An Oregon man convicted of hate crimes had his big expensive stash of fancy guns taken away by the government.

Police recovered a trove of rifles and neo-Nazi literature from Rockhill’s home during his arrest in May after authorities noticed his distinctive tattoos and a license plate belonging to the 35-year-old in surveillance footage.

The guns will remain in the possession of the Portland Police Bureau while Rockhill serves two years of probation, according to court documents.

The press say “Neo-Nazi” when clearly he is a Nazi. His arrest is related to his use of speech intended to harm.

Jarl J. Rockhill admitted to affixing the sticker, which showed a male figure making a Nazi salute above the word “pure,” to a fence at the Immigrant & Refugee Community Organization on Northeast Glisan Street on April 23.

Pure hate. I’m surprised his sticker didn’t say America First.

The language of the judge is interesting because it orders the man to learn quickly about real history and submit proof of understanding as if an antidote to decades of swallowing white insecurity propaganda.

Cory Doctorow sat in the front row of my talk at a 2018 security conference and asked me some fairly specific questions. I didn’t mind.

It was a nice to see he was there to learn about the topics I frequently write and speak about.

However, when I wrote my blog post in 2020 about a more fair and accurate history of the Luddites, I didn’t really expect him to basically take it and publish it in January 2022 as his own work… without attribution.

In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology – no more than the Boston Tea Party’s cause was the elimination of tea, or Al Qaeda’s cause was the end of civilian aviation. Smashing looms and stocking frames was the Luddites’ tactic, not their goal.

In truth, their goal was something closely related to science fiction: to challenge not the technology itself, but rather the social relations that governed its use…

In truth, Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.

As someone just pointed out to me, I wrote this exact thing years prior with far more context and detail.

So it goes.

Kudos to those who have read both.

Years ago, in my talks about future AI risks, I explained how satellites and fax machines by 1960s had become essential technology in the success of U.S. Army special force operations in Africa.

Rescue teams gathered an accurate record of building footprints in order to prepare raids and make quick work of kidnappers.

A new Google blog post about their use of AI reminded me of it.

An accurate record of building footprints is important for a range of applications, from population estimation and urban planning to humanitarian response and environmental science. After a disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, authorities need to estimate how many households have been affected. Ideally there would be up-to-date census information for this, but in practice such records may be out of date or unavailable. Instead, data on the locations and density of buildings can be a valuable alternative source of information.

I see only a very subtle nod to the “humanitarian response” elephant in the room.

Here’s an example from “In the Shadows… Intelligence Corps”

Another time I mentioned briefly how quickly deflating cost of spatial intelligence feeds into asymmetric conflict.

One of the more interesting aspects of this new Google post is something I highlighted as far back as my 2016 talks, which is that AI engineers do not think about African geography when they develop “recognition” systems (I easily broke a Cambridge “driverless” system claiming 90% accuracy by running it on scenery from Botswana, where it immediately failed).

…taking into account confounding characteristics of different areas across the African continent. In rural areas, for example, it was necessary to identify different types of dwelling places and to disambiguate them from natural features, while in urban areas we needed to develop labelling policies for dense and contiguous structures.

It begs the question whether someone associated with military intelligence or special operations poked Google for help on a “humanitarian” mission by providing accurate footprints… in Africa. Or maybe even Google hired a spy to their dubiously funded massively expanding engineering teams.

I mean remember how Twitter engineers had been taking money from the Saudi government for access before the new CEO made it into an official strategy?