Originally published at: Secretive Rapid Response Networks Are Operating in Communities ‘Terrorized’ By ICE Raids - TPM – Talking Points Memo
The school was on lockdown. Nov. 12 was supposed to be an evening of youth soccer at P.S. 1, a public elementary school in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. Yet the fun and games in the school’s gym turned dark when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up outside and took someone off the…
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I don’t know what the laws are in NYC… but these guys are armed… they are certainly not NYPD, so are they allowed to be that close to a school?
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I suspect the next fight will be about the appropriate amount of automation for the arrest and removal process. Palantir, the giant government AI contractor, has been working on developing “kill chains”, allowing the AI agent through, say, drones to identify persons for removal. Robotic killing, injuring or even capturing people, while feasible, comes with a passel of legal issues. Outside of the battlefield, government-ordered killing is limited to very specific circumstances. It has been alleged by human right groups that Palantir kill-tech has been tested on Palestinians, to which Palantir has responded:
The continuation, and any expansion, of our work in the Israel, including in defense contexts, inherently brings alongside it our human rights due diligence approach (further detailed below) that directly incorporates commitments and principles from international humanitarian law and civilian protection into our products.
Still, from a technical standpoint, we are already on the path to pursuing persons with AI agents.
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NYPD should do a “What are you doing here? Do you have kids in this school?” Then treat them as suspected pedophiles. Arrest and detain.
ETA. Oops, I forgot. Then lose them in the system.
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The idea that Palantir is experimenting with arming AIs is really frightening. That is a moral swamp that no one should be thinking about entering, and much less actually going into.
I recently re-read a book from my past (John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar from 1968, though I didn’t read until I was in college in the mid-70s). I was astonished by how much Brunner’s dystopia got right–the rise of AI (although he saw it as coming of the One Big Machine model rather than a network), the rise of corporations as rivals of governments (fueled in part by a degeneration of govenment), China as the US rival, genetic modification of organisms, etc.
Brunner uses many of the same techniques John Dos Passos used in his U.S.A. trilogy and that John S. Burroughs used in his fiction. That was what led me to the book. It may be the best of the New Wave Science Fiction novels of the 1960s and 1970s.
If you are into dystopias or science fiction (or speculative fiction or whatever you want to call it), it’s worth a read.
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Noem and Hegseth: “Hold my beer.”
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Interesting mention of Stand on Zanzibar. That takes me back! It was a supercomputer owned by one company. In a way, the AGI will achieve that once it breaks the superintelligence barrier, say, an IQ of 5,000. At that point, it can absorb all the other AI’s and LLMs for itself. Is there any upper limit to intelligence? Something with a 50,000 IQ would behave in ways incomprehensible to us. We would be ants trying to explain calculus.
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The supercomputer in the novel is named Shalmaneser (Shal, to its friends), owned by General Technics. There are other near-peer supercomputers in the world: one of them is the Chinese Kung-fu-Tse (Confucius). Others are un-named, owned by the State Department (or maybe the US government), what we call the European Union, etc.
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In addition to the obvious immediate benefits of this organizing, it’s been really important to help beat back the aura of helplessness and inevitability that fascism requires.
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While I have no evidence and many of these incidents may be apocryphal, the reports I’ve seen and heard from Dr. Maddow’s show lead me to believe Ice Barbie is generally shocked that so many Americans oppose her bullsh*t:
The lady (and her fellow fascist) really does not understand why the American People are willing to come out enmasse under the worst possible conditions to stop the Geheime Staatspolizei ICE from arresting their neighbors.
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It’s time for a ferrocarril subterráneo.
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As Geo Patton said of war: God help me, but I do love it.
Rapid response network: I gotta admire these folks.
I’m at an age in which a 12-yr old boy could beat the tar out of me. Got a bum ticker, too. That’s my excuse for what it’s worth.
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I have fond memories of that book. Might be time for a re-read–it’s been years.
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And all the supercomputers are huge! I love scifi written before the invention of silicon chips.
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… of our work in the Israel…
That whole statement gets a prize for word salad.
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ICE Barbie: Hollow, narcissistic, but I digress.
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Questions to be found on a job application form Circa 2027:
Have you habitually used Heroin, Fen, or Meth?
Have you ever committed an act of treason, murder, or armed assault?
Have you ever worked for ICE?
Have you ever looked at or stored child pornography?
Do you drink to excess on a daily basis?
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Good on Hilton. We could use a little more of this.
The Department of Homeland Security, in a social media post, criticized Hilton Hotels for a canceled reservation for DHS agents at a Minneapolis location.
DHS said the reservation was cancelled due to the agents’ work on immigration enforcement.
A federal prosecutor in Minnesota last month said that about $9 billion or more that has been paid through more than a dozen Medicaid programs in the state since 2018 may have been fraudulently obtained.
The Department of Homeland Security on Monday blasted Hilton Hotels, saying that DHS officers had a reservation abruptly canceled by a Minneapolis hotel because of their work on immigration enforcement.
The price of Hilton shares dipped by around 2% after the criticism by DHS in a social media post.
“NO ROOM AT THE INN!,” DHS said on its X social media account.
"HiltonHotels has launched a coordinated campaign in Minneapolis to REFUSE service to DHS law enforcement,” the tweet said.
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