Palantir’s AI machines need data for fuel—data in the form of intelligence reports on Palestinians in the occupied territories. And for decades a key and highly secret source of that data for Israel has been the US National Security Agency, according to documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. After fleeing to Hong Kong in 2013 with a pocket full of flash drives containing some of the agency’s highest secrets, Snowden ended up in Moscow where, soon after he arrived, I met with him for Wired magazine. And in the interview, he told me that “one of the biggest abuses” he saw while at the agency was how the NSA secretly provided Israel with raw, unredacted phone and e-mail communications between Palestinian Americans in the US and their relatives in the occupied territories. Snowden was concerned that as a result of sharing those private conversations with Israel, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would be at great risk of being targeted for arrest or worse.”
“Now, with Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, critical information from NSA continues to be used by Unit 8200, according to a number of sources, to target tens of thousands of Palestinians for death—often with US-supplied 2,000-pound bombs and other weapons. And it is extremely powerful data-mining software, such as that from Palantir, that helps the IDF to select targets.
AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Technology didn’t kill those people. It might make that guy sleep a little easier to pretend he’s just a “stamp of approval,” but thats because he’s deluding himself.
If Alex Karp and Peter Thiel had created a deadly biological weapon in a lab, then sold it around the world for profit knowing it would be used to commit mass murder, nobody would be pretending they weren’t responsible for those deaths their weapon caused.
They created this monster, and the U.S. helped it flourish by feeding it the data it needed. And now they’re just pillaging hoarders of data from the entire world. And we’re just letting them. As if they have no responsibility and we have no way to stop them.
They refused and still refuse to regulate it, because nobody forced them to. Why not? The technology isn’t to blame for this, they are. They created a technological weapon of mass destruction, and for some reason, we’re all just going along with the idea that what they’ve done is somehow different than unleashing a deadly disease on humanity. As if they’re somehow removed from responsibility once it’s in the buyer’s hands.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
It’s scarier that this is clearly a testing ground. Gaza is too small for anything real, it doesn’t really incur expenses, and it doesn’t really provide profits when cleansed of people.
Also since Britain is in the title - I’d reminisce on the old picture of Russian Imperial, German Imperial, Soviet and partially even Nazi propagandist view of the world, where Britain was the center of evil aiming for, well, something like this.
It seems telling that USA, Israel, and the Commonwealth (for all military and totalitarian purposes Britain and its former dominions are still one thing) are in this together and have dropped any pretense of internationalism and rules on the world stage.
So what I think - propaganda, that’s in its name, is used to propagate information. That information is augmented and simplified by those providing it, but it wouldn’t have any meaning if it had zero correlation with the real world, and providing correct information is beneficial long-term for any elite, except few of them can afford to disregard short-term effects.
Perhaps that picture had something in it, or again has something in it.
See, these countries have notably interconnected and very developed intelligence services, world military logistics, propaganda means above anything openly totalitarian countries could ever hope. Totalitarian counties close up and institute censorship because you can paint a pond red, or a small river, but you can’t paint the world ocean red. USA+Israel+Commonwealth can and do paint the world ocean red ; perhaps the color is paler around its remote parts.
And now they are developing and testing, on the scale of a small country, weapons that, combined with these means, can indicate that we know who will deliberately start WWIII with the goal of world domination, except it might not last long enough to be called a war.
I’ve also heard that British royalty still consists of types who classify people and nations by color, and those more colored in their perception have no rights at all.
And the whole constitutional monarchy and separation of dominions and independence of their puppet organizations in other (sometimes very totalitarian, I know) countries - these things can maintain structure without hard joints.
Say, when some opposition party in Georgia is technically its own thing, but receives grants, the more the better it works, that’s not having a hard joint yet having a hierarchy. And, say, the glory of Saakashvili’s war on corruption shouldn’t be overestimated, he mostly did it through abuse. When in Armenia in the 90s Vano Siradeghyan was the internal affairs minister, its crime and corruption problems were also much less than before and after, because police would simply murder mob bosses (except for those in the government, of course). I don’t know anything about Vano being pro-western or receiving grants or aiming for political power, but he used absolutely the same means the wonderful reformer Saakashvili did. OK, these are local examples.
