…Tesla Model X struck a Chevrolet Silverado that was parked along Middle Creek Parkway, near Voyager Parkway on the far north side of Colorado Springs. Police found an unconscious occupant on the passenger side of the Tesla. The Tesla collided with the parked Silverado at a speed high enough to move the truck about 30 feet, police said. “The unconscious occupant was determined to be a passenger in the car and was transported to a local hospital with life-threatening injuries,” police said in an online blotter entry.
Several incidents like this have been reported recently, as Tesla for some reason continue to be unable to avoid crashing at full speed into cars around them.
Here’s a case from just a couple days ago that brought homicide charges for the Tesla owner.
Witnesses reported that a Tesla had disregarded the southbound red light on Central Avenue North at Smith Street and collided with a gray Prius in the intersection, then collided with a red Prius that was leaving a restaurant parking lot, according to police. They reported that the red Prius was struck so hard it was pushed into a nearby wall.
The MIT Technology Review has a very naive feel-good story about “AI to let a single voice through” that doesn’t mention anything about the famous and decorated 1960s or 1970s spy-thrillers let alone prior hyper-focused directional microphones.
Poster for the 1974 American mystery thriller film written, produced, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr, and Robert Duvall. Hackman portrays a surveillance expert who faces a moral dilemma from his collection of highly targeted conversations. It won the highest Cannes Film Festival prize (Palme d’Or) where it premiered, then was nominated for three Oscars, four Golden Globes, and three nominations at the 47th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound.
MIT instead should have written more about how our identity can be seen as a collection of things, such that a high-fidelity sensor for AI is able to ingest a complex signal and then maintain a “private” connection between two points better than static and manual credentials. That’s an arguably positive development, as it suggests pre-shared keys could be switched to instant yet more sophisticated credentialed communications.
I mean the upside to presenting a secret for ID is that it’s disconnected from our true selves. And the downside to presenting a secret for ID is that it’s disconnected from our true selves. Which is preferred and when? It depends, so technology and tools are better when they provide options for our complicated world.
Or let me ask this a different way. Do you want to hear a specific person in this crowd? Is it a person with A, B and C attributes?
Either you setup a secret sharing system to manage that connection or… you can imagine using AI with a microphone to train on a particular Chinese woman’s voice and then alert you to her presence in any crowd while translating her speech to English.
What if a Sheriff could detect someone who is young, someone who is also Black, someone who is also male… and classify their speech as “threatening” to unleash extra-judicial assassination?
Who gets authorized for such massive scale micro listening accuracy, and for what purposes? And what could be more spooky?
It’s reminiscent of the infamous IGLOO WHITE project (sensors meant to detect men walking in the jungle and relay their position to close air support), which cost over a billion dollars a year in 1968 yet still didn’t achieve mission success. Are we there yet?
In other words, imagine a radio in a combat zone keeping contact with a single voice because attributes, where authentication is based on that voice being measured for its particular uniqueness and entropy.
And now imagine the countermeasures. One obvious safety device would be to require a secret to “key in” on a particular voice. Like the patented “PIN login” method I invented in 2006, for tens of millions of users of Internet devices at that time, commercial versions of this AI product could be prevented from detecting a voice unless it also had a pre-shared secret to authorize such a “connection”. No key, no key in.
The MIT article thus seems very lacking because it blindly reports about AI product development, really about academic research, that is within a very old technology space. It lacks any of the proper context of real-world markets (and dangers), as if ethics are somehow a separate consideration than the main one.
They could help wearers focus on specific voices in noisy environments, such as a friend in a crowd or a tour guide amid the urban hubbub.
Yeah, sure MIT, “such as a friend” or a tour guide. Positive thinking. Not such as… a target for harm.
The MIT author even uses the word “target” yet fails to mention any of the history and philosophy of targeted identity management and private point-to-point communication risks, let alone why military intelligence is desperate to game obfuscation in order to pinpoint targets for spying or even… targeted assassination by drone.
USAF airman Roger Fortson, assassinated by a Florida Sheriff’s Deputy on May 3, 2024
The tragic case of a Sheriff’s Deputy assasinating an innocent American in the Air Force has produced a statement that begs how the Sheriff will overhaul the entire system.
SHALIMAR, Fla. (May 31, 2024) – The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) has terminated Deputy Eddie Duran following the completion of an administrative internal affairs investigation into the death of Roger Fortson on May 3. The administrative investigation determined the deputy’s use of deadly force was not objectively reasonable and therefore violated agency policy.
The OCSO administrative internal affairs investigation, opened immediately after the shooting, is separate from the active criminal investigation that remains ongoing with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Notably the Sheriff’s office has boiled the assassination down to a simple statement.
“This tragic incident should have never occurred,” said Okaloosa County Sheriff Eric Aden. “The objective facts do not support the use of deadly force as an appropriate response to Mr. Fortson’s actions. Mr. Fortson did not commit any crime. By all accounts, he was an exceptional airman and individual.”
