This article first appeared in Propaganda in Focus on July 25, 2024
The last time I caught up with Edward Snowden online was at his Substack site, Continuing Ed. That was back on September 22, 2022, when he wrote his first piece there in almost a year. He came back briefly to remind us: America's Open Wound: The CIA is Not Your Friend. Essentially, the piece details the history of CIA miscreant behavior since its founding in 1947. In 2022, the CIA was celebrating its 75th anniversary and the NSA its 70th. Snowden, who worked for both agencies, seems intent on making sure the reader knows that the work they do isn't always honorable or in the service of national security. He give them some Hell:
Within a decade, the CIA was directing the coverage of American news organizations, overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely to benefit a favored corporation), establishing propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects (purportedly contributing to the creation of the Unabomber), and-- gasp-- interfering with foreign elections. From there, it was a short hop to wiretapping journalists and compiling files on Americans who opposed its wars.
We don't know why Ed hasn't published more than that piece at his Substack site since December 2021. But, the arrival of a new child, and the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war, and the need to lay low probably had something to do with it.
Nevertheless, Snowden does find some quick time to post tweets at his X account. Perhaps his most important contribution in a while came last week when he went ballistic at the tweet by Mario Narfal spilling to the world that OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, retired US Army general and former NSA head, to its board of directors. To Snowden, this is the worst possible news for the future of OpenAI and its flagship app ChatGPT. Snowden launched:
When Ed Snowden talks, people should listen. But it is cryptic. I mean, what is he talking about that I should listen to so intently? Why does he refer to an attack on "the rights of every human of the Earth"? What rights? Global human rights. That's what. What are they? According to the UN, which is not good much these days, except for shining a dubious light on our collective failed idealism -- such as the conceit that we could come together as a body politic and accomplish great feats of humanity, starting with the cessation of arbitrary wars that spread like wildfires in the forests of our native Yore, and vesting it with the supra-power of managing global issues like Noam Chomsky's Big Three risks to humanity: Nukes, Climate Change, and the end of Democracy. Nope. (Catches breath.) According to the UN:
Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.
Is General Nakasone about to deprive us of our global liberties, Ed? He thinks so. So do I.
What happened was that preceding the on-boarding of Nakasone there was Deep Concern over at OpenAI offices among staff privy to the plans and actions of executives (and their pet Über wonks) regarding safety and security. Disclosing the tension roiling beneath the surface, a June 5, 2024 PC Magazine article begins, "A group of former and current OpenAI staffers wants to ensure that employees can publicly disclose the potential dangers of artificial intelligence." There were 13 such concerned employees, so, for reference purposes, let's call them the Gang of 13.
Essentially, they were looking for whistleblower protection to prevent retribution against informing the world that OpenAI might be up to no good or else have serious security flaws that coil allow, say, hackers to infiltrate and remove information and/or muck around like mischievous imps. Probably the Russians. (You've seen the film depictions. Will they never stop trying to disrupt our precious democracy?) Edward Snowden is concerned with how these Deep State types are mucking around with our precious democracy, unelected and without accountability. Indeed, in sympathy with the Gang of 13, Snowden sees the threat to the human species, with profit-driven prophets, like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, hurtling us toward the horizon event precipice leading into Suckersville.
The Gang of 13 produced an open signed letter titled: "A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence." It's worth a read. But here are some 'demands':
1. No NDAs.
2. An anonymous and protected process for employees to raise concerns.
3. Support a culture of open criticism. Academics do. Why not technologists?
4. No retaliation against whistleblowers.
In response, OpenAI brought in the NSA. Snowden launched.
If the CIA is not your friend, then the NSA is the one that will hunt you down in your own mind and leave you no place to hide. (See Frank Church's warning from 1975.) Marry that mentality to an enforcing mafia and what you get is nano-totalitarianism enforced with horrific violence. To wit, thought control.
Well, that's if things go wrong. Right?
For Snowden, the Intelligence Community (IC) went wrong a long time ago. Crossed that bridge over the abyss of no return. We got first word of it with the hearings of Frank Church who exposed the rogue government's willingness to work with dark presences, like the mafia (see my review of James Risen's recent biography, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys -- and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy). And then Snowden got inspired to whistleblow when he learned that NYT journalist, and Pulitzer Prize winner, Risen had an article quashed by an editor doing the NSA a favor. The article meant to run just before the presidential election of 2004 was about Stellar Wind, the operation to illegally suck up every American's phone records under false pretenses, and store them in databases. (Risen describes this thumb drive into the eye of journalism in anIntercept piece.) Snowden says he went to work gathering classified information after reading of that quashing.
To remind the reader, Snowden began delivering explosive classified material to the press (and the public) back in 2013, while he began his journey on the lam. Perhaps his most explosive revelation was the NSA's XKeyScore operation which, he said, allowed an "analyst" to access the data of anyone online through their IP address. In a 2014 interview that Snowden gave to a German broadcaster, he describes some specific uses:
You could read anyone's email in the world, anybody you've got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you're tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It's a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA's information. " You can tag individuals " Let's say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what's called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.
This is some serious invasiveness.
And nobody knows how invasive it can be or get better than Snowden. He devotes a whole chapter in his memoir, LoveInt, describing how he and fellow male colleagues would use XKeyscore, and other technologies, to spy on "love interests" and to share the male gazetron with each other. As he puts it,
This led to the practice known as LOVEINT, a gross joke on HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysts used the agency's programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection -- reading their emails, listening in on their phone calls, and stalking them online. (238)
But LoveInt takes manpower. The proposed ChatGPT processes in the making at OpenAI are automated and deeper.
