“It’s a poor blaster that won’t point both ways”
Issac Asimov, Foundation
U.K. Orders Apple to Let It Spy on Users’ Encrypted Accounts:
Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.
The 2024 US election marked a choice between two alternatives, between a chance at restoring the constitutional republic and a continued, perhaps even accelerated, slide into progressive materialism.
There was another election that year which also marked a choice. Last July, the UK Labour party won a parliamentary landslide and immediately doubled down on extending the power of the state over people’s lives, chipping away at Britons’ traditional rights and liberties. Free speech? Say something hateful on Facebook and you’ll get raided by the police. Freedom of religion? Simply standing in the wrong place while in silent prayer will get you a trip to the slammer.
We can see now in Labour’s Britain a future that we narrowly avoided (for now) when Trump won.
There’s one other, very serious consequence to those two elections and now is a good time to talk about atom blasters pointing both ways.
One of the key tools Trump is using in his assault on the Administrative State is AI. Musk’s DOGE teams enter agencies to secure the data sets and then use AI and other analytical tools to uncover hidden secrets and patterns in those sets, exposing the rot of waste and abuse. Where once seizing the archives meant just capturing mounds of paper now it means following the data or in the vernacular that the DC Swamp understands following the money.
That’s the magic of AI in terms of analysis and decision support, it allows not just the rendering of enormous, varied data sets but their manipulation and cross-referencing in order to reveal their deepest secrets at amazing speeds. It is the T-800 of investigators. It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop.
If you keep that image in mind, then you have some idea of the terror going on down in the Beltway right now.
However, that’s America. What of AI and the UK?
The Labour government has ordered Apple to give it unprecedented access to the company’s encrypted cloud server. Where once the police would come to your corporate door and demand you provide them with specific customer information on your servers, now they are essentially demanding their own keys to the entire data center so they can roam at will taking what they want.
Keep in mind that these “technical capability notices” that the Labour-controlled government issues are secret, it is against the law to even reveal that the UK government has even made such a demand. How likely is that the Brits have demanded this access only from Apple?
Just as the DOGE commandos use AI to decipher and analyze troves of data from the newly unlocked government archives in order to fight the State, so will agents of the British government use AI to decipher and analyze the troves of data from the newly unlocked cloud services in order to extend the State’s control over people’s lives.