[liberationtech] Support Libertarians Run For Pres Argentina Oct 22 2023 - Javier Milei - Bitcoin

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

As a general matter, I find arguments of the form 'The United States wants
...' to be utter nonsense.

As with any large state, there are many, many factions within government.
And not all of those factions are aligned with a common program. Indeed it
is quite usual to have different factions within a single administration
acting against each other.

The CIA of the 1950s is not the CIA of today, nor is the FBI.

Rather than considering national agendas as immutable, it is much more
informative to instead consider the alignments of various factions to
either a fascism or a liberal democracy.

We can replace the term 'fascism' with autocrat or communist or whatever,
but the point here is that there is always a faction that wants its boot on
someone else's neck. That faction includes Hoover, the brothers Dulles,
Trump, Timothy McVeigh, Bin Laden, Stalin, Mao and of course Hitler. While
those people all disagreed on the question of whose neck should be under
the boot, they were all of the view that it should be their foot inside the
boot.

Today we have a situation where Putin has aligned himself with
anti-Democratic factions in the US, the UK and many other parts of the
world. In this context, what the CIA did in the 1950s when the US was an
aggressive, racist neo-colonial power has really very little relevance to
the current situation where it is Putin who leads the aggressive, racist
neo-colonial power.


My problem with the current administration is not simply that the US
government has assembled a vast apparatus of pervasive surveillance, it is
that we cannot trust the people who are in charge of that apparatus to use
it for the purposes for which it was purportedly assembled. There are in
fact numerous very obvious Russian assets who have operated in the US and
UK with immunity for decades. And of course, the notion that any
counter-intelligence service would ever want to arrest their spies is
nonsense because then they would have to work out who the replacements are
and that takes time and effort. And if we arrest their spies, they will
arrest ours.

One major problem with that vast surveillance apparatus is that the US is
currently a country facing a fascist threat. Two members of the highest
court openly take bribes, two more have sold real estate they own to
members of law firms with business before the court, another is credibly
accused of rape and the majority acts with naked partisanship, permitting
the most flagrantly illegal acts by administrations they favor while
blocking actions supported by 30 years of precedent by administrations they
oppose.

But the biggest problem with all this data sloshing about is that it is
really easy for any hostile foreign power to obtain enough to use it
against the national interest. Instead of sending the likes of a Maria
Butina in to NRA cocktail parties to report the names of rapey men who
grabbed her buttocks and thus demonstrate a propensity to take the bait in
a pedophile honeytrap, the FSB could in future perform their lead
generation activities by analyzing data available from a public broker
using 'AI' which is after all, merely incredibly sophisticated and powerful
statistics.
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