The A.I. of Sauron

Yesterday (which now seems so far away, due to Earth’s being pulled into a metaphorical black hole, as outlined in https://outofunitedstates.com/p/spiralling-into-a-black-hole), a paragraph in my blogpost read: “It’s pretty clear that rising temperatures, a melting Arctic and increasing global water and resource scarcity are behind Trump’s threats to annex Canada and Greenland, both of which are home to significant reserves of critical minerals, called rare earth elements, that can withstand extreme cold and pressure changes, making them essential for the space industry, technology and green energy sector. And it’s not just minerals, but massive reserves of oil and gas, both onshore and offshore, are attracting U.S. interest. A geopolitical storm is brewing in the Arctic, accelerated by climate change and a play for global domination of Arctic land, coastline and trade routes that provide access to those massive reserves of critical minerals, oil, gas and water.” https://outofunitedstates.com/p/climate-change-accelerated-timeline

Then I see today’s news: Hegseth Closes Pentagon Office Focused on Future Wars--the Office of Net Assessment…and Scott Horton’s commentary: "If the White House were to take a disastrous move—like invade Canada, Greenland and Panama, for instance—this is the office that would instantly sound alarms about what this would cost the US in terms of money, lost prestige and disruption of alliances. So this move is to be expected. And it suggests again that Trump is absolutely serious about (1) invasions (Canada, Greenland and Panama, just for starters), (2) terminating NATO, (3) disrupting all existing US alliances, and (4) making the US a dependency of the Kremlin as the junior partner in a US-RF alliance."

Surely, there are enough non-MAGA brave souls who will join to form the largest and most sustained protests in the country’s history, if the Trump administration actually moved to invade Canada. I doubt that there are Army or National Guard regiments that are about to start shooting non-violent protesters. Maybe the police in some areas…sure, there are paramilitary groups who love Trump, as he pardoned all the January rioters (even those who attacked Capitol police), and could declare martial law if anti-administration protests rapidly grew.

But what if would-be resistors could be disincentivized before the protests start? “DOGE has hit one part of the federal government after another. The Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Veterans Affairs; the Federal Aviation, General Services, Social Security, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric administrations; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service; the US Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the National Park Service and the National Science Foundation—all fell under Musk’s control. An estimated tens of thousands of federal employees were effectively fired or resigned, in a ‘digital coup’.

“Along the way, DOGE gained access to untold terabytes of data. Trump had given Musk and his operatives carte blanche to tap any unclassified system they pleased. One of their first stops: a database that contained investigative files on tens of millions of US government employees. Other storehouses thrown open to DOGE may have included federal workers’ tax records, biometric data, and private medical histories, such as treatment for drug & alcohol abuse; the cryptographic keys for restricted areas at federal facilities across the country; the personal testimonies of low-income-housing recipients; and granular detail on the locations of particularly vulnerable children…

“As Wired reported on February 4, a 25-year-old former X engineer named Marko Elez was granted the ability not only to read the code in the Treasury systems but also to write—or change—it. With that level of access, he (or anyone he reported to) could potentially have cut off congressionally authorized payments, effectively allowing Trump or Musk to exercise a line-item veto. More immediately ominous to people familiar with the systems was the possibility that, by tampering with the code, Elez could cause the systems, in whole or in part, to simply stop working…The Wall Street Journal found racist comments from accounts linked to him on social media…Akash Bobba was given access to records in the Numerical Identification System, which contains information on everyone who has ever applied for a Social Security number—full access to ‘everything, including source code’ that included the SSA’s Enterprise Data Warehouse, which contains the ‘names of spouses and dependents, work history, financial and banking information, immigration or citizenship status, and marital status…The next step: Unleash the AI’. wired.com/story/elon-musk-digital-coup-doge-data-ai/

It reminds me of a Black Mirror episode, Shut Up and Dance, in which a teenager is blackmailed into committing bizarre and criminal acts by anonymous hackers in possession of a video of him masturbating. The teen is joined by a middle-aged man who is also being blackmailed over infidelity. But multiply that by a hundred million, so that there are roughly 200 million people who can be threatened or blackmailed into committing crimes, or snitching on their neighbors, or staying home, rather than going out and protesting what their government is doing, inside and outside its borders.