The feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat:
In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.
This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding "anti-American," "anti-Christian," and "anti-capitalism" beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump's counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.
Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.
Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.
"The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City," the report reads. The term "anti-tech violent extremism" does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.
[...] Created in the wake of 9/11, 80 fusion centers now pockmark the country and serve as go-betweens for federal intelligence agencies and state and local law enforcement. In addition to concerns about portions of the American populace disturbed by the rapid proliferation of AI, these centers are also gathering and circulating "intelligence" about alleged threats to data centers.
A Western Pennsylvania fusion center, for example, claimed that "adversarial actors, including state-sponsored entities, criminal groups, and extremists, such as homegrown violent extremists or environmental extremists, may target US data centers" and that "these actors could also exploit the strategic importance of data centers to the US economy, using them for activities like cryptocurrency mining or leveraging third-party entities, such as front companies, to gain access to US data and infrastructure."
(Score: 3, Touché) by turgid on Tuesday June 02, @01:15PM (4 children)
The world is going to run out soon. I'm not advocating violence, by the way.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Informative) by Ingar on Tuesday June 02, @01:57PM (2 children)
Torches, pitchforks and the guillotine have shown time and again that violence is a viable solution to abuse by the ruling class.
Love is a three-edged sword: heart, soul, and reality.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02, @06:14PM
I say we just start sending Typhoid Marys to cater their parties, again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Tuesday June 02, @06:29PM
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." —Tom Jefferson
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 4, Funny) by mcgrew on Tuesday June 02, @06:27PM
The world is going to run out soon.
Indeed, the popcorn shortage is terrible ever since that last popcorn vein ran out in the Floridian mine. However, there may be a big lode in Germany.
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Tuesday June 02, @01:26PM (20 children)
It just looks like it because tech is the obvious target. No, people are getting upset at the obvious corruption. Trump is the epitome of it but for decades hedge fund managers and other billionaires have been quietly making long range plans to screw us, while our politicians are more interested in getting re-elected than in the future of the country.
Things are getting so obvious now that the rage is becoming apparent. I've said it before, but in '76 18 y/o me moved into my own place on a minimum wage income. Had a car with insurance, put myself through college, yadda yadda. You can't do that today. Nobody can afford a house. I spend 2/3 of my income on rent. I've definitely noticed that when the cost of my popcorn goes up 10% due to "supply chain issues" Orville Reddenbocker's profits somehow increase 20%.
Trump's Grave will be the world's most popular open air toilet.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Tuesday June 02, @02:05PM (9 children)
Wage inequality has steadily worstened in the US since the 1960s. US government has some nice tables here:
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-inequality.html [census.gov]
E.g. 90th centile in earnings earns 3 times more than 50th centile and 13 times more than 10th centile in 2024
In 1970 that was more like 2 times more / 9 times more.
Note that disposable income has per capita steadily *grown* in the US, even after taking account of inflation/etc.
https://www.macrotrends.net/3769/us-disposable-personal-income-per-capita [macrotrends.net]
There was a blip in 2021 (covid and ukraine, I presume). On average house price has increased since 1970s, although that was apparently a historical low point:
https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ [longtermtrends.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday June 02, @04:09PM (4 children)
To add a datapoint, I retired in '08 (embedded software) making $117k plus 401k matching, bonuses and stock options. Couple years ago I was checking jobs (turns out retirement is boring), the pay for an equivalent job was $80k - $120k depending on experience.
Here's another article [techdirt.com].
Trump's Grave will be the world's most popular open air toilet.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 02, @06:32PM
Tech wages have been pretty chaotic ever since .com
When I was leaving college in the 80s, there were pretty well known starting salaries for the various degrees, and through the 90s they basically inflated along with cost of living around 2-3% per year. Then .com hit and they doubled overnight, depending on where you go to work and to a lesser degree who you go to work for. Some spots, like a University town I lived in, hung on to the old salary scales and just hired kids from the local school at those rates. Move 60 miles over to "the real city" and you can easily get 2x the pay for the same job, 3x if you smooth talk yourself in the right doors.
Then there's the Silicon valley / all of California disconnect, take that 3x number from the town I live in now and multiply it by another 3x - but, real-estate (rent or purchase) is easily 10x higher there as well, often with nothing equivalent on offer due to the distorted economics (2 acre lot in the city?, yeah like that's gonna happen in Glendale on a techie salary.)
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday June 03, @10:52AM
It's almost like closing the gold window and moving to an entirely fiat dollar backed only by an ever expanding national debt totally distorted the marketplace and its ability to allocate resources effectively.
Wonder who could have seen that coming...
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday June 03, @11:16AM (1 child)
> Here's another article [techdirt.com].