As we are seeing now, databases are key to the effectiveness and workings of AI and ChatGPT. Nakasone begins his tenure just as OpenAI announced plans to roll out Advanced ChatGPT Voice Mode. Open AI told the press recently, "ChatGPT's advanced Voice Mode can understand and respond with emotions and non-verbal cues, moving us closer to real-time, natural conversations with AI. Our mission is to bring these new experiences to you thoughtfully," OpenAI has delayed this roll out, which, presumably, will now be reviewed by Nakasone.
The boarding of OpenAI by the NSA represents a further ratcheting of the international security apparatus that began with the hysteria following the Russian Sputnik launch that soon led to the development of the Internet (ARPAnet) and the decades of US imperial foreign policy (1) backed by the threat of nuclear weaponry and control of the world monetary policy. No Place to Hide (2) was established as a fact by the publicly-aired Frank Church Committee as far back as 1975. Since 9/11, the Internet has become a literal battlefield. It is a good idea to recall here that the Internet was a US Department of Defense initiative (ARPA), using its domain structures (controlled by the US) and its protocols (such as HTTP, DNS and TCP/IP). Battlefields are to be controlled. We recall how over-the-top jubilant the controversial CIA-head David Petraeus was, back in March 2012, when he announced the imminent arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), of which, he wowed in a Wired piece titled, "We'll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher," that calling IoT "'Transformational' is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies " particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft."
Every device with an IP address is a spy now. (I wrote a review back in 2014 of a book, Technocreep, that frames this menace comprehensively.) Just as Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT, called the AI phenomenon the revolution of revolutions, Petraeus's view that IoT is transformational is acknowledgement that the dystopia we feared is here (3).
Again, and one last time here, we recall what Ed Snowden warned us about in, and what is implied by his memoir title, Permanent Record. We are each and all, profiled by keywords and algorithms, our paper records of yore (social workers, schools, all kinds of paper trails now digitized), our Facebook and Instagram and YouTube uploads and Tweets, held in databases; we are dossieros (4). There's brilliant section of the memoir, in the chapter Cleared and In Love, where Snowden is awaiting the outcome of a background check and worries:
I drove to and from classes at AACC as the National Background Investigations Bureau rummaged through nearly every aspect of my life and interviewed almost everyone I knew: my parents, my extended family, my classmates and friends. They went through my spotty school transcripts and, I'm sure, spoke to a few of my teachers. I got the impression that they even spoke to Mae and Norm, and to a guy I'd worked with one summer at a snow cone stand at Six Flags America. The goal of all this background checking was not only to find out what I'd done wrong, but also to find out how I might be compromised or blackmailed " This, of course, set me thinking -- sitting stuck in traffic as all the moments of my life that I regretted went spinning around in a loop inside my head " When I went back and reread the posts, I cringed. Half the things I'd said I hadn't even meant at the time -- I'd just wanted attention -- but I didn't fancy my odds of explaining that to a gray-haired man in horn-rimmed glasses peering over a giant folder labeled PERMANENT RECORD " It was heinous to be so inextricably, technologically bound to a past that I fully regretted but barely remembered. (75-76)
This is the nub of nanototalitarianism. In the hivemind ahead, we ourselves become digitized and controlled by forces of mafia and 'private security contractors.'
ChatGPT Voice Mode expects to be as fast as the current keypad mode is, with very quick responses to queries following database searching by the app. They hope it will be as fast as a natural exchange, such as with current interactive apps Alexa and Siri. But the real concern to worriers-in-the-know is that the databases will develop into bespoke nightmare electronic dossiers. Imagine a database that has all of your life's information in it, docs, pics, phone calls, places you have been, videos, papers you submitted to university courses through TurnItIn. But added in, people connected to you.
What if ChatGPT turned vicious on you one day, and ala Chucky (the doll from Child's Play) says, Have you ever wondered what your mother really thought about you? And then you hear your mother's voice on the phone to a friend telling her how your Mom almost had you aborted. And she wishes she had taken the advice. (Chucky chuckles.)
The darkened mind reels at the possibilities.
BREAKING NEWS
As this piece was being edited, Synchron, the Australian (DARPA-initiated) BCI company announced plans to upload ChatGPT to their mindstreaming product. See this article, "Aussie tech company uploads ChatGPT," currently hidden behind a paywall, when it should be openly accessible. In the piece, CEO of Synchron tells the reader with accesns:
"Prompts are still going to be making errors, they may hallucinate. They're still not going to be perfect, but they are trying to predict what your intent is, and then the BCI (brain computer interface) has to remain the guardian of your free will, of your choice," Dr Oxley said. "You can see where it's going. The way I think about it is it becomes an extension of your brain, basically, eyes and ears, you know, doing complicated analysis of your environment and then presenting. It reminds me of how the brain works."
This casual playing with the mind requires more inquiry and analysis. Stay tuned.
Regional partners, England (Europe), Israel (Middle East), and Australia (Asia) have aided and abetted the spread of global capitalist hegemony.
In his famous speech to Meet the Press in 1975, Frank Church warned of a US-led global surveillance regime that gathered everyone's data and from which, if not governed, would lead to every US citizen having "no place to hide," and called it "an abyss we must not cross." We crossed.
Not a few of us on the Left were filled with schadenfreude giggles when Petraeus was caught out sleeping with his biographer, spilling secrets and stuff, and text-recorded by IC partner Google.
Dossieros is a word I coined to describe our cognition now; indeed, our existential terror at having no place to hide. Digital personas desaparecidas.
