NYSee Radar

Tag: ai

  • End Times Fascism

    End Times Fascism

    Finally dropping tomorrow

    End Times Fascism on Bookshop.org

  • The ‘End Times Fascists’ Behind the AI Industry

    Brian Merchant · Blood in the Machine

    A conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about what they call end times fascism in the tech industry.

    As audio or video

  • The multiplying risks of financing data centres

    Michelle Chan, Martha Muir, Rafe Rosner-Uddin and Lee Harris · FT

    So great are the sums involved that even Big Tech groups with tens of billions of dollars in cash need to fund the infrastructure with debt.

    This is presenting major lenders with a complex set of calculations as they stretch themselves to finance, insure and underwrite an entirely novel asset class.

    Gift Link

  • A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over

    Joseph Cox · 404 Media

    404 Media is revealing the name of Border Patrol’s predictive policing units, which analyze financial data and have local cops pull people over. The people are not suspected of any particular crime.

  • US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

    Daniel Boguslaw · WIRED

    Spencer Reynolds [senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund] says that, despite the real if limited threat posed … a category like “anti-tech extremism” could be drawn so broad as to ensnare peaceful data center protesters, AI skeptics, and anyone with a bone to pick with technology that permeates modern life.

    · · ·

    “Suspicious activity reports are incredibly unreliable, often about vague or innocent behavior, issued under permissive standards. These reports, often received in large volumes, allow officers to inject their own biases and see what they want to see in the facts.”

    · · ·

    Among the vaguely defined activities flagged by the Northern Virginia intelligence center as suspicious are “expressed/implied threat,” “observation/surveillance,” “photography,” “testing/probing of security,” and “attempted intrusion.”

  • Google DeepMind Workers Vote to Unionize Over Military AI Deals

    Joel Khalili · Wired

    “A lot of people here bought into the Google DeepMind tagline ‘to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity,’” the DeepMind employee told WIRED. “The direction of travel is to further militarization of the AI models we’re building here.”

    · · ·

    “These conversations are happening . . . The workers at other frontier labs have seen what Google DeepMind workers have done. They’ve come to us asking for help as well.”

  • ‘It beggars belief’: MoD sources warn Palantir’s role at heart of government is threat to UK’s security

    Charlie Young & Carole Cadwalladr · The Nerve

    “When you have that mosaic built from UK sovereign defence, health, roads, power networks, power stations, and our major industrial bases, you have a detailed understanding of virtually every aspect of the sovereign United Kingdom. For an adversary, or even a nation with whom we have a special relationship, that picture is worth more than all the fine art on Earth.” 

  • Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web

    L0la L33tz · The Rage

    Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.

    In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

    …

    Persona Identity, Inc. is a Peter Thiel-backed venture

    …

    The software performs 269 distinct verification checks and scours the internet and government sources for potential matches, such as by matching your face to politically exposed persons (PEPs), and generating risk and similarity scores for each individual. IP addresses, browser fingerprints, device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and even selfie backgrounds are analyzed and retained for up to three years.

    …

    The program, according to the researchers, performs product analytics and user behavior tracking on a government identity-verification platform, provides real-time user monitoring — every click, every page load — on a FedRAMP platform processing PII and biometrics, and includes financial identity-verification capabilities on the government platform.

  • How US Intelligence and an American Company Feed Israel’s Killing Machine in Gaza

    James Bamford · The Nation.

    The project involved selling the ministry an Artificial Intelligence Platform that uses reams of classified intelligence reports to make life-or-death determinations about which targets to attack. In an understatement several years ago, Karp admitted, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” the morality of which even he himself occasionally questions. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’”

  • Retailers Secretively Using Face Recognition to Spot “Persons of Interest” — Including For the Government

    Jay Stanley · ACLU

    the incorporation of “BOLO” (“Be On the Look Out for”) alerts by companies on behalf of law enforcement has the potential to become — and may already be becoming — a powerful nationwide government surveillance dr­agnet.

    Cute move Rite Aid:

    In 2023 the FTC investigation found that “Rite Aid specifically instructed employees not to reveal Rite Aid’s use of facial recognition technology to consumers or the media.”

    We know the technology makes false positives all the time, and that there’s typically no human in the loop.

    If such sharing networks emerge — much as blacklists of “troublemakers” (i.e., labor organizers) were shared among companies in the 20th century — someone who is falsely accused might find themselves unjustly banned from a significant number of retail stores.

    This article collects a lot of scattered details concerning the issue, so would be a decent jumping off point for your exploration.