TFS: The article points out that US government repressing dissent, rather than engaging in meaningful discourse, will create an anti-AI politic.
I think it's a deliberate strategy by US government, isn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04, @05:49AM
Some are blaming China for it:
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/irrefutable-fact-kevin-oleary-says-185500320.html [yahoo.com]
I somehow am not convinced...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 02, @06:46PM
Prices have gone every which way... tech prices have collapsed almost as radically as Dutch tulip bulbs, but they never made 8TB Dutch tulip bulbs... Houses have probably gotten cheaper per square foot, but they're also much bigger on average. Cars have become even more of a rental agreement item than they ever were, and they have legally mandated all kinds of crap into the new ones that just didn't even exist 50 years ago.
The idea that you can put a single number on how the value of a dollar evolves over time is deep fallacy. Different people have different uses for their dollars.
One peculiar data point in the univese of "things people do with their money":
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday June 03, @10:44AM (2 children)
And people think wage inequality has to do with the tech, rather than the fact that monetary debasement sees those with real assets become richer through through the Cantillon effect, while meanwhile those who are spending their wages see each paycheck buy less and less.
Financialization, not technological advancement, is the enemy. Bitcoin's a great life raft, though it is true if you're not able to stash anything away for the future, it'll be the life raft you see as you sink below the waves.
Theft by a kleptocratic government and the parasitic banking system must be called out, lest we suffer the folly of yet another generation believing that more, rather than less government control, is the answer (coupled with a Marxist lashing out at the very people whose enterprises have the potential to bring enough prosperity in terms of real wealth to escape the debt trap in the first place).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Wednesday June 03, @11:12AM
> wage inequality ... Cantillon effect
Wage inequality has nothing to do with Cantillon effect. Wage inequality talks about income, Cantillon effect is about decay of savings from inflation.
> kleptocratic government
> parasitic banking system
What organisation has the ability to control the bankers?
> enterprises ... bring enough prosperity in terms of real wealth
But also have enough power to keep the "real wealth" in the hands of the rich property owners.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 04, @11:54AM
Inequality isn't affected all that much by inflation: If, thanks to inflation, the price of a loaf of bread goes from $2 to $200,000, then you'll have a situation where the minimum wage is $72,500,000 an hour, a middle-class worker is making $100,000,000,000 and Elon Musk is making $100,000,000,000,000. In other words, you've added 5 zeros to all the numbers, but the ratios remain the same.
What drives inequality is a political system that supports it by law and by force. The last time US society was extremely unequal, the Gilded Age, being in a union was illegal, advocating for either unions or left-wing political ideas would lead to arrest or worse, companies routinely employed spies to fire anyone who complained about their working conditions or pay, company management had goon squads on payroll to beat up anybody who tried to strike, and at one point the physical fights over striking escalated to the use of machine guns and bombs. Whereas in the 1950's, unions had significant rights granted by the government under the NLRA, wealth building tools like home mortgages were significantly funded and very real options if you were white enough to take advantage of them, and management that did not play right by unions would find key players wearing concrete shoes thanks to the union's mob ties, and all that led to workers being paid a lot more of company profits.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02, @02:18PM
Yeah, but they are far outnumbered by those looking for a piece of the action.
Heh, more like a caricature. His audience loves him.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 02, @06:26PM (1 child)
I'm not disagreeing, completely, but... in '76 what college did you pur yourself through. Look around town, or the state if you have to, what colleges are available? Around here we've got anything from $2600/yr for a State school offering 4 year programs, up to $48K/yr for one of our lesser known local private universities.
In 1973 my parents afforded a newly constructed house on teachers' salary (with a bit of help from their parents on the down payment), but... that was a 1600 square foot 3/2 with an air-conditioner that wouldn't get it below 78F in the middle of summer.
The goalposts have shifted quite a bit, what used to pass for "doing pretty good, upper middle class" is now considered ghetto by most people who spend their free time consuming AV entertainment showing them lifestyles of the rich and richer framed as if they are "just normal folks" driving $80K cars to and from their "ordinary" $800K suburban McMansions. Even back in the 1970s you had "The Brady Bunch" on TV with a pile of kids crammed into 2 bedrooms, with a (white) live-in maid downstairs in her own room.
Also for reference, while you talk about good 'ole 1976, remember: that's as far back as 1926 was then...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday June 02, @06:45PM
I was in college from '76 through '79 (SIU E) and it wasn't much higher than that. I'm sure there were cheaper colleges somewhere.
The GI Bill paid my tuition, but books and other supplies far outweighed normal tuition (with the exception of my 1920s history class, the textbook [mcgrewbooks.com] was only a buck and a half IIRC.
