Why Spy?
On Intelligence -- Raw, Filtered, Artificial
‘Nothing to Hide’. In the early days of mass surveillance, many people saw nothing ominous in official or commercial demands for their personal information. They reassured themselves with the mantra ‘I have nothing to hide’, believing this made the snooping harmless. In those carefree times, the immense resources of technology, money, and effort that would be dedicated to compiling universal private information on everyone would have been unimaginable. It was easy to wonder why anyone would bother, and hard to anticipate the purposes of doing so. The spy agencies proceeded to invent ever more encompassing rationales for amassing personal data. The 9/11 attacks gave them all they could ever wish for in the realm of mass surveillance.
Traditional espionage confined itself to the usual suspects among foreign states -- the Soviet Union and satellites, Communist China, North Korea, and a few others. These others included allies, since Soviet spies had established active networks in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. In the 1940s heyday of Soviet espionage, the Soviet Union acquired U.S. atomic secrets, breaking the U.S. nuclear monopoly in only four years; and placed agents in the top echelons of the U.S. State Department. Afrer several years of delay in appreciating the extent of Soviet penetration of U.S. and allied governments, U.S. spy agencies and the general public finally recognized domestic subversion as a serious problem. While traditional American espionage divided the work neatly into foreign (CIA) and domestic (FBI), with each supposed to keep out of the other’s territory, this soon proved untenable.
The advent of mass surveillance. As globalization of commerce expanded, information technology took in previously unimaginable volumes of data. In addition, non-state enemies proliferated, and national borders became porous. The 9/11 (2001) attacks sparked a fateful crossover point, wherein targeting ordinary people at home for surveillance, without any grounds for suspicion, became the norm. People with ‘nothing to hide’ became targets of mass surveillance.
The NSA’s PRISM program (exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013) reveals ongoing collusion between U.S. spies and Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and other tech firms. Banks track private accounts to detect large cash withdrawals, purportedly as an anti-money-laundering precaution legalized by the Patriot Act. Banks around the world are required by a U.S. law called FATCA to report all accounts held by U.S. citizens, violating other countries’ sovereignty. Unfortunately for all, they meekly submit, fearing loss of access to the global currency, U.S. Dollars.
The ever-expanding inventory of devices (in addition to mobile phones) that spy on their owners includes: voice-activated clocks and televisions, smart refrigerators, outdoor cameras with built-in facial recognition software, coordinating with social-media portrait scraping, cars that know when their owners are too drunk to drive, license-plate readers tracking drivers’ movements nationwide, iris scanners, and coming soon, dermal patches to enable detection of vaccination status from afar, and brain implants to read thoughts and emotions, and engage in ‘predictive policing’ to identify likely criminal behavior before it happens.
Enormous quantities of raw intelligence accumulating in electronic records available to official, private, and increasingly to unauthorized overseers, inevitably invite abuse. As in any sado-masochistic relationship, it takes two to tango. This sort of abuse was pre-figured in the arts since the 1960s, where it was gleefully enacted in louche theatrical performances, graphically pictured, and imposed on the public with architectural monstrosities. Exhibits and performances in public institutions gave license to ‘challenge’ — meaning to impose gratuitous suffering on — viewers. Normalized into the arts, this S-M mode of conduct progressed into politics, business, science, and medicine. Thus an S-M relationship between officials and the public was institutionalized.
