Posted originally on the CTH on December 31, 2024 | Sundance

t the core of our great American experiment is liberty.

Freedom is a proximity issue; liberty is about how we engage life. I would argue, the issue of liberty is perhaps the single most consequential facet of the next several years that few people are discussing.

The Tech Bros as they are now colloquially called, are building the tools for rapid expansion of the surveillance state.

Palantir (Peter Thiel) is leading the way to connect Real ID with facial recognition; the system has both military and domestic application. Oracle (Larry Ellison) is building out cloud storage and data processing with speeds to capture massive data and link the tools. xAI (Elon Musk) is building the refinement system for specifically directed targeting. In whole these networks are creating the tools for the Surveillance State.

As we learned with the Obama administration. Every tool within this process is but one election away from being a weapon. However, the fully engaged AI surveillance system has some very predictable probabilities.

Within the AI surveillance system, which I continually assert is not compatible with liberty, the tools are being designed to avoid certain outcomes.

A nuclear weapon kills everyone within the same proximity. AI used as a weapon has the ability to skip certain targets as defined by the people who deploy the detonation.

While the future forecast says that everyone remains essentially “free,” the same cannot be predicted for “liberty.” Some people will be more equal to constitutional protections than others. This is the baseline for my opposition to the specific AI weapon being created by the Tech Bros.

At a certain point this weaponized AI conversation gets very alarming.  Using a reference that some might remember, essentially capability shifts from Truckers being debanked for opposing government, to Truckers being de-personed for opposing government.  The Truck is disabled before the Trucker arrives at the protest point, and the Trucker is identified and warned proactively.  Phones stop working, credit cards and atm’s are moot, GPS is disabled, and the Trucker encounters a place where every tech interface rejects his/her transactional intent.

Now, insert “Politically Exposed Persons” (PEP) as defined by the political control operators wherever you see the word Trucker to expand the point.  The PEP might be “free,” but does the PEP have liberty.

In building the system there are going to be key inflection points where an American engineer on the process might take exception with the contracted tool being built.  How do the Tech Bros avoid that problem, H1Bs.