A drone fell out of the sky and crashed into a New Jersey homeowner’s backyard Thursday night — prompting the town’s mayor to even drive to the scene to survey the site himself. The aircraft smashed down in a residential area of Pequannock Township in Morris County around 8:45 p.m. Thursday, according to police and dispatch audio. Officials determined the craft was “a hobby or toy type of drone” and “not a large commercial or military grade drone,” the Pequannock Police Department told The Post.
A drone spotted flying over New Jersey this month.@MendhamMike via Storyful
It comes on the heels of New Jersey cops warning of possible “copycats.” The video player is currently playing an ad.
“What we think is it started as some sort of Picatinny Arsenal base surveillance drill or operation but once it exploded online, this became a copycat situation,” one Garden State police chief theorized.
The US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center is located at the Picatinny Arsenal and is one of the sites where several mystery drone sightings have been reported, which has prompted concern. As a highly secure facility that develops and tests new bombs, guns, ammunition and warfare devices for all branches of the military, it is a target for espionage by foreign adversaries.
When The Post arrived at the crash site Thursday night, the resident was putting his trash cans out and declined to comment. However, as paranoia grips the state, the report of one crashing into a homeowner’s backyard had the mayor rushing to the scene.
The mayor of Pequannock, Ryan Herd, pulled up in a Ford Econoline work van to survey the crash scene for himself.
Multiple drones are seen over Bernardsville, NJ, on Dec. 5. AP
In the middle of the Ocean on a ferry and nothing around and then bam- drones appear out of no where in the middle of the sea.
Our government knows what it is but they aren’t telling us.
Herd told The Post “It is definitely not” one of the massive, car-size drones that purportedly have been hovering overhead. He said he’s “absolutely” concerned that “nobody knows whose drones are flying over us and what they’re flying over us for and where they’re taking off and landing.”
“Drones are flying over our houses, which is our private property. My family is here,” he added.
The Morris County Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the incident.
Meanwhile, there was a second report of a downed drone that hit a powerline in nearby Randolph Township less than an hour later. The report turned out to be unfounded, the Morris County Sheriff’s Office confirmed.
In a follow-up phone call Friday morning, Herd urged residents not to chase after, shoot at or attempt to catch any of the large drones.
“We can’t be putting up Class 1 and Class 2 drones trying to follow these drones. God forbid something happens and it crashes into the big drone, and the big drone crashes into a house and kills six people — that’s going to be a problem,” he said.
Suspected drones over the Atlantic Ocean off New Jersey on Dec. 5.@DougSpac
Local officials have told The Post that many sightings farther afield could be either civilian copycats flying their own drones or people mistaking planes, helicopters or satellites for UFOs.
After receiving reports of drone activity last month near Morris County, New Jersey, the Federal Aviation Administration issued temporary bans on drone flights over a golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey — owned by President-elect Donald Trump — and over Picatinny Arsenal Military Base. The FAA says the bans were in response to requests from “federal security partners.”518
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday that federal investigators have been unable to verify any of the 3,000-plus reports of car-size drones patrolling the nighttime skies in recent weeks. Pentagon officials have said they do not believe the drones are a foreign asset.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said earlier this week the aircraft are “very sophisticated,” noting that “the minute you get your eyes on them, they go dark” — but promised residents that the devices are not a threat to public safety. Murphy said New Jerseyans should not shoot them out of the sky — but welcomed federal authorities to take them down to study, NJ.com reported.
Human beings are not ready for a powerful AI under present conditions or even in the “foreseeable future,” stated a foremost expert in the field, adding that the recent open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on developing advanced artificial intelligence is “understating the seriousness of the situation.”
“The key issue is not ‘human-competitive’ intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence,” said Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and leading AI researcher in a March 29 Time magazine op-ed. “Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.
“Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’ It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.”
After the recent popularity and explosive growth of ChatGPT, several business leaders and researchers, now totaling 1,843 including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, signed a letter calling on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” GPT-4, released in March, is the latest version of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT.
AI ‘Does Not Care’ and Will Demand Rights
Yudkowsky predicts that in the absence of meticulous preparation, the AI will have vastly different demands from humans, and once self-aware will “not care for us” nor any other sentient life. “That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.” This is the reason why he’s calling for the absolute shutdown.
