Google deletes policy against using AI for weapons or surveillance

The pledge had been in place since 2018.

Mashable By Amanda Yeo  on February 5, 2025

Google has quietly deleted its pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance, a promise that had been in place since 2018.

First spotted by Bloomberg, Google has updated its AI Principles to remove an entire section on artificial intelligence applications it pledged not to pursue. Significantly, Google’s policy had previously stated that it would not design nor deploy AI technology for use in weapons, or in surveillance technology which violates “internationally accepted norms.”

Now it seems that such use cases might not be entirely off the table.

“There’s a global competition taking place for AI leadership within an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape,” read Google’s blog post on Tuesday. “We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality, and respect for human rights. And we believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”

While Google’s post did concern its AI Principles update, it did not explicitly mention the deletion of its prohibition on AI weapons or surveillance. ……………………..

Google first published its AI Principles in 2018, following significant employee protests against its work with the U.S. Department of Defense. (The company had already infamously removed “don’t be evil” from its Code of Conduct that same year.) Project Maven aimed to use AI to improve weapon targeting systems, interpreting video information to increase military drones’ accuracy. 

In an open letter that April, thousands of employees expressed a belief that “Google should not be in the business of war,” and requested that the company “draft, publicize and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”

The company’s AI Principles were the result, with Google ultimately not renewing its contract with the Pentagon in 2019. However, it looks as though the tech giant’s attitude toward AI weapons technology may now be changing.

Google’s new attitude toward AI weapons could be an effort to keep up with competitors. Last January, OpenAI amended its own policy to remove a ban on “activity that has high risk of physical harm,” including “weapons development” and “military and warfare.” In a statement to Mashable at the time, an OpenAI spokesperson clarified that this change was to provide clarity concerning “national security use cases.”

“It was not clear whether these beneficial use cases would have been allowed under ‘military’ in our previous policies,” said the spokesperson……………

Now Google’s revised policy has consolidated this list to just three principles, merely stating that its approach to AI is grounded in “bold innovation,” “responsible development and deployment,” and “collaborative process, together.” The company does specify that this includes adhering to “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” Still, any mention of weapons or surveillance is now conspicuously absent.  https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-weapons-surveillance-policy

February 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA | Leave a comment

The Evolution of the Militarized Data Broker

As the front of modern warfare slowly evolved from direct military action into weaponized financial speculation, the market for data became just as valuable as the defense budget itself.

Facebook, not unlike Palantir, was one of the vehicles used to privatize controversial U.S. military surveillance projects

While often mythologized as having been created to champion human freedom, the internet and many of its most popular companies were directly birthed out of the national security apparatus of the United States.

UNLIMITED HANGOUT, by Mark Goodwin, January 16, 2025

Today, the world’s economy no longer runs on oil, but data. Shortly after the advent of the microprocessor came the internet, unleashing an onslaught of data running on the coils of fiber optic cables beneath the oceans and satellites above the skies. While often posited as a liberator of humanity against the oppressors of nation-states that allows previously impossible interconnectivity and social organization between geographically separated cultures to circumnavigate the monopoly on violence of world governments, ironically, the internet itself was birthed out of the largest military empire of the modern world – the United States.

The ARPANET

Specifically, the internet began as ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which in 1972 became known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), currently housed within the Department of Defense. ARPA was created by President Eisenhower in 1958 within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in direct response to the U.S.’ greatest military rival, the USSR, successfully launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit with data broadcasting technology. While historically considered the birth of the Space Race, in reality, the formation of ARPA began the now-decades-long militarization of data brokers, quickly leading to world-changing developments in global positioning systems (GPS), the personal computer, networks of computational information processing (“time-sharing”), primordial artificial intelligence, and weaponized autonomous drone technology.

In October 1962, the recently-formed ARPA appointed J.C.R. Licklider, a former MIT professor and vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman (known as BBN, currently owned by defense contractor Raytheon), to head their Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). At BBN, Licklider developed the earliest known ideas for a global computer network, publishing a series of memos in August 1962 that birthed his “Intergalactic Computer Network” concept. Six months after his appointment to ARPA, Licklider would distribute a memo to his IPTO colleagues – addressed to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”– describing a “time-sharing network of computers” – building off a similar exploration of communal, distributed computation by John Forbes Nash, Jr. in his 1954 paper “Parallel Control” commissioned by defense contractor RAND – which would build the foundational concepts for ARPANET, the first implementation of today’s Internet.

