Given current developments in the USA, where most of our communication is hosted, many organizations and individuals should revisit their thinking around operational security.
Here are five things I consider facts:
US spy agencies have in the past had on-demand access to all data stored by US companies, and in many cases even taken full copies by default.
AI has almost completely removed the friction and cost associated with evaluating each individual message's contents or creating profiles on each person.
The current administration is taking direct control of many agencies at will, and ignoring checks and balances.
An increasing list of concepts, keywords and associations can land you on the list of organizations or persons considered "woke" or "radical leftist" (Note: the NIST just instructed AISI to eliminate any mention of "AI safety", probably not yet as bad as working on climate science, but the direction is clear).
It would be trivially easy for a US agency to make a list of almost all EAs, if it doesn't exist already
I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past.
The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least...
