Or the get a giant mess of unstructured data that they cannot derive any useable anything from. But in obtaining the data they broke numerous laws. And so they all go to jail. The end.

Great!! Love this for them.

I don't know Big Data enough to say with any authority, but I'm skeptical they can get AI to process the data any more efficiently than a traditional police state could. Any lists of targets created would be full of errors; going after those lists would still work to achieve terror, in the same way random selection would, I suppose.

If some Stasi-style future agency gets personnel sufficiently numerous to actually comb through all this data for anyone who draws their attention in whatever way - yeah, scary.

I remember a short story by, or possibly just promoted by, C Doctorow back in the day when Google ads were new, a metadata based police state where someone's private emails were still protected but they were harassed based on Google having scanned them & displayed ads for explosives.

The direct to consumer market due for explosives remains small.

Palantir to build the database too. This is the kind of thing that used to have conservatives* frothing at the mouth.

*remember them?

In Russia, small explosive consume you.

I always park my strategic bombers inside.

Israel used a system like this to decide which Palestinians to bomb in the early days of the current iteration of the war. Turns out its a great way to generate lists of targets while offloading accountability to a machine.

Aren't they just shooting at children now?

They're not disturbing in a "someone's life is getting materially wrecked in the next year" kind of way, though.

I don't understand why not, these are small-minded vindictive people. I could easily imagine them digging into that data for dirt on anyone that pisses them off.

If you have AI why would you need data? You can just ask AI to make it up for you.

11: good point! I hadn't considered revenge.

We can rest easy then, if there's one thing Trump and his minions have no interest in it's revenge

There's a field called "entity resolution" that is directly concerned with taking massive unstructured data-sets and deciding which are about which persons, finding connections between persons, etc. It's a very well-developed field, and there are a number of companies selling product, e.g. Palantir. I worked for a pioneer in the field for a while, and the stuff actually works; this guy's group had a wall of plaques from three-letter agencies that used the stuff -at scale- to find terrorists and such.

Also, this sort of data-mining is how RU finds the Ukrainians they need to focus on for filtration camps and such: it's been widely-reported that when they take over an area, they scoop up all the computers and drives, dump all that data into their data-mining systems, and crunch it to find individuals of interest.

I think we should -assume- that that is what they're doing with all this data: it ain't as innocuous as "DOGE lets AI train on it"; it's "DOGE lets Palantir build detailed profiles of every American and their social (human-space) networks".

I can believe Russia is using it in this way. And I guess mapping the networks is more likely to result in something useful to an authoritarian regime than feeding it all to Grok & expecting something coherent to emerge.

That said, if Russia's methods were all garbage, how would we know?

They would be unable to stop Ukraine from driving up to an airbase and burning th strategic bombers with drones.

Minivet: I don't know whether Russia's methods are garbage, but the reports I've read say that they work.

But my own time working with these folks who did this ER stuff, convinced me pretty quickly that they knew what
they were doing, and that the stuff works, -at scale-. They have clients in law enforcement, credit card agencies, etc.
A tiny example: this guy was funded by In-Q-Tel (CIA's in-house VC), and some of his first clients were the casinos in
Vegas. They use his software to map out the social networks among their customers, and to find the rings that that
try to count cards, etc.

And the thing that makes these things work, is the -scale- of the data. The bigger the better.

Or hitting the Kerch bridge for the umpteenth time today

ETA: This is why I think that Americans' phobia about a national identity card is misplaced. Such a "card" already exists,
virtually, by way of this ER stuff. We should be pushing our government to provide us such identity cards, and to make
it an -affirmative duty- of government officials to ensure that all Americans have such cards. With penalties -- personal
penalties -- for officials who deprive (by action or inaction) Americans of their identity card.

B/c otherwise, what we'll get us what we have today: government ID used as a -cudgel- to beat on poor people and
minorities.