Prior to the technological innovations explored by Licklider and his ARPA colleagues, data communication – at this time, mainly voice via telephone lines – were based on circuit switching, in which each telephone call would be manually connected by a switch operator to establish a dedicated, end-to-end analog electrical connection between the two parties. The RAND Corporation’s Paul Baran, and later ARPA itself, would begin to work on methods to allow formidable data communication in the event of a partial disconnection, such as from a nuclear event or other act of war, leading to a distributed network of unmanned nodes that would compartmentalize the desired information into smaller blocks of data – today referred to as packets – before routing them separately, only to be rejoined once received at the desired destination.

While certainly unbeknownst to the technologists at the time, this achievement of both distributed routing and global information settlement via data packets created an entirely new commodity – digital data.

A Brief History of Weaponized Financial Intelligence

Long before the USSR spooked the United States into formalizing ARPA due to fears of militarized satellite applications post-Sputnik launch, data brokers have played a significant role in warfare and specifically the markets surrounding military conflict……………………………………………….

As the front of modern warfare slowly evolved from direct military action into weaponized financial speculation, the market for data became just as valuable as the defense budget itself. It is for this reason that the necessity of sound data emerged as the foremost issue of national security, leading to a proliferation of advanced data brokers coming out of DARPA and the intelligence community, akin to the 21^st century’s Manhattan Project.

The San Jose Project: Google, Facebook, and PayPal

Exemplified by the creation of the CIA’s venture firm, In-Q-Tel, and the proliferation of Silicon Valley-based venture firms coalescing on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, CA, the financialization of a new crop of American data brokers was complete.  The first firm to grace Sand Hill Road was Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, better known as KPCB, which participated in funding internet pioneers Amazon, AOL, and Compaq, while also directly seeding Netscape and Google. KPCB partners have included such government stalwarts as former Vice President Al Gore, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Ted Schlein – the latter being a board member of In-Q-Tel and member of the NSA’s advisory board. KPCB also had an intimate connection with internet networking pioneer Sun Microsystems, best known for building out the majority of network switches and other infrastructure needed for a modern broadband economy.

……………………… Perhaps the world’s most famous data broker, Google, whose founders both came out of Stanford University, was seeded by former Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim and his partner at the Ethernet switching company Granite Systems (later acquired by Cisco), David Cheriton, with Google’s most iconic CEO, Eric Schmidt, being the former CTO of Sun Microsystems.

The emergence of Silicon Valley out of the academic circuit in Northern California was no accident, and in fact was directly influenced by an unclassified program known as the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project. The MDDS was created with direct participation from the CIA, NSA, and DARPA itself within the computer science programs at Stanford and CalTech, alongside MIT, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon……………… over a few years, more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each were distributed via the NSF (the National Science Foundation)  in order to capture the most promising efforts, ensuring that those efforts would become intellectual property controlled by the United States regulatory regime.

……………………………………………….The first unclassified briefing for scientists was titled “birds of a feather briefing” and was formalized during a 1995 conference in San Jose, CA, which was titled the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems.” That same year, one of the first MDDS grants was awarded to Stanford University, which was already a decade deep in working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was to “query optimization of very complex queries,” with a closely-followed second grant that aimed to build a massive digital library on the internet. These two grants funded research by then-Stanford graduate students and future Google cofounders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Two intelligence-community managers regularly met with Brin while he was still at Stanford and completing the research that would lead to the incorporation of Google, all paid for by grants provided by the NSA and CIA via MDDS.

…………………………………………………………………………………………….It was also during these formative years that the PayPal team worked closely with the intelligence community. …………………………………………………………………..In 2003, a year after PayPal was sold to eBay, Thiel approached Alex Karp, a fellow alumnus of Stanford with a new venture concept: “Why not use Igor to track terrorist networks through their financial transactions?” Thiel took funds from the PayPal sale to seed the company, and after a few years of pitching investors, the newly-formed Palantir received an estimated $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel.

