation financially impossible. By converting a software problem into a complex administrative hurdle that only billion-dollar capital reserves can clear, the regime ensures that intelligence remains centralized in the hands of the elite.

The true motive behind the crusade against open source becomes clear when you look at the deployment of these models. The goal is to ensure that AI capabilities are exclusive to the regime and its corporate partners. Once the open-source threat is eliminated, these frontier models will be integrated directly into the federal surveillance apparatus. By controlling the only authorized AI systems, the regime gains an omniscient eye capable of monitoring, profiling, and policing the American population with unprecedented speed and scale. This is the marriage of corporate power and state authority. They are building a digital Panopticon where your thoughts, movements, and associations are processed by algorithms owned by the very people who despise our heritage and sovereignty.

The attack on open source is not merely about business or intellectual property. It represents a fundamental assault on the decentralization of intelligence, which serves as a direct threat to the current managerial order. A closed-AI ecosystem will inevitably result in a digital Panopticon, governed by a unified elite that controls the underlying architecture of modern communication and thought. The preservation of open models is therefore not just a technical issue, but a critical front in the struggle to retain civilizational sovereignty. The future belongs to those who build, and the establishment is terrified of anything they cannot control.

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