In awakening With attacks at CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers and growing worries on AI replacing jobs, federal intelligence agencies and national law enforcement agencies are disseminating reports with a up-to-date domestic target in mind: anti-tech extremists.
More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the fusion centers obtained by WIRED show the shift in the country that is taking place in surveillance of this up-to-date and disturbingly broad category of people and activities considered an emerging threat.
This up-to-date venture is a continuation of President Donald Trump’s initiative Memo from the President on National Security 7which directs the Department of Justice to target anyone with “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, issued a public statement anti-terrorist strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the top three counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.
Taken together, these Trump administration directives have hijacked the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and rallies that challenge the White House’s ideology. The up-to-date focus on anti-tech extremism adds an undeclared category to already public nominations under a president who has heavily invested political and material capital in artificial intelligence AND proliferation of data centers.
Among the documents The tranche obtained by WIRED includes a report from Up-to-date York’s Office of Intelligence and Counterterrorism that warns of widespread upheaval in response to the adoption of artificial intelligence. Of particular note is the novel definition of what the Bureau considers an emerging threat of extremism.
“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from the emergence of AI technologies over the next five years could spark large-scale protests that escalate into civil unrest and anti-technology violent extremist activity, particularly in large urban areas such as New York,” the report said. The term “anti-technology violent extremism” does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI reports or guides on domestic extremism and represents a novel grouping of a broad range of ideologies under a single category of extremism.
In the same Intelligence Bureau assessment, analysts also describe a up-to-date threat emerging in the wake of… arrest and trial Ziz Laota, an extreme rationalist who allegedly led a diminutive sectarian group, three of whose members have been charged with murder, linked to an obsessive ideology focused on the existential risk posed by artificial intelligence.
While Zizian’s ideology is extremist in nature, a less extreme version of the same fears about the cataclysmic potential of AI is a common concern among AI adaptation experts, machine learning engineers, and even pioneering AI companies. Nevertheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that “paranoid views about artificial intelligence” may spread in the wake of the Zizian trial as a result of their “attempt to justify belief in the inevitability of a divine incarnation of artificial intelligence” and the belief that “humans must make the best of their present time to devote themselves to ensuring its compatibility with human morality, or they will suffer existential consequences if they do not do so.”
The NYPD’s intelligence assessment follows the department’s cooperation with the FBI last year monitor Signal chat, an activist group that coordinates volunteers monitoring public hearings in Up-to-date York’s immigration courts. According to documents obtained by GuardianThe FBI carried out the surveillance of activists as part of a broader investigation into “anarchist violent extremists” – one of the threat categories listed in the up-to-date counterterrorism strategy.
Established after 9/11, 80 fusion centers now span the country and serve as intermediaries between federal intelligence agencies and state and local law enforcement. In addition to concerns about parts of American society concerned about the rapid spread of artificial intelligencethese centers also collect and disseminate “intelligence” about alleged threats to data centers.
For example, the Western Pennsylvania Fusion Center claimed that “hostile actors, including state-sponsored entities, criminal groups, and extremists such as homegrown violent extremists or environmental extremists, may target U.S. data centers” and that “these entities may also exploit the strategic importance of data centers to the U.S. economy, using them for activities such as cryptocurrency mining or exploiting third-party entities such as front companies to gain access to U.S. data and infrastructure.”