………………………………..As of 2013, Palantir’s client list included “the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS” with around “50% of its business” coming from public sector contracts…………… As The Guardian reports: “Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data-efficient fighting of war, it runs Wall Street, too.”

Facebook, not unlike Palantir, was one of the vehicles used to privatize controversial U.S. military surveillance projects after 9/11, having also been birthed out of one of the MDDS partners, Harvard University. PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel became Facebook’s first significant investor at the behest of file-sharing pioneer Sean Parker, whose first contact with the CIA took place at age 16. ………………………… Facebook’s long-standing ties to the military and intelligence communities go far beyond its origins, including revelations about its collaboration with spy agencies as part of the Snowden leaks and its role in influence operations – some have even directly involved Google and Palantir.

The Military Origins of Facebook

Facebook’s growing role in the ever-expanding surveillance and “pre-crime” apparatus of the national security state demands new scrutiny of the company’s origins and its products as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was essentially analogous to what is currently the world’s largest social network.

An unspoken outcome of the global proliferation of Facebook was the sly, roundabout creation of the first digital ID system – a necessity for the coming digital economy. Users would set up their profiles by feeding the social network with a plethora of personal information, with Facebook being able to use this data to generate large webs of connectivity between otherwise unknown social groups. There is even evidence that Facebook generated placeholder accounts for individuals that appeared in user data but did not have a profile of their own. Both Google and PayPal would also use similar digital identification methods to allow users to sign into other websites, creating interoperable identification systems that could permeate the internet.

A similar evolution is occurring in the financial sector, as data broker social networks – including Facebook and Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) – are posturing themselves as the future of financial service companies. ……………………………

From Public-Private, to Private-Public

As outlined above, it is clear that the public sector’s intelligence community used the veil of the private sector to establish financial incentives and commercial applications to build out the modern data economy. A simple glance at the seven largest stocks in the American economy demonstrate this concept, with Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), and Amazon – with founder Jeff Bezos being the grandson of ARPA founder Lawrence Preston Gise – leading the software side, and Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA and Tesla leading the hardware component. While many of these companies have egregious ties to the intelligence community and the public sector during their incubation, now these private sector companies are driving the globalization and national security interests of the public sector.

The future of the American data economy is firmly situated between two pillars – artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. With the incoming Trump administration’s close advisory ties to PayPal, Tether, Facebook, Palantir, Tesla and SpaceX, it is clear that the data brokers have returned to roost at Pennsylvania Avenue. AI requires massive amounts of sound data to be of any use for the technologists, and the data provided by these private sector stalwarts is poised to feed their learning modules – surely after securing hefty government contracts. Private companies using public blockchains to issue their tokens generates not only significant opportunities for the United States to address its debt problem, but simultaneously serves as a “boon in surveillance”, as stated by a former CIA director.

Trump Embraces the “Bitcoin-Dollar”, Stablecoins to Entrench US Financial Hegemony

Trump’s recent speech on bitcoin and crypto embraced policies that will seek to mold bitcoin into an enabler of irresponsible fiscal policy and will employ programmable, surveillable stablecoins to expand and entrench dollar dominance.

Within the Trump administration’s embracing of the blockchain – itself the final iteration of the public-private commercialization of data, despite its libertarian posturing – reveals the culmination of a decades-long technocratic dialectic trojan horse. Nearly all of the foundational technology needed to push the world into this new financial system was cultivated in the shadows by the military and intelligence community of the world’s largest empire. While technology can surely offer solutions for greater efficiency and economic prosperity, the very same tools can also be used to further enslave the citizens of the world.

What once appeared as a guiding light beckoning us towards free speech and financial freedom has revealed itself to be nothing but the shine of Uncle Sam’s boot making its next step.  https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/01/investigative-reports/the-evolution-of-the-militarized-data-broker/

January 29, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA | Leave a comment

America’s ‘zombie’ nuclear reactors to be revived to power Trump golden age

By ELLYN LAPOINTE FOR DAILYMAIL.COM, 24 January 2025 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14317459/zombie-nuclear-reactors-revived-ai-demand-trump-stargate-south-carolina.html

A defunct nuclear power plant will be revived to power Donald Trump‘s new half-trillion-dollar project to make America the world’s artificial intelligence powerhouse. 