So why then did Aden’s team use such excessive force to assassinate “an exceptional airman”? An airman. A specialist, trained professional, for high risk situations demanding clear thought and purposeful action.
To put this in perspective, look at another recent incident involving OCSO. Have you ever heard the sound of an acorn falling on top of your car? Can you imagine that?
Two OCSO deputies bizarrely claimed that they heard gunfire and started shootingat their own car despite absolutely zero actual threat, and with risk of hitting the suspect they had just searched, handcuffed and put in that car.
Now imagine barrel rolls, yelling “I’m hit” and dumping a magazine into your own police car after… SQUIRREL.
Really. The video of these two is a keystone kops komedy. They even thought the sound of an acorn hitting a car roof meant that they were “hit” and they then fantasized about their vest stopping a bullet. They thought they were about to die. They actually were just scared out of their mind in the middle of the day by a squirrel.
“Though his actions were ultimately not warranted, we do believe he felt his life was in immediate peril and his response was based off the totality of circumstances surrounding this fear,” Aden said.
Sheriff Aden’s justification of outrageously unprofessional staff behavior, attributing it to their absolutely false and unjustified beliefs in an imminent danger, underscores systematic deep-seated anxiety and lack of proper judgment under his watch. OCSO created dangerous conditions for unnecessary violence and threats to society.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that this new investigation report reveals the Sheriff’s office has a culture of “shoot first to kill innocent people and ask questions later.”
According to the internal affairs report, Duran told investigators that when Fortson opened the door, he saw aggression in the airman’s eyes. He said he fired because, “I’m standing there thinking I’m about to get shot, I’m about to die.
“It is him or me at this point and I need to, I need to act as opposed to react,” he told investigators.
Acorn eyes?
Absurd. Duran was literally reacting to a call. He arrived, banged on the wrong door and then killed an innocent man for no reason.
He was reacting extremely unprofessionally. Why was he even there, reacting in the first place? Apparently it was to unload his gun, perform extra-judicial assassination of someone he fraudulently had been trained to see as a threat.
Fortson, who had no criminal record, lived alone and had no guests that afternoon. He was on a video call with his girlfriend, who told investigators they had not been arguing. She said Fortson was playing a video game.
An apartment complex manager called the sheriff’s office at 4:24 p.m. and Duran arrived three minutes later. He met the manager in the parking lot and she directed him to Fortson’s fourth-floor apartment, telling him there are frequent arguments, body camera video shows.
However, 911 records show deputies had never been called to Fortson’s apartment previously but they had been called to a nearby unit 10 times in the previous eight months, including once for a domestic disturbance.
Duran and Foreman couldn’t have been farther apart in background and training. A trigger-happy and clumsy deputy, who Sheriff Aden deployed despite obviously unprepared and overwhelmed with fear, unloaded his gun without justification into a calm, smart and quiet professional.
4th SOS Emblem: Blue is for the day-time sky with sun yellow borders representing personal excellence. A black disc with a crescent is for special night-time operations, with a ghost specter for the unit’s history with “Spooky” aircraft and an ability to appear and disappear. The flames from the ghost’s arm denote high-altitude firepower of an AC-130J.
Remember the “free fire zones” of Vietnam? That’s life in Florida now, apparently, under the OCSO.
…an investigative report linked two city officers with the secret hate society that once was violently active in the area. […] The Florida Department of Law Enforcement sent the police chief a report linking the officers to the Klan based on information from the FBI.
And also related, clumsy unprofessional American law enforcement in targeted assassination of Black men in the military has been a known long-time problem.
In brief, Williams was a black 21-year old man in May 1960 (serving as a U.S. Army Paratrooper) when two white police officers apparently pulled him into a County jail at night where he was beaten to death by police clubs.
Don’t underestimate Duran’s statement of “him or me at this point and I need to act” or Aden’s own racist-sounding statement of “totality of circumstances surrounding this fear” as anything less than politically motivated.
Brookings: A crisis within a crisis: Police killings of Black emerging adults
Last year Microsoft was blamed for a weakness that enabled Russia to attack Germany, including systems for a centrist political party.
In that case, the government blamed a Russian military intelligence unit for orchestrating the hack and summoned a high-ranking Russian diplomat to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. That hack also targeted German companies in areas like logistics, defense, aerospace and IT services sectors. The SPD later said that a security vulnerability, not identified at the time, in Microsoft software had enabled the hack.
A few days ago, as European elections are coming, another centrist German political party was hacked.
The incident comes almost exactly one week ahead of the European Parliament elections, with polling day in Germany on June 9 as it is in the majority of EU member states.
“The BfV will issue a warning to all [political] parties in the German Bundestag [parliament] regarding the current attack,” the Interior Ministry said. “Our security agencies have intensified all protective measures against digital and hybrid threats and are informing people about the dangers.”
Clearly being in the center, a moderate, means targeting by those who want to force extremism. Hard to hold the middle when Russia is constantly looking for means to help extremist parties.