Without a human approach to life, the AI will simply consider all sentient beings to be “made of atoms it can use for something else.” And there is little humanity can do to stop it. Yudkowsky compared the scenario to “a 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15.” No human chess player has yet been able to beat Stockfish, which is considered an impossible feat.
The industry veteran asked readers to imagine AI technology as not being contained within the confines of the internet.
“Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow.”
The AI will expand its influence outside the periphery of physical networks and could “build artificial life forms” using laboratories where proteins are produced using DNA strings.
The end result of building an all-powerful AI, under present conditions, would be the death of “every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth,” he warned.
Yudkowsky blamed OpenAI and DeepMind—two of the world’s foremost AI research labs—for not having any preparations or requisite protocols regarding the matter. OpenAI even plans to have AI itself do the alignment with human values. “They will work together with humans to ensure that their own successors are more aligned with humans,” according to OpenAI.
This mode of action is “enough to get any sensible person to panic,” said Yudkowsky.
He added that humans cannot fully monitor or detect self-aware AI systems. Conscious digital minds demanding “human rights” could progress to a point where humans can no longer possess or own the system.
“If you can’t be sure whether you’re creating a self-aware AI, this is alarming not just because of the moral implications of the ‘self-aware’ part, but because being unsure means you have no idea what you are doing and that is dangerous and you should stop.”
Unlike other scientific experiments and gradual progression of knowledge and capability, people cannot afford this with superhuman intelligence because if it’s wrong on the first try, there are no second chances “because you are dead.”
‘SHUT IT DOWN’
Yudkowsky said that many researchers are aware that “we’re plunging toward a catastrophe” but they’re not saying it out loud.
This stance is unlike that of proponents like Bill Gates who recently praised the evolution of artificial intelligence. Gates claimed that the development of AI is “as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.”
Gates said that AI can help with several progressive agendas, including climate change and economic inequities.
Meanwhile, Yudkowsky instructs all establishments, including international governments and militaries, to indefinitely end large AI training runs and shut down all large computer farms where AIs are refined. He adds that AI should only be confined to solving problems in biology and biotechnology, and not trained to read “text from the internet” or to “the level where they start talking or planning.”
Regarding AI, there is no arms race. “That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature.”
Yudkowsky concludes by saying, “We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.
What we found: You can make a long road trip without fear of getting stranded, as long as you plan ahead.
That means juggling route-planning apps and billing accounts with various charging companies, which can get confusing.
And be prepared for the unexpected, like glitchy charging equipment touchscreens, billing questions and inoperable plugs.
First, the car: The EV6 is a great choice for a road trip because its 800-volt charging system makes it among the fastest charging EVs available today.
At a 350 kW DC fast-charger, the EV6’s battery can go from 10% to 80% (good for up to 217 miles) in under 18 minutes, according to Kia.
It’s also roomy and comfortable, with lots of advanced technology — including a heads-up display with augmented reality and various driver assistance technologies.
Details: My husband, Bill, set out from Detroit last Tuesday in the all-wheel-drive EV6 GT-Line, which has an EPA-estimated battery range of 274 miles.
The plan was to meet up in Washington, D.C., and then travel together to Winter Garden, Florida.
His first recharging stop was at an Electrify America station outside Cleveland, per the advice of an app called A Better Route Planner. But he was anxious about the car’s driving range.
What he said: “When I left Detroit, the temperatures were in the low 30s and the vehicle said it had a range of 216 miles. A Kia engineer told us that the cold would put extra stress on the battery, draining it faster than normal. So I used only the heated steering wheel and heated seats while driving — no cabin heat.”
After a chilly 151 miles, he arrived at the recharging spot with 16% left on the battery, which helped him get over his range anxiety.
“But I did learn a lesson: Know where your next charging stop is before you leave, and make sure to have extra range upon arrival in case that charger is inoperable.”
This was a leisurely trip, with stops to visit friends and do some sightseeing. If we cannonballed from Michigan to Florida, it would have taken about 24 hours. We did it over four days.
But we were constantly thinking about where to charge next. It occupied our minds more than where to eat or spend the night.