The point is - the modern state of existence of the British Empire (in my humble opinion US has slowly receded to being part of that for many years) doesn’t favor hard joints. One should look not only at grant eater groups in various countries, one should also look at many small independent states, like Arab monarchies or Baltic republics, whose foreign affairs positions have little consistency and often seem as if they were saying what the US or Britain don’t want to say themselves yet.
So - getting back to weapons, we might be living in an interbellum, not for world wars, but for imperialist and anti-imperialist wars. WWI and WWII can be united into one thing in some sense, in WWI empires crumbled and socialist movements raised their heads. In WWII socialists survived and even reinforced some of their positions, but empires managed to play on both sides, and speaking about Nazis, they were very bad people, but their plans for future weren’t compatible with the old concept of empires. So in some sense Nazis and USSR got played to fight each other where they shouldn’t have.
So - Star Wars is often blamed for touching politics where, in the opinion of those talking, it’s superficial in that. I don’t think Star Wars is superficial in that, I think its EU’s portrayal of that inhabited galaxy and its politics is pretty similar to our real world, just more directly exposed and has a far smaller difficulty level for the good guys. Both can be considered conventions of art.
I think we’ll see the empire where it naturally won’t make any sense to call it anything more specific.
AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The thing about this, is that it doesn’t matter if it’s happening in Brittain or the U.S. or Israel. It’s a form of social control for elites who view the world as a social hierarchy. There are no rules for them, but they need the masses to believe there are.
They’re at the top. God or nature chose for them to rule, and at the end of the day, nobody has any rights other than their right to rule over others. It just “is what it is.” They love social darwinism as long as they control the game, but they also know the reality is that if the masses were to ever unite and rise up against them, they would very quickly lose their spot at the top of the hierarchy.
Creating a value system on something arbitrary like skin color is one of the easiest ways to divide and conquer. Control of the masses by tricking some of them into believing they share something inherent with those who actually dominate all of them. Skin color or nationality as a measure of the value of human life lulls the subordinates into a false sense of safety by default. They can be fully aware of atrocities happening on the other side of the world, or next door to them, but believe they’re part of the in-group that matters, so it won’t happen to them.
When one out-group is eliminated, a new arbitrary out-group will be created to divide and conquer. It’s happening in the U.S. right now.
We allowed immigrants to be rounded up like animals. We rationalized children screaming and crying in fear as their families were torn apart. They weren’t here “legally” so they didn’t have the same legal rights as everyone else. And since we allowed a group of humans to be considered “illegal,” a loss of human dignity is just accepted as the consequence of their actions.
Then when we learned there were people who were here legally, also being rounded up illegally in the rush to get all the “illegals” off the street, we accepted that it was simply a mistake, but a consequence of so many illegals with similar ethnicities overwhelming the system. Nothing we needed to worry about, things would get sorted out, eventually.
Last week an entire apartment building was raided in Chicago when government agents dropped from a helicopter to a rooftop to break in. Most residents woke up to their doors behng kicked in around 1 am. Adults were handcuffed. Children were zip tied together and taken from their families screaming and crying. And in all the chaos and confusion, their American neighbors were also rounded up, handcuffed for hours, and denied due process. When they were finally released, they returned to find many of their friends and neighbors missing (and still unaccounted for) and many of their homes raided of valuables.
Surely this will be the line for America, right? We can all see this has nothing to do with immigration and legal status, right? Or, will we all just accept that because it happened to mainly black and brown American citizens in an inner city apartment building, it was simply a mistake due to similar ethnicities overwhelming the system? It’s not something you need to worry about if you’re not one of them. You’re safe. Surely things will get sorted out, eventually.
Divide and conquer.