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Tuesday June 02, @06:39PM (6 children)
And that was AFTER the Arab Oil Embargo in '73 that was the root cause of the stagflation. In 1969 a plain McDonald's hamburger was 15¢ and the minimum wage was $1.50 (I got a 50¢ raise that year). Today that exact same hamburger is $2.49. If not for the greed of the 1% and the politiciams they own, the minimum wage would be $24.90.
Then, Mexico's was 38¢ per day and Canada had no minimum wage. Today Mexico's is almost twice ours and Canada's is by province but around $18 and the lowest is more than our highest state minimum.
America has become a third world shithole country!
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 03, @12:52AM (2 children)
>America has become a third world shithole country!
Feels like we went to Vietnam to learn just how to turn ourselves into a 3rd world shithole.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday June 05, @06:53PM (1 child)
I don't think so. I was stationed in Thailand at the end of that war, and it was third world; no paved roads or electricity outside of Bankok. Today they have surpassed us.
The enshittification of America started a decade later with the Reagan/Bush "trickle down" lie they and their Demublican congresses and their "fuck the working class, MAXIMIZE SHAREHOLDER VALUE!" told to a gullible America.
Meanwhile, rather than #1, we're about 20 or 30 depending what you're counting (except gun ownership and incarceration, we're #1 in those).
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 05, @07:08PM
I've got another take on the situation:
That, by the time of our Vietnam adventures, the USA had "arrived" at a level sufficient for harvest / exploitation, and so switched from progress for the people to profits for the possessors. Reagan was the symptom: actor delivering lines instead of leader executing vision. Strings pulled from behind the curtain, so obvious it's pitiful, and yet we continue to elect 2nd rate actors whose employers clearly have not a care in the world for improving the lives of the majority of Americans.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 03, @02:40AM (2 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Friday June 05, @07:20PM (1 child)
I can't tell the difference between the old 15¢ one and the new $2.50 one, but it's a sure thing that they're not using better ingredients today. If anything that $2.50 burger isn't as good as the 15¢ one was. Back then you could eat hamburger and chicken raw, but we actually had meaningful, enforced regulations then.
As to the economy, "the economy" itself is meaningless, is it a great economy for the Epstein class like America is today and suck for the 99%? Or are they short of billionaires and happy about it? Considering they earn twice as much as us per worker, logic says they may not have as many billionaires or as healthy a stock market, but those are both meaningless to anyone on a wage or salary.
How many Mexicans have to choose between food and medicine? IMO if your country doesn't have universal health care its economy is already crippled. Like I said, third world.
FUCK the Epstein class' economy. It doesn't matter to the normal people who they steal labor from, can working people pay their bills and have a little left over? That's the only measure of a healthy economy that matters.
I was in college in the late '70s, here is the textbook for my history class, [mcgrewbooks.com] a history of the 1920s. My grandmother, born in 1903 told me that the "roaring Twenties" only roared for the rich, most Americans were farmers and farm laborers who would starve if they didn't grow their own food. GREAT economy! ...until 1928.
All three great depressions in US history were preceded by vast wealth inequality. Wealth inequality is worse today than ever in history. There's a huge storm brewing!
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 07, @04:35PM
So enshitification has indeed occurred. So why are we to expect that such adulteration of the McDonalds burger happened only in ingredients not in price? That continues to be why I think your measure of inflation is nonsense.
Quite a bunch. The country as a whole is much poorer than the US, right?
Were those "great depressions" followed by vast wealth inequality? Nope. The recessions in question corrected for the wealth inequality all by themselves. In fact, that would be the driver for the recessions be it the actual Great Depression, the modern real estate crisis - the "Great Recession", or the panics [wikipedia.org] of 1893 and 1896. Each was preceded by massive overvaluation of stocks, bonds, and other assets. And are you counting poor people wealth - future total compensation? No, of course not.
I recognize the utter bankruptcy of wealth inequality as a measure of societal fitness. It's bullshit. Nobody ever measures wealth inequality after the asset bubble bursts or include future income, but that's where you'll get the more accurate reading, such as it is. But of course, if you did that, you wouldn't have an eternal grievance.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Username on Tuesday June 02, @02:13PM (4 children)
In the grand scheme of things, LLMs are just a tech bubble like .com in the 90s. Eventually those data centers will fit in your PC in 30 years. The only thing driving it is the stock/investment aspect where predictive investments made in milliseconds before someone else gets there earns back the money spent on it. Idk enough about sam altman to make a judgement on him. Seems like he's a nepotite, so probably no major loss to the company there if he gets assassinated.
(Score: 4, Touché) by turgid on Tuesday June 02, @02:43PM (2 children)
In the grand scheme of things, LLMs are just a tech bubble like .com in the 90s.