We stopped 12 times to recharge over the 1,500-mile journey. Charging times varied between 20 minutes and 55 minutes, depending on the state of the car’s battery and the speed of the chargers we used.
Sometimes we were just topping off to make it to the next destination.
The bottom line: Gradually, our confidence grew. We never felt range anxiety again — even when the battery level fell below 10% and the dashboard flashed orange warnings.
Yes, but: We learned a lot from the challenges we faced, and we’ll share our key takeaways in an upcoming story.
What’s next: We’ll be heading north again in a few weeks on a different route, so stay tuned.
Last week, our Canadian neighbors mobilized their national security apparatus against working-class citizens protesting government overreach. The Biden administration is no doubt taking notes. In fact, the contours of a similar strategy are already emerging in the United States. First, the FBI reportedly tagged parents opposed to critical race theory with a “terrorism” label under the direction of Biden’s Department of Justice. Then, the DOJ revealed plans to stand up a domestic terror unit fixated on “anti-government or anti-authority” ideologies. Now, a new Department of Homeland Security terrorism bulletin classifies Americans as potential violent extremists if they question the administration’s Covid-19 policies or election integrity narrative by spreading “mis- dis- and mal-information” on social media. This should send a chill up Americans’ spines.
The willingness of the U.S. government to classify movements to the right of leftist ideology as “domestic extremism” lays the groundwork for the purging of these citizens from digital platforms — and all of digital life. We are entering a reality in which tech companies target average conservative organizations, users, and speech as part of this push. Just after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Google co-founder Sergey Brin referred to Trump voters as “extremists” and suggested using Google’s tech incubator, Jigsaw, to shape their opinions. In July 2021, Facebook began testing“extremism” warnings on users who engaged with popular, mainstream conservative accounts. This problem is a small outgrowth of a broader one shaping the new digital atmosphere: the efforts of companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and TikTok to skew the political and cultural environment of this nation and its inheritors.
These corporations interfere in our elections, actively undermine our First Amendment freedoms by silencing speech they don’t like, work together to disadvantage or destroy existing or potential competitors, and partner with government actors to intimidate, surveil, and silence Americans. They’re even purposefully poisoning the next generation, targeting American youth with highly addictive content that has been shown to do legitimate harm.
Governments are not the only actors capable of encroaching on Americans’ individual liberties. Private, monopolistic corporations should be held accountable if they violate these liberties to the degree Big Tech has in the past two years alone. Efforts to rein them in should reflect an imperative to protect Americans’ natural rights against abuses flowing from the consolidation of power — whether by the government, private corporations, or a combination of the two. Big Tech’s willingness to shut off direct access to digital information, their demonstrated pattern of information manipulation, and their effect on America’s culture of free speech have decisive political and cultural ramifications.
Censorship against viewpoints to the right of center runs across platforms and is pervasive and accelerating. The Media Research Center found in September 2021 that Twitter and Facebook censor Republican members of Congress at a rate of 53-to-1 compared to Democrat lawmakers. By its own admission, Facebook created two internal tools in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory that suppressed“very conservative” media reach on its platform. Google stifled conservative-leaning outlets such as The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and this publication during the 2020 election season, with Breitbart’s Google search visibility reportedly shrinking by 99 percent compared to the 2016 election cycle. Finally, at least 17 digital platforms banned Trump or affiliated accounts within a two-week span in early January 2021 — all while Chinese Communist Party, Iranian, and Taliban spokesmen enjoy a voice on these American-owned platforms.
To contest this imbalance, conservatives attempted to take matters into their own hands and “build their own” digital platform. Yet when such a company, Parler, developed an app that reached the top of the Apple store in the early days of January 2021, Apple, Google, and Amazon Web Services acted within approximately 48 hrs of each other to vanquish it. Parler has yet to recover a fraction of the users it gained during January 2021. The “build your own” argument wilted in the face of concerted opposition by these entrenched juggernauts.
Further, the distinction between the coercive power of the government and that of a private company is negated when they work hand-in-glove to achieve the government’s ends. Jen Psaki admitted from the White House podium in July that the government was “flagging problematic posts” for Facebook to censor. Within a month, the accounts she and the surgeon general surfaced were removed from Facebook. And that’s just what the two Biden officials admitted out loud. In fact, Psaki again took to the podium in February 2022 to declare that media app Spotify could do more regarding comedian Joe Rogan, intimating the private company should expand its censorship of the podcasting star for platforming views that buck the administration’s Covid narrative.