The state-owned utility Santee Cooper — the largest power provider in South Carolina — said Wednesday that it is seeking buyers to complete construction on a partially-built project that was abandoned in 2017.

The VC Summer Nuclear Power Station, which houses two unfinished nuclear reactors, was scrapped following years of lengthy, costly delays and bankruptcy by its contractor, according to a company statement.

But now, the utility is hoping tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft will be willing to finish the project, as they are seeking clean energy sources to fuel data centers for AI.  

‘We are seeing renewed interest in nuclear energy, fueled by advanced manufacturing investments, AI-driven data center demand, and the tech industry’s zero-carbon targets,’ said Santee Cooper President and CEO Jimmy Staton. 

This announcement came as President Donald Trump unveiled a $500bn AI project which he says will jumpstart America’s ‘golden age.’ 

The project, dubbed the ‘Stargate Initiative,’ is a massive private sector deal to expand the nation’s AI infrastructure, led by Big Tech companies such as OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle. It is the largest AI infrastructure project in history.

Trump stated that Stargate will create over 100,000 new jobs ‘almost immediately.’

‘This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,’ he said during a Tuesday briefing. 

Trump emphasized that the project aims to sharpen the country’s technological edge against competitors, notably China. 

He held the briefing in the White House’s Roosevelt Room alongside SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

The US AI industry has already grown rapidly in recent years, but one of the biggest hurdles to expansion is the energy cost of running data centers.

A recent Department of Energy (DOE) report found that total data center electricity usage more than tripled from from 2014 to 2023, rising from 58 TWh to 176 TWh.

The DOE estimates that by 2028, data center energy demand will increase between 325 to 580, consuming up to 12 percent of US electricity. 

‘This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,’ he said during a Tuesday briefing. 

Trump emphasized that the project aims to sharpen the country’s technological edge against competitors, notably China. 

He held the briefing in the White House’s Roosevelt Room alongside SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

The US AI industry has already grown rapidly in recent years, but one of the biggest hurdles to expansion is the energy cost of running data centers.

A recent Department of Energy (DOE) report found that total data center electricity usage more than tripled from from 2014 to 2023, rising from 58 TWh to 176 TWh.

The DOE estimates that by 2028, data center energy demand will increase between 325 to 580, consuming up to 12 percent of US electricity. 

Santee Cooper said it was working with the investment firm Centerview Partners LLC to vet buyer proposals, which they will accept until May 5.

The exact asking price has not been publicly named, but the Wall Street Journal reported that completion of the reactors would cost the buyer billions of dollars over several years. 

This would not be the first time that Big Tech bankrolled a nuclear energy project. Last September, Microsoft struck a deal with the New York utility Constellation Energy to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. 

This plant was the site of the worst nuclear power accident in US history, when its Unit 2 reactor partially melted down in 1979 and released radioactive gases and iodine into the environment.

Amazon, Meta and Google also sought or signed deals to back nuclear energy projects in 2024, similarly motivated by their AI endeavors. 

The federal government has also shown support for the resurgence of nuclear power. 

In September, the DOE finalized a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to help Holtec International, a New Jersey manufacturing company, recommission the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, marking the first-ever revival of a nuclear power plant in the US. 

The Biden administration and Congress also offered billions of dollars in subsidies to maintain older nuclear plants and fund the construction of new reactors. 

President Trump has largely opposed and sought to repeal the former president’s energy and climate policies, but has said he supports nuclear energy. 

In its first actions this week, the new administration signed an executive order directing the heads of ‘all agencies’ to identify regulations that ‘impose an undue burden’ on domestic energy resources, including nuclear power.

It also instructs the US Geological Survey ‘to consider updating the Survey’s list of critical minerals, including for the potential of including uranium,’ which can be refined into nuclear fuel.

January 25, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA | Leave a comment