Public-private partnership: filtered and targeted intelligence. The mania for gathering raw intelligence rarely pauses to consider why this is done. Governments around the world, including those of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, cite omni-present threats as justification for their unrestricted snooping. Spyware pioneered by Facebook, Google, Apple, and others for commercial purposes, is secretly commadeered by government spy agencies, without stating a purpose. Not only is the previous standard for snooping — ‘probable cause’ to suspect someone of a crime -- missing, the entire apparatus of raw intelligence exists without any clear mission or purpose. It does not take long, however, for politically motivated actors to discover a purpose, albeit one that was never embodied in legislation. The tech-savvy Obama Administration set about targeting political enemies like the Tea Party, using then-primitive methods like keyword searches (’patriot’ was one). Rising candidate Donald Trump comes in for special scrutiny in 2015. Supposition is quickly transformed into a fanciful story of collusion with Russia, then to a self-reinforcing reification of that narrative. Policies, such as the last-minute sanctions on Russia imposed during the dying days of the Obama Administration, are proclaimed to create an appearance of offensive Russian behavior, and to entrap officials of the incoming Trump Administration into unwinding them, reinforcing the appearance of their collusion. In short order the entire apparatus of government and spydom is conscripted into the service of blocking a presidential candidate, and failing that, crippling his presidency from within (the ‘insurance policy’).
Domestic mass surveillance takes a giant leap into new territory with the release of the NIH-Wuhan-crafted virus in late 2019, and its fraternal twin the covid-vax in early 2020. As German political prisoner Reiner Fuellmich puts it, ‘The vaccine was not created for the Wuhan virus. The virus was created for the vaccine. Once you understand that, it all makes sense.’ So dire is the ‘emergency’ of this man-made pandemic that nearly all national governments in unison enact mass house-arrests and try to enforce universal injection of an experimental gene-altering drug to treat (ineffectively and unsafely, as it turned out) an illness with a death rate of 0.15%.
This extraordinarily invasive injection requires an unprecedented enforcement apparatus. After all, people confronted with this demand can simply refuse. How to get them to accept an experimental invasive medicine that may harm them? The covid episode *ratchets-up passive surveillance to active intervention*, transforming government into an activist force pursuing its own ends without even the pretense of popular consent.
To compel compliance, ‘all-of-government’ is mobilized is required to target individuals and groups, fine-tuned to their specific fears and aspirations. The range of individually targeted sanctions encompasses threats of job loss, denial of school admission, removal of professional accreditation, blacklisting, de-platforming from social media, censorship of publications, and others, amounting to deprivation of livelihood. Some people respond more to fear of illness or death, while with others it is found that more positive psychological motivators such as purported anti-infection obligations (’two weeks to stop the spread’ and ‘take one for the team’) are effective. About midway throught the pandemic, covidians devise the ‘vaccine passport’ to enforce compliance with government edicts. Like a travel passport, the ‘vaccine passport’ admits the bearer to restaurants, offices, schools, public transit, shopping, or other sorts of access required for normal life. In the next iteration of this technology, the ‘vaccine passport’ could be embedded into the obedient subject’s skin, with a trans-dermal or micro-needle patch. MIT Researchers describe this patch as an ‘on-patient medical record (OPMR)’ that ingeniously uses invisible but machine-readable quantum dots to record medical or vaccine status without the patient’s knowledge or consent.
The thrill of remote-control intimacy. Edward Snowden in his memoir Permanent Record, provides intriguing clues as to the motivations of spies who seek intimate knowledge of others while themselves remaining hidden, remote, untouchable:
‘I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who’d ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were being surveilled in gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.
‘It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop.’
This was Snowden’s introduction to what the NSA’s XKEYSCORE enabled a 20-something analyst to do. It produced a high unlike any he had previously experienced. Snowden calls it
‘the most significant change in the history of American espionage — the change from the targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations.... In secret, it [U.S. Govt] assumed the power of mass surveillance, an authority that by definition afflicts the innocent far more than the guilty.’
‘STELLARWIND was the classified report’s deepest secret. It was, in fact, the NSA’s deepest secret, and the one that the report’s sensitive status had been designed to protect. The program’s very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizens’ private Internet communications as potential signals intelligence.’
‘According to the [classified] report, it was the government’s position that the NSA could collect whatever communications records it wanted to, without having to get a warrant, because it could only be said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency ‘searched for and retrieved’ them from its database.’