Less than a month earlier, Biden had called on tech companies to police Covid-related speech. Even at the state level, at least one lawsuit alleges that the Office of the Secretary of State for California worked directly with Twitter to flag and scrutinize a conservative commentator over his election skepticism, ultimately resulting in his suspension in February 2021.
Suppression of conservative speech as a response to political pressure is not limited to social media alone. Online payment processors and fundraising platforms, email delivery services, and web hosting services are all taking their cues from and following in Big Tech’s footsteps. What happens in the future when your individual environmental, social, and governance score or level of climate change compliance is unsatisfactory for every online banking service intent on staying in the good graces of the government? In effect, our country is sleepwalking into a CCP-style social credit system.
This type of control also tears at the cultural underpinnings of our society. The disposition toward freedom of expression is central to the American way of life. Supporting an unpopular opinion in the digital public square or donating to political causes should not mean risking your livelihood. These practices erode our culture of free speech, chill open discourse, and engender self-censorship. In a more concrete sense, Big Tech’s practices result in measurable, destructive effects on the next generation of young citizens. Author Abigail Shrier documents social media’s influence on social contagions of the moment, stating that these sites offer an “endless supply of mentors” to fan the flames of gender dissatisfaction among teen girls.
According to Facebook’s own research, 6 percent of teen Instagram users who reported suicidal thoughts traced their emergence directly to Instagram. Teenage girls in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia are likely developing verbal and physical tics by watching influencers on TikTok who exhibit the same habits, in addition to being fed eating-disorder videos, according to The Wall Street Journal. (As of early 2021, 25 percent of TikTok users in America were teenagers or younger.)
Big Tech companies have proven themselves irresponsible stewards of their government-enhanced power. A recalibration of their relationship to the American people is warranted. The answer exists in solutions that promote human flourishing and arrest the infringement of God-given rights by private entities, such as freedom of speech. American policymakers and representatives should take on Big Tech as uniquely deleterious to a healthy body politic and invest in a diversity of tactics to meet the moment. The aggregate effect of these measures should be far more scrutiny, pressure, and oversight over Big Tech companies.
A comprehensive agenda to end Big Tech’s undue influence over Americans’ daily lives and subversion of their rights is necessary. Measures should confront legitimate anti-competitive behavior by these global oligopolies by enforcing antitrust laws and reforming them where necessary. Lawmakers must also ensure that the government does not continue to use tech companies as their agents to chill speech. The deployment of Big Tech’s ad-tech models — the heart of what allows these companies to manipulate and exploit the data of Americans — merits particular congressional scrutiny.
Additionally, Big Tech executives should be held civilly liable for legitimate instances of fraud and breach of contract, just as GoFundMe’s decision to refund the Freedom Convoy donations instead of dispensing them to charities of their choice was likely influenced by threats of a fraud investigation.
Transparency in content moderation practices, algorithmic impacts, and data use should be non-negotiable for these companies. Americans have a right to know how their data is collected, stored, and shared in plain English. Data privacy and a national data protection framework are also critical to righting Big Tech’s wrongs.
In tandem, Americans should be given new ways to fight back when their rights are infringed upon, as well as obtain prompt and meaningful recourse from Big Tech companies. All companies and tech founders should institute expanded user control mechanisms and design privacy-preserving technologies from the outset in their products.
And finally, these tech companies should no longer be permitted to work directly with our adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party.
Sovereign citizens of the United States do not exist solely to serve the economy or maximize gross domestic product. Despite their success in the stock market, Big Tech companies are actively eroding citizens’ ability to maintain a self-governing republic. Absent drastic measures to arrest the progress of this march toward totalitarianism with a tech face, we risk the welfare of a nation. It must end here.
Kara Frederick is a Research Fellow in the Center for Technology Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Her research focuses on Big Tech and emerging technology policy. She helped create and lead Facebook’s Global Security Counterterrorism Analysis Program and was the team lead for Facebook Headquarters’ Regional Intelligence Team. Prior to Facebook, she was a Senior Intelligence Analyst for a U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command and spent six years as a counterterrorism analyst at the Department of Defense.