I actually picked up my passport card at the embassy last week because I wanted a handy way to prove I'm a US citizen when I go back home on leave this Friday. Not that it will matter because the Feds will just think it's fake like that guy with the Real ID.

Barry: yeap, I got mine too back in March 2024 when I renewed my passport. And like you, I have my doubts that it'd work, but better safe than sorry, and I don't want to carry my passport around everywhere like I used to when I lived/worked in France. It was sometime in March 2025 that my (middle-aged, white, Pennsylvanian-born, Irish-American) friend E. exhorted me in no uncertain terms to start carrying the damn thing in my wallet, explaining that back during Trump I, ICE was stopping people on the streets of NYC and arresting those who "fit the description" and couldn't present their papers. He carries his passport card at all times.

I'm still using a driver's license that isn't Real ID and a note from my mom.

22 I stupidly did not apply for one when I renewed my passport last year because I thought why would I need one? Things have really changed.

(May marked ten years I've been overseas in Arrakis)

I'm not freaked out by the vacuuming up of the Federal data, but for the depressing reason that I think it's uninteresting compared to the commercial data about most of us that is already out there being bought and sold.

Back in 2013 Kieran Healy (of Crooked Timber) showed how network analysis of 1770s data would have found Paul Revere. No doubt that techniques and machinery have improved in the last 12 years, in the ways that Chetan describes.

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/

It seems pretty bad to me! It makes certain kinds of abuses a lot easier. Locally we now have a requirement that every syllabus for any required course must be uploaded to a searchable database. Most of us would freely give out our syllabi anyway, and many of us post them online. Yet! Putting them into a keyword-searchable database definitely means we'll be in for '354 syllabi at the LIBERAL U used the word 'bias' and 'inclusive' makes harassment of a certain inevitable kind much more likely. Being mandated to

(I'm trying to talk some engineering colleagues into seeding their syllabi with forbidden words just for the lulz. Gotta watch out for those Fourier trans.)

My dad worked as an international banking regulatory lawyer and he thinks where it's going is large scale civil forfeiture for enemies of the state. Right now if you drive through Bumblefuck OK with $1000 in cash the cops will legally rob you. Now give that power to the federal government if they can find any tenuous connection to a suspect financial entity and they'll be free to electronically ruin your life by freezing your accounts, at any scale they want. Oh you're one of 150000 people who went to Harvard? We know they support terrorism, too bad you and all your co-conspirators won't be able to pay your mortgages this month.

SP @ 28: i'm certainly not going to say that father is wrong, i've mused about this very thing. This is Nazi level expropriation, and besides causing the collapse of the US' International reputation, Would almost certainly resultIn violent Revolution. As things stand unless you're literally wealthy it is difficult to establish investment accounts in other countries because of FATCA. But this is the sort of shit that would cause anybody with half a brain to move all their Investments out of the country.

Again, I'm not saying that your father is wrong. I've worried about this very question myself.

That would definitely be a big jump up from where they are now - regime consolidation, "Kash Patel has called Justice Barrett and directly threatened her family" territory. Not to say it's impossible.

All this said, I thought it would be a really easy step for the first Trump administration to start getting back to deniably political CSA enforcement. Raid the legal dispensaries in blue states, get their customer lists, a good chunk of dissidents are probably on there and can be raised in turn whenever desired. Never happened. Generally, they seem bad at crafty plots - most of their evil has a first and final step, then they do something else.

Raised s/b raided in turn

I would be more worried about this.

The Financial Research Fund referenced in Section 50005 finances both the operations of the Financial Stability Oversight Council -- an overarching body that includes all the main US financial regulators and is chaired by the US Treasury Secretary -- and the OFR that supports it. The FRF gets its money from a small annual levy on big US banks.

The bill seems to place a cap on these charges, equal to the average annual budget of the "Council", which presumably means FSOC in this context. But FSOC's budget is tiny compared to the OFR, which consumes the lion's share of the money raised by the Financial Research Fund's bank charges.