You and I know that, but "tech CEOs" and investors don't understand or acknowledge that. They are pursuing the bubble and the false promises with a religious zeal which is having very damaging short-term effects on the livelihoods of millions of people.
As usual, the media are not helping. Investigative journalism and healthy scepticism are expensive and difficult.
The result is panic. I'm waiting for the stock market correction.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Touché) by mcgrew on Tuesday June 02, @06:47PM (1 child)
You and I know that, but "tech CEOs" and investors don't understand or acknowledge that.
You don't think fraudsters understand their own fraud? Hell, they're extorting CONGRESS! [mcgrew.info]
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday June 02, @10:40PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 02, @06:35PM
After .com popped, all that money went looking for the next big thing and a lot of it went into fiber optic infrastructure. We still have dark fiber in places from those installs that happened 25 years ago.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday June 02, @02:39PM (5 children)
Anti-Tech Extremism. Where have we heard that before. Oh right. Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski and his "Industrial Society and Its Future" aka the Unabomber Manifesto. It just needs a bit of an update to current levels of technology. But it's all there. What is perhaps scary in that regard is that Ted was smart. His manifesto was a lot more coherent then a lot of the idiots today that have some kind of manifesto before they commit heinous acts. In some regards his manifesto even makes sense.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html [nytimes.com]
https://www.unabombermanifesto.net/ [unabombermanifesto.net]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pTamok on Tuesday June 02, @03:35PM (2 children)
I don't think people are anti-tech, as anti-being-exploited-by-people-controlling-tech-using-it-to-abuse-them-and-extract-rent-from-them.
People like the convenience of things that are useful and/or enjoyable for them being enabled by computerisation and use of smartphones, so it is not a visceral hate of generic 'tech', but a deep dislike of being exploited that drives people.
The Luddites [wikipedia.org] were not against innovations in weaving technology. What they were against was the unequal distribution of the benefits of technology. Which sounds familiar.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Tuesday June 02, @04:59PM
This is basically true. The phrase 'anti-tech' is propaganda intended to make moves to silence protesters. In the real world, though, data centers are popping up and driving up the price of energy, meaning the local residents are paying more for electricity but getting no other benefit from it. In some of those cases the drain on the water supply and people are actually seeing the results of that when they turn on their faucets. These are legitimate concerns from the people, but if you pass them off as irrational "ANti TaCh" you can justify barreling ahead against the public-will. After-all, can't have the administration's donors lose their profits, right?
Personally I think we're in for an ugly confrontation. It's not like corps are big on paying for cleanup of their own messes.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 5, Interesting) by krishnoid on Tuesday June 02, @05:06PM
Dear Lord, I didn't think I'd be quoting Vonnegut's Player Piano [libcom.org] twice at all, much less twice in a month [soylentnews.org]. My old coworker's offhand recommendation of it turned out to be far more relevant than I could have anticipated.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday June 02, @05:22PM (1 child)
Uncle Ted is a surprisingly popular author. There's a weird "slop" phenomenon going on where there's like a dozen pirate copies of his original manifesto all being sold for profit as slop on amazon. Not sure exactly how that works legally, you'd think his estate would get the profits which would flow to the victims families, as it should, but its all private profit for scammers "thanks amazon". What would we do without Amazon, other than get scammed less? Amazon has really gone down hill over the last decade or so.
Anyway, he wrote a book named "Technological Slavery" that has a really high sales rank in certain academic sales categories and for whatever reason the locusts have not descended on this work of his. So if you want an updated version, Uncle Ted quite literally wrote a book, yeah.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday June 02, @05:27PM
Oh and I forgot to suggest Orlov's book ""Shrinking the Technosphere" from a decade ago, which is pretty interesting but written very much for normies. If you've thought about the problem for a half hour you probably have all the ideas in the book.
Greer has a lot of good things to say but he writes a LOT of books some not terribly useful. "Ecotechnic future" is an oldie from 15 years ago and his timelines never check out but the general idea is pretty interesting. He has a pretty severe "noble savage" complex which clouds his judgment severely, but still makes some good points.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02, @05:39PM (2 children)
Everyone is itching to burn some datacenters but nobody is cutting down flock cameras. One of these affects you directly, the other does not.
(Score: 3, Funny) by turgid on Tuesday June 02, @07:41PM
Don't burn down data centres. Take your kettle and warm the water up for free. When you take it home to boil, it will have less heating to do.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Wednesday June 03, @03:20AM
Funny you should say that, I saw a photo of a deflocked post just earlier this morning in my social feed. And yesterday there was a comment about how every flock camera that had been pointed out on a map, was no more. Only tracks from off-road vehicles, apparently.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03, @12:14AM
From the Butlerian-Jihad dept.