You may recall I called for a ban of Twitter on grounds of posing a global security threat.

Any country that wants to stop Twitter’s intentional spread of violent Nazi hate speech can now consider a Senate bill meant to enable a targeted ban of unsafe technology.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a bill that would ban the wildly popular social media app from devices issued by federal agencies.

And several governors have ordered their agencies not to use the app on state-issued devices. This week, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho and Utah joined four other states — Maryland, South Dakota, South Carolina and Nebraska — in issuing such bans.

In related news, and for contrast, Twitter itself is pushing censorship of targets without any transparency or consistency.

On November 6, Musk pledged that he would not ban @ElonJet. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted. On Wednesday, less than a month later, Musk reversed course entirely[…]. Hours later, @ElonJet was suddenly back, without explanation, and subsequently suspended for a second time.

Open, censored, open, censored. Chaos.

All that “fire, ready, aim” trigger pulling was only within about a month. It started with a false premise of not caring at all about safety and then abruptly caring a lot, without accountability.

It’s called lying — permanent improvisation of dictatorships — and should diminish if not disqualify Twitter management from governance.

FTX’s CEO is now in deep trouble for the same selfishly unstable antics, and somehow Elon Musk avoids his due.

The Senate by comparison has been deliberating in public among bipartisan representatives; debating merits and risks of raising a safety bar to limit speech.

Maybe they even are discussing what it was like back during the 44 months in America under the Office of Censorship.

…censorship must focus tightly on a narrow objective such as fighting against racism, fighting against pandemic and fighting against… enemies of democracy.

Twitter’s CEO objectively is an enemy of democracy. He has reinstated hate speech and disinformation accounts, while attacking professional news reporters.

Elon Musk’s latest tinpot dictator move is to personally censor technology journalists without explanation.

[Musk] put up a poll with a variety of options, asking if or when he should reinstate the journalists’ accounts. When a plurality of respondents voted to restore the accounts immediately, he deleted the poll….

Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., tweeted that she had met with Twitter representatives on Thursday who said the company would not take action against journalists who criticize the platform. “Less than 12 hours later, multiple technology reporters have been suspended.”

Twitter representatives? Nobody gets to make any decisions in the company anymore except the insecure chief executive firing anyone critical of him. Sounds like China or Saudi Arabia, right?

The CEO allegedly is even deep in the pocket of foreign interests as he dramatically flip flops like a coin-operated fish out of water, grasping for power.

Something smells rotten.

Tick tock… Tik Tok…

An Oregon man convicted of hate crimes had his big expensive stash of fancy guns taken away by the government.

Police recovered a trove of rifles and neo-Nazi literature from Rockhill’s home during his arrest in May after authorities noticed his distinctive tattoos and a license plate belonging to the 35-year-old in surveillance footage.

The guns will remain in the possession of the Portland Police Bureau while Rockhill serves two years of probation, according to court documents.

The press say “Neo-Nazi” when clearly he is a Nazi. His arrest is related to his use of speech intended to harm.

Jarl J. Rockhill admitted to affixing the sticker, which showed a male figure making a Nazi salute above the word “pure,” to a fence at the Immigrant & Refugee Community Organization on Northeast Glisan Street on April 23.

Pure hate. I’m surprised his sticker didn’t say America First.

The language of the judge is interesting because it orders the man to learn quickly about real history and submit proof of understanding as if an antidote to decades of swallowing white insecurity propaganda.

Cory Doctorow sat in the front row of my talk at a 2018 security conference and asked me some fairly specific questions. I didn’t mind.

It was a nice to see he was there to learn about the topics I frequently write and speak about.

However, when I wrote my blog post in 2020 about a more fair and accurate history of the Luddites, I didn’t really expect him to basically take it and publish it in January 2022 as his own work… without attribution.

In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology – no more than the Boston Tea Party’s cause was the elimination of tea, or Al Qaeda’s cause was the end of civilian aviation. Smashing looms and stocking frames was the Luddites’ tactic, not their goal.

In truth, their goal was something closely related to science fiction: to challenge not the technology itself, but rather the social relations that governed its use…

In truth, Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.

As someone just pointed out to me, I wrote this exact thing years prior with far more context and detail.

So it goes.

Kudos to those who have read both.

Years ago, in my talks about future AI risks, I explained how satellites and fax machines by 1960s had become essential technology in the success of U.S. Army special force operations in Africa.

Rescue teams gathered an accurate record of building footprints in order to prepare raids and make quick work of kidnappers.

A new Google blog post about their use of AI reminded me of it.

An accurate record of building footprints is important for a range of applications, from population estimation and urban planning to humanitarian response and environmental science. After a disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, authorities need to estimate how many households have been affected. Ideally there would be up-to-date census information for this, but in practice such records may be out of date or unavailable. Instead, data on the locations and density of buildings can be a valuable alternative source of information.

I see only a very subtle nod to the “humanitarian response” elephant in the room.

Here’s an example from “In the Shadows… Intelligence Corps”

Another time I mentioned briefly how quickly deflating cost of spatial intelligence feeds into asymmetric conflict.

One of the more interesting aspects of this new Google post is something I highlighted as far back as my 2016 talks, which is that AI engineers do not think about African geography when they develop “recognition” systems (I easily broke a Cambridge “driverless” system claiming 90% accuracy by running it on scenery from Botswana, where it immediately failed).

…taking into account confounding characteristics of different areas across the African continent. In rural areas, for example, it was necessary to identify different types of dwelling places and to disambiguate them from natural features, while in urban areas we needed to develop labelling policies for dense and contiguous structures.

It begs the question whether someone associated with military intelligence or special operations poked Google for help on a “humanitarian” mission by providing accurate footprints… in Africa. Or maybe even Google hired a spy to their dubiously funded massively expanding engineering teams.

I mean remember how Twitter engineers had been taking money from the Saudi government for access before the new CEO made it into an official strategy?