Snowden describes what the violation of privacy removes from human experience:
‘All you wanted to do was to read — to take part in that most intensely intimate human act, the joining of minds through language. But that was more than enough. Your natural desire to be with the world was all the world needed to connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique identifiers, such as your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these identifiers across every available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to record and store for perpetuity the data of your life. And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all of your communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By poisoning the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, or ‘exploits’, they developed the ability to gain possession of more than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device, including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this now — this sentence — on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you.’
‘This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation — the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.’
Raw intelligence is first gathered without purpose, simply because the technical means exist for doing so, and it might come in handy someday. Eventually a purpose emerges: Rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Passive surveillance then changes into actively influencing how users respond to information they are given. Surprisingly (to me), they respond in measureable, predictible ways to news-information. I thought awareness of information with manipulative intent would ‘break the spell’, nullifying the influence of that manipulation on one’s own thinking and behavior. But apparently not -- millions recognize the operation of mind-control, but they’re OK with it! They prefer the convenience of crowd-sourced traffic information, or of an app presenting them with choices based on their ‘Likes’ and other information not specifically intended for public consumption.
From this predictable knowledge of how individuals who are classified by demographic or psychological attributes will react, it is s short step to tailoring news and other information to produce officially desired responses. This matching of content to character is the basis of ‘cognitive surveillance’, otherwise known as mind-control.
It is used to bring masses of protesters into the streets, drive buying decisions and voting choices, enforce compliance with invasive medical practices, and quell resistance to migrant invasions. In extreme individual cases such as the MK Ultra experiments, mind-control psychological operations (’psy-ops’, as they are known in the spy trade) break down moral inhibitions against sexual exploitation, murder, drug addiction, terror, torture, and similar activities incompatible with civilization. Moving from passive to active surveillance, and thereby facilitating such experiments, is thus a profoundly fateful choice. America leads the world in incorporating mind-control seamlessly into the tech-wizardry of convenience serving as the point of entry for centralized control of the populace.
Americans are conditioned to accept the next fix delivered by mad scientists, while the digital dragnet draws ever tighter around their throats. Oligarchs champ at the bit to install machine-readable brain sensors, trans-dermal skin patches, and other invasive devices in our bodies. Covid lockdowns prove that officials could largely get away with enforcing ‘vaccine passports’ to control access to food, meeting-places, bank accounts, travel, and all other fundamentals of existence. Substituting an inconspicuous implant for a piece of paper is the logical sequel — unless large numbers of people refuse.
Democratization of intelligence by AI. Artificial intelligence upends the standard intelligence hierarchy, giving everyone genius-level memory, reasoning, number-crunching, computer-programming, diagnostic, analytical, data-relation, economic forecasting, and many many other abilities. New uses of AI are discovered daily. Traditional experts are threatened with extinction, while crowd-sourcing ousts specialized fiefdoms. Vast expanses of unknown territory become transparent to anyone with a GPS navigation system. Its possessor can navigate around the locale better than natives can.
AI translation breaks down linguistic barriers to an unprecedented degree, opening up everything ever written to foreign inquiry. This is a task its ‘large-language-model’ (LLM) design is ideally suited for. We are just beginning to realize the enormous benefits of this capability. As one example of the extraordinary inter-lingual possibilities, the author of a book on ‘umami’ (savory taste in Japanese and other cuisine) uses AI to translate recipes from out-of-print Meiji-era books found in Jimbocho shops. All the books ever published and lying dormant in used-book shops and libraries are now available to everyone, regardless of their native language.
Just as filtered or targeted intelligence gives purpose to raw intelligence, so artificial intelligence enhances filtered intelligence. AI does this by responding to users’ prompts in a seemingly intelligent way, incorporating very large sets of the world’s published knowledge into its answers. Instead of the endless lists of irrelevant references produced by keyword-based search engines, AI focuses on the topic at hand, with nuanced, well-organized, and comprehensive compilations beyond the ability of any individual researcher to produce.