By seemingly restricting those charges to a maximum of only FSOC's average annual budget, the budget bill would de facto kill the OFR by defunding it, without the hassle of having to actually pass any legislation to do so formally (a favourite playbook of the Trump administration)
[...]
The whole point of the original 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was to bring together America's stupidly complex patchwork of regulators and prevent the kind of cataclysmic failures that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. But to do so it needed data, research and analysis, which was why the OFR was set up inside the US Treasury.

||
More charming behavior from EAC members.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250524-sexually-assaulted-and-smeared-in-excrement-uganda-activist-details-torture-in-tanzania
|>

Ooh - Milder versions of what SP is describing do sound plausible.

I'm not clever enough to figure out exactly what they would do, but I'm nervous about Kennedy's plan to build an autism registry. I mean, your local health system has a diabetes, hypertension and depression registry. There are always errors, but they are built off of billing codes, so it might not be super hard.

And in theory, in a place like Denmark, that could be a good thing for tracking outcomes. Kennedy has made so many disparaging comments about people with disabilities, describing people with autism as being completely incapacitated and useless, that I find this terrifying. Autism is such a broad category anyway. It describes something pretty "mild" in the sense that you need help but can lead a basically normal life to people who need a lot of support to manage basic activities of daily living. This WH's pattern of going after individuals with disabilities in the Federal workforce and taking away accommodations leaves me disinclined to think their goals are gathering evidence to improve care.

There are a lot of people on the internet who will say that anyone not wearing an N95 24/7 is a Eugene cost, and I think those people are a little bit histrionic, but there is a eugenecist flavor to Trump. It goes hand in hand with the anti-intellectualism and efforts to destroy the universities.

The Genius Act sucks. Cory Booker's promise to do better (which I never took all that seriously) was reneged on within months.

Cf. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/samia-suluhu-hassan-drops-the-pretence-of-reform

||

Faine Greenwood is a genuine expert on drones and makes some very good points about Ukraine's Operation Spider's Web here:

https://little-flying-robots.ghost.io/ukraines-audacious-drone-attack-some-thoughts/

|>

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/navy-new-name-usns-harvey-milk-ships-named-for-civil-rights-leaders/

"Among them are the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers."

37 is really interesting, in particular this bit:
"I'll put it this way: it's really interesting that we still haven't seen a major terrorist attack using small drones outside of the context of hot wars or serious civil conflict. I'm not totally sure why this is the case, and I'd certainly never claim that it'll never happen. I assume it will eventually. We should be working hard to anticipate that it will, and technologically hardening ourselves against such an attack. But the fact that we're in the middle of 2025, almost 15 years into the modern consumer drone technological revolution, and we still haven't seen anyone successfully execute a major terrorist attack using small drones?"

I think she's slightly off here, for a couple of reasons.

First, we actually have: someone tried to kill Maduro with a couple of drones at a parade in 2018. (That's still only one, though, I suppose.)

Second, yes, we haven't seen a major terrorist attack using small drones outside of the context of hot wars or serious civil conflict. But how many major terrorist attacks outside of the context of hot wars or serious civil conflict have we seen, full stop? Here's the list. They're rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_terrorist_incidents
Most of those are in the context of serious civil conflict, or they're Islamic militants for whom the suicide nature of the suicide attack is part of the point.

Another point: drones are precise. Not only because they can be, but because they have to be - because, as she mentions, they've got limited payload. But if you're ISIS or HAMAS or someone like that, you want to kill a lot of people indiscriminately. That's your whole thing. Hence, you know, bombs, and unguided rockets, and just rounding up and panga-ing everyone in the village.

ObChesterton: "The revolutionary is unhappy because the bomb failed to kill the tyrant. The anarchist is happy because the bomb has killed somebody."

38 is outrageous. They really are a bunch of misogynists and segregationists.