For weeks, mysterious unidentified flying objects over the Eastern Plains region of Colorado have vexed residents, law enforcement, the military, and state and federal officials. Those who see them say they appear in the night sky, often several at a time, their locations marked by the light they emit. Audibly buzzing, they hover and maneuver in precise formations.
The mystery of their origin has gripped Colorado, where news of a sighting makes near-daily headlines and no one has yet copped to operating the aircraft. The state’s governor, Jared Polis, deployed the state plane to hunt them down after a pilot believed one of the objects came too close to a Flight for Life helicopter. And a constellation of government agencies has formed a task force to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Representatives from some 77 agencies, including the military and the FBI, met for a closed-door briefing in the small town of Brush on Jan. 6.
“The group is not going to discuss the details of its inner workings, and is not planning to provide incremental updates on its activities,” Ian Gregor, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson based in Los Angeles, told The Daily Beast. “But we will inform the public about any important developments.”
The FAA has reached out to UAS test sites, drone companies, and companies that have authorization to operate drones in the area, “but we have not been able to determine that any of these operators were the source of the reported drone flights,” an FAA statement read.
In the vacuum of any definitive answer about who might be responsible for the aircraft, theories have ricocheted around the internet. Media have been drawn to small towns on the Colorado-Nebraska border. A storm chaser crew is on the case. Some observers believe the UFOs could be alien visitors. Other locals say what they’ve been seeing are merely quadcopter-style drones.
“There’s nothing about these sightings that’s inconsistent with drone technologies, so why reach for the most extreme explanation?” Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the SETI Institute in California, which uses powerful sensors to search for aliens, told The Daily Beast.
“Besides, everyone knows that the alien spacecraft prefer the American Southwest,” Shostake joked. “Must be the Tex-Mex cuisine.”
What’s weird, even for those who discount the possibility that the UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin, is the low population of Eastern Colorado, an expanse of rural farmland. Why bother mounting such a sustained campaign of drone aerobatics in a place with so few people and so little industry?
“Everyone knows that the alien spacecraft prefer the American Southwest.”
Unless, of course, people and industry aren’t the targets. Some of the counties where drones have been spotted do butt up against F.E. Warren Air Force Base in neighboring Wyoming. There, airmen at the base man and protect around 200 underground silos housing Minuteman nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), each packing enough firepower to wipe out several cities. It’s disturbing enough to see formations of glowing drones maneuvering in a grid pattern over sparsely populated expanses of land. It’s more disturbing still to see them lingering near nuclear-missile silos.
Since residents first reported the UFOs around Dec. 20, local and state government officials, including the Air Force, have denied they have anything to do with the nocturnal air shows. No one can quite figure out what the apparent drones are doing, or why.
The mystery has become big news in Colorado.
Michael Yowell, a captain at the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, has added drone patrol to his law enforcement beat. He told The Daily Beast he has seen the mysterious objects more than once over Hugo, a town with a population of fewer than 800.
An abnormal red light will appear on the horizon, he said, and soon a drone, or whatever it is, will buzz by overhead. He described the curious phenomenon to The Daily Beast as square in shape with red lights on the corners and a white light in the middle that move around at a consistent speed of about 45 miles per hour at a few hundred feet in the air regardless of the wind, emitting a low hum and high-pitched whine.
“It doesn’t sound like your normal drone,” he said. “It sounds like a motor. It sounds like a jetliner when you’re standing next to an airport.”
The Air Force and the other military branches operate thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles ranging from airliner-size Global Hawk spy drones to Reaper hunter-killers the size of Cessnas. The military equips many of its ground units and ships with hand-launched drones including quadcopter-style models. The small, radio-controlled UAVs help scout ahead of ships and ground troops and patrol sensitive sites such as air bases and potentially missile fields.
“It doesn’t sound like your normal drone. It sounds like a motor. It sounds like a jetliner when you’re standing next to an airport.”