At the same time, AI prose is typically bland and devoid of opinion or humor. It is a reliable guide to the conventional orthodoxy on any subject, or to the biases of its designers. As published sources are increasingly colonized by AI output, it is becoming more and more self-referential, recirculating content in an endless loop. This phenomenon is hardly confined to AI. For example, the made-up pastische of the Steele dossier passed through multiple sources among journalists, Congressional aides, spies, and special-counsel investigators, like a virus serially passed through animals in a gain-of-function experiment. Repetitive references abound in online searches as well, with circular citation chains. Indeed Google started by ranking references according to numbers of citations. AI did not invent regurgitative reporting, but its sources consist increasingly of mutually-cited unedited content. The remedy is to focus instructions as precisely as possible, issue multiple prompts, and apply common-sense judgment to the results.
AI (so far) fails to catch up with human knowledge, because human knowledge continually evolves. New experiences make us ‘see things in a new light’. News about an earthquake in Indonesia acquires great salience because a friend lives there. A medieval herbal manuscript gathering dust in a library reveals a headache remedy. A picture evokes a memory of someplace visited decades ago. Real thought interacts dynamically with its environment, evolving as it goes, blending new knowledge with previous experience. AI has proved unexpectedly adept at predicting how masses of people will react to certain well-defined stimuli (especially stimuli associated with negative emotions), but that is only because those masses have been pre-programmed to bypass their innate common-sense. AI’s formidable ability to rearrange words does not yet rise to the level of creative thought. As long as at least some people continue to exercise their own innate common-sense, creation of new knowledge will continue to outpace AI.
Investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) reached $252 billion in 2024, or under a more inclusive definition, nearly one trillion dollars, projected to have reached $1.5 trillion in 2025. As of the end of 2025, the return on this massive investment is trivial, with the most common levels of increased revenue attributable to AI being less than five percent of the firm’s prior revenue. Cost-cutting from AI has fared little better, with the most common savings under 10 percent of prior costs. As AI users have discovered, its effectiveness depends on the prompts, or questions, they pose. Like a search engine, it performs better if you know what you’re looking for. In the early days of the The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) blitzkrieg, Elon Musk’s team used AI to uncover hidden money flows they knew were there, such as the Treasury Department’s daily $50 billion payments to unidentified recipients.
At the end of Musk’s appointed term, DOGE claims $214 billion in savings, but accounting uncertainties and judicial decisions restoring budget cuts and reinstating fired employees cut actual savings to $67 billion. While AI in Musk’s hands has proved to be a useful tool in revealing massive unauthorized and illegal Government payments, stopping them is another matter altogether.
Aside from Musk’s Grok, the most prominent AI product is ChatGPT, posting annual revenue of $13 billion for OpenAI. Due to its ambitious expansion plans, the company anticipates a net loss of $9 billion in 2025. CEO Sam Altman and his partner are diversifying into the designer-baby business. Feminist darling Jennifer Doudna supplied the CRISPR gene-editing technology that fuels this mad experiment. Scientists rolling the genetic dice, skirting regulatory oversight, have already produced ‘off-target’ genetic anomalies with ‘unanticipated serious consequences, such as mutation, oncogene activation, immune response, and activation/inactivation of undesired genes’ in animals’. These unfortunate animals are routinely killed, but Altman and partner haven’t disclosed what they plan to do with human babies emerging from laboratories bearing similar CRISPR gene-editing anomalies. Like the experimental alterations of the human genome wrought by mRNA technology, long-lasting harm without conceivable benefit is a clearly foreseeable consequence.