39 And you don't even really need any explosives for a mass casualty event, a large SUV or pickup truck rammed into a crowd will do the trick, and in the US at least guns are readily available.
(I know you have no way of knowing this but Faine is they/them)

Really, the thing to grasp here is that there is no such thing as data, in the super-general sense people love to use it in. Data is only ever interesting, important, or useful in the specific and the more specific the better. The generic sense is only interesting if you are thinking about how much disk space you need to keep it in. I have seen far far too many stupid projects and business ideas thinly justified by "uhhh....data", there are basically two (2) that actually work. It is true that one is Google AdSense and the other is Facebook's ad program but even so that's two and you bet they go to extreme lengths to prepare, curate, filter, validate, etc the data involved.

Even - especially! - if you are trying to train an AI model, there is no such thing as just generic data. Improving your training data set is the equivalent of improving the antenna for radio systems; it will always improve the whole thing and usually by more than any other change. Stable Diffusion worked and will run on a phone because they made an enormous heroic effort to curate the LAION data set.

(This pisses me off mightily because it is so common and so bullshitty and also because my name is on a white paper from about 2008 saying data was an asset class; I didn't believe it then and added all kinds of caveats that my then boss mostly cut out of the final text.)

So the answer to the OP question is "what specific data do you mean and to what end?"

42: good point - drones are basically very cheap, very small precision-guided munitions, and many terrorists aren't really interested in that sort of thing. Can you imagine HAMAS going "ah yes, drones! Finally an answer to the question of how we blow up military targets without risking the lives of innocent Israeli bystanders".

Improving your training data set is the equivalent of improving the antenna for radio systems; it will always improve the whole thing and usually by more than any other change.

This is, regrettably, true. Regrettably because, unlike everything else that you can change about your radio system, all of which you can change by pressing buttons and twiddling knobs while staying inside in the warm, improving your antenna tends to involve you (or rather me) going out into a blizzard in the middle of the night and climbing fifteen feet up a tree, and then climbing back down again and saying "how about now? Did that do any good?" using the tone of voice which is the direct English equivalent of num, the Latin particle which "expects the answer No".

9: people were extremely excited about this but a) the Israelis had a specifically curated database of suspects they built for the purpose not, idk, partial lists of small grant program applicants, and b) it turned out to be heartily irrelevant to the utter orgy of violence they were about to unleash, which was either completely indiscriminate or deliberately targeted on things like hospitals.

Improving a training data set also tends to involve an enormous amount of thankless scutwork, funnily enough.

9, 46 972 Magazine has done some really good reporting on this https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

48 was me

I think 48 is unreliable, or at least out of date. IDF attacks now are completely indiscriminate and genocidal, or deliberately aimed at protected civilian targets with no possible military justification, like the Gaza European Hospital. The idea that they have some special software looking for HAMAS members and are following its guidance is ludicrous - they're just trying to kill everyone.

50 I believe it is reliable and was picked up elsewhere (though 972 broke it) but you are correct that is very much out of date.

51 again me (the hazards of commenting incognito mode on my work computer)

Incidentally I just finished this harrowing piece in NYRB by 2 Israeli doctors and one Israeli professor of international and humanitarian law about the complicity of Israel's medical establishment in a slew of horrific human rights abuses https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/05/31/the-shame-of-israeli-medicine/

Africom? Who needs it?

More than 400 soldiers have reportedly been killed by insurgents since the start of May in bases and towns in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, an unstable region prone to coups. Sunday's attack in central Mali hit a military base in Boulkessi, near the border with Burkina Faso. The Malian army said in a statement it had been forced to pull back after dogged defence, but gave no casualty numbers.

meanwhile our Chinese competitors have their priorities right, they've finetuned YOLOX to identify whether chefs in an open kitchen environment are wearing their standard chef hats.

https://www-volcengine-com.translate.goog/docs/6893/1347451?_x_tr_sl=zh-CN&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true

This is ByteDance Volcano Engine, the cloud services side of the TikTok company, so you better believe they know whether you're wearing a chef hat in your sexy clips.

Root access to systems across government means they have the on/off switch for the coup.