In 2015, one of the Army’s hand-launched Raven drones strayed from Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, flew over the city, and crashed in a man’s yard. An investigation determined the operators had broken Army and FAA rules. The Air Force in particular also uses small drones as targets for developing countermeasures against an enemy’s own drones. The 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren hosts a security squadron that protects the missile fields. Equipped like infantry and riding in Huey helicopters, the security airmen train to defend the ICBMs against protesters, criminals, terrorists, saboteurs and even clueless civilians who might wander toward the silos.
When cheap drones hit the market and terror groups began modifying them to carry explosives, the security airmen started carrying devices to track potential aerial intruders. Louisiana-based Air Force Global Strike Command, which oversees the service’s ICBMs, confirmed to the Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs that it conducts counter drone exercises out of F.E. Warren.
According to the Gazette, the security squadron at the base uses equipment developed by Dedrone in San Francisco. The Dedrone tech detects and pinpoints the radio signals that connect drones to their human operators. Testing the tech could require deploying actual drones over the base.
But Air Force Global Strike Command repeatedly has insisted the apparent drones people are seeing over Colorado aren’t its own.
“We can confirm that the drones spotted in Colorado and Nebraska are not from F.E. Warren Air Force Base,” command spokesperson Carla Pampe told The Daily Beast in a statement. “We do have counterdrone systems. But we cannot speak to specifics due to operational security.”
It turns out the Air Force is just as curious about the mystery objects flying near its silos as civilians. “F.E. Warren is working with the FAA, the FBI and state and local authorities to determine the origins and operators,” Pampe said.
On Jan. 13, the Colorado Department of Public Safety announced it was scaling back its investigations into the drone sightings that have turned Eastern Colorado into the epicenter of a baffling post-holiday media sensation.
“Despite all of the reported activity, we are still unaware of any crime being committed,” the department’s director, Stan Hilkey, said in a statement. “While I can’t conclusively say we have solved the mystery, we have been able to rule out a lot of the activity that was causing concern.”
Back in Lincoln County, Captain Yowell believes investigators will likely crack the case with old-fashioned police work. Area law enforcement have been asking residents to report any activity they think might be related to the aerial objects.
“We all agree that the way this is finally going to get resolved is somebody on the ground — or these drones are going to be homed back to a certain location, and that’s where we’re going to get our break,” Yowell said.
Billionaire investor, Facebook board member, and Trump supporter Peter Thiel recently called on the FBI and CIA to investigate Google for the “seemingly treasonous” act of aiding the Chinese military.
Axios reports that Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley investor, Facebook board member, and longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, called on the FBI and CIA to investigate Google for allegedly aiding the Chinese military during his speech at the recent National Conservatism Conference. During the speech, Thiel noted “three questions that should be asked” by the federal government of tech giant Google.
Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?
Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?
Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military… because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn’t go out the front door, it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?
Thiel added that these questions “need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA, and I’m not sure quite how to put this, I would like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner.”Thiel has been a long time supporter of Artificial Intelligence, joining Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman in pledging to commit a total of $1 billion to the non-profit group OpenAI in 2015.
Google has come under fire previously for its relationship with China, particularly the development of a censored Chinese search engine codenamed Project Dragonfly. During a speech before the Hudson Institute in 2018, Vice President Mike Pence criticized what he believes is China’s theft of U.S. technology, urging Google to take action on the issue. Pence said during the speech that other business leaders are hesitant to enter the Chinese market “if it means turning over their intellectual property or abetting Beijing’s oppression.”
Pence called on Google to listen to these other leaders and that “more must follow suit.” He also called on Google to end the development of its censored Chinese search engine project known as Dragonfly: “For example, Google should immediately end development of the ‘Dragonfly’ app that will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers,”said Pence.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Chinese policy expert Dr. Michael Pillsbury noted that eight years ago, Google co-founder Sergey Brin received praise for refusing to do business with the Chinese government, a decision which now appears to have been completely reversed. “Fast forward eight years and Google has reversed itself, but done so secretly.”
Recently, e-commerce giant Amazon faced pressure from employees to cut ties with Peter Thiel’s Palantir, a data mining firm that is employed by ICE in its efforts to carry out deportations. Amazon employees are now circulating a letter from June 2018 in which they called for executives to ban Palantir from Amazon Web Services; Palantir’s software utilizes Amazon’s cloud computing unit.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
aerogondo/Getty
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.