A new architecture of thought. Investors and promoters of AI are after bigger game than sparing researchers the drudgery of looking up references for footnotes. In a 21st-century version of the ‘Great Game’, rival powers are engaged in cognitive warfare — an arms race for hegemony of the last frontier, the human mind. For about half a millennium, Western Civilization has dominated the architecture of human thought. It has done so through its superiority as a survival tool for large-scale societies. Individual freedom drives cultural, political, and scientific innovation, creating prosperity and improved lives for all. Societies that can’t tolerate freedom — whether socialist, theocratic, or tech-utopian — inevitably fail. Central planners simply cannot even begin to encompass the myriad variables, facts, trends, knowledge, and events in their deliberations and decisions, as noted by Friedrich Hayek in The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization. It is precisely this universal knowledge that developers of artificial intelligence aspire to own and apply to global governance. If central planners possess all knowledge relevant to economic, health, geopolitical, and other decisions affecting humanity, then the fatal flaw of systems based on total state control of society ceases to exist.
This governance by expertise is what the tech-utopian architects of thought seek to substitute for Western Civilization. The stakes in this contest — between Western and Chinese AI on the one hand, and between tech oligarchs and Western Civilization on the other had — are sky-high.
The credibility of AI as a domain of universal knowledge is central to its role in crafting a new architecture of thought. For as we think, so do we act. If we believe that artificial intelligence is not only intellectually superior to human intelligence, but also morally and even spiritually superior, then we will blindly ‘follow the science’. This new architecture of thought enshrines a priesthood of savants and oligarchs remarkably similar to the alliances of religious and secular powers described by James Bryce in his history of the Holy Roman Empire. They are out to triumph over both Chinese rivals and freedom-loving Westerners.
Much has been written about where Jeffrey Epstein got his money, whether sex with adolescent girls was just his hobby or a means of securing kompromat on prominent persons, whether he was a CIA asset or not, and whether he was murdered, and if so, by whom. A brief review of his career suggests his part in the AI saga.
Mike Benz, in assessing Epstein’s role as that of a financial intermediary, summarizes his specialty succinctly: ‘Girls juice deals’;
‘It’s not really a party unless you have girls there... It was a very different thing from blackmail. That’s how Adnan Khashoggi got to be the biggest arms dealer in the world. Pretty girls are the currency of the mideast.’
‘Spy agencies want financial facilitators far more than they want blackmail material. They need a deal-maker who can broker deals that the U.S. Government does not want to be seen as brokering, but that they want to happen in the world. [Epstein] served as the broker between Israel and the U.S. for Bechtel to build a pipeline to get Iraqi oil out overland instead of the increasingly risky sea route.’
This is plausible as far as it goes, but Benz doesn’t account for why Epstein particularly recruited cognitive scientists engaged in integrating diverse fields of inquiry, including neurology, psychology, evolutionary biology, economics, mathematical modeling, and computer programming. Brought together by the publishing impresario John Brockman and his Edge Foundation, they specialize in outside-the-box thinking unbound by traditional disciplines. Jeffrey Epstein provided two resources to the Edge set that were lacking in their lives: girls and money.
Eric Weinstein, a member of the Edge set, reviews the Epstein case in a long monologue full of superfluous complexity. But Weinstein is absolutely clear on one point: If Epstein hadn’t supported the geniuses and heterodox thinkers of the Edge set, then China would have done so. Here we see the self-congratulatory cult of expertise, with its belief in their own pre-eminence in comparison with lesser mortals.
Surely the formidable effort applied to corralling the Edge set had some purpose other than cybernetic badinage. Chances are, that purpose was to build a new architecture of thought with artificial intelligence engrafted onto human intelligence. Aiming for organic integration of human thought with comprehensive information-gathering and -processing capacity, they seem to be after super-human intelligence capable of taking real-time action. This new species of humanity would have previously undreamed-of powers -- for good, of course, despite unfortunate precedents. This appears to be the goal cognitive scientists of the trans-human persuasion, and their financiers, are pursuing, asserting that it’s better for America to have a race of super-human-robots than for China to have it. The gargantuan hype makes a persuasive investment story, for now. What happens when the reality fails to live up to the hype is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile many can benefit from the democratization of intelligence, if they use AI tools as assistants rather than authorities, and, as always, apply their own common-sense to the results.