Category Archives: History

History, Sailing, Security

Microsoft’s Exploitation Gambit: An AI-Historical Warning

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Executive summary: Corporate rhetoric about innovation and leadership often masks the unpalatable reality of exploitation and extraction. Microsoft’s new AI manifesto, with its careful political positioning and woefully selective historical narrative, exemplifies this troubling pattern – trading safety for market advantage that has historical precedents with catastrophic outcomes.

A U.S. Navy Blimp crashed in Daly City 1944 with nobody on board. Speculation abounds to this day about the two men who disappeared from it.

When the Hindenburg burst into flames in 1937, it marked another era built on hubris – a belief that technological advancement could outrun safety concerns. Microsoft’s recent manifesto on AI leadership eerily echoes this same dangerous confidence, presenting a sanitized version of both American technological history and their own corporate record.

Brad Smith’s Failure at History

The company’s vision statement posted under Brad Smith’s name reads like a saccharin a-historical fiction, painting a rosy picture of American technological development that far too conveniently forgets death and destruction of weakly regulated barons. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire’s 146 victims, the horrific conditions exposed in “The Jungle,” and the long struggle for basic worker protections weren’t exceptions. And selective amnesia by those who profit from ignoring the past isn’t accidental – it’s a strategic attempt to hide the human costs of rapid technological deployment that lacked the most basic safeguards.

Just as the disastrously mis-managed private American railroads of the 19th century built empires on fraud (government handouts while preaching free-market rhetoric) that left taxpayers holding the fallout with no trains in sight, Microsoft now positions itself as a champion of private sector innovation while seeking public funding and protection. Their carefully crafted narrative about “American AI leadership” deliberately obscures how the technology sector actually achieved its “success” – through massive public investment, particularly in military applications for “intelligence” like the billion-dollar-per-year IGLOO WHITE program during the Vietnam War.

Real History, Real Microsoft Patterns

The corporate-driven PR of historical revisionism becomes even more troubling when we examine Microsoft’s awful and immoral business track record. The company that now promises to be a responsible steward of AI technology has consistently prioritized corporate profits over human welfare. Bill Gates’ lack of any concern at all for “virus” risks in his takeover of the personal computer world, delivering billions of disasters and causing world-wide outages, is somehow supposed to be forgotten because he took the money and announced he cares about malaria now? While ignoring basic consumer safety, Microsoft also pioneered a “permatemp” system in the 1990s for a two-tier workforce where thousands of “temporary” workers had to do the work of full-time employees yet without benefits or job security. Even after paying a piddling $97 million to settle lawsuits, they arrogantly shifted to more sophisticated forms of worker exploitation through contracting firms.

As technology evolved, so did Microsoft’s methods of avoiding responsibility. Content moderators exposed to traumatic material, game testers working in precarious conditions, and data center workers denied basic benefits – all while the company’s profits soared unethically. Now, in the AI era, they’ve taken an even more ominous turn by literally dismantling ethical AI oversight teams (because they raised objections) precisely when such oversight is most crucial.

New Avenues for Exploitation

The parallels to past technological disasters are stark. Just as the Grover Shoe Factory’s boiler explosion revealed the costs of prioritizing production over safety, Microsoft’s aggressive push into AI while eliminating ethical oversight should raise alarming questions. This is like removing the brakes on a car when you install a far more powerful engine. Their new AI manifesto, filled with flattery for coming White House occupants using veiled requests for deregulation, reads less like a vision for responsible innovation and more like a corporate attempt to avoid accountability… for when they inevitably burn up their balloon.

Consider the track record:

  • Pioneered abusive labor practices in tech
  • Consistently fought against worker organizing efforts
  • Used contractor firms to obscure poor working conditions
  • Fired ethical AI researchers as they accelerate AI

Smith’s manifesto, with carefully crafted appeals to American technological leadership and warnings about Chinese competition, follows this as a familiar pattern. It’s the same strategy railroad companies used to secure land grants, that oil companies used to bypass laws, that steel companies used to avoid safety regulations, and that modern tech giants use to maintain their monopolies.

Tea Pot Dome May Come Again

For anyone considering entrusting their future to Microsoft’s AI vision, the message from history is clear: this is a company that has repeatedly chosen corporate convenience over human welfare. Their elimination of ethical oversight while rapidly deploying AI technology isn’t just a little concerning – it’s intentionally dangerous. Like boarding a hydrogen-filled zeppelin, the risks aren’t immediately visible but are nonetheless catastrophic.

The manifesto’s emphasis on “private sector leadership” and deregulation, combined with their historic exploitative practice of using contractor firms to avoid responsibility, suggests their AI future will repeat the worst patterns of industrial history. Their calls for “pragmatic” export controls and warnings about Chinese competition are less about national security and more about seeking unjust tariffs (e.g. Facebook’s campaign to ban competitor TikTok) and securing corporate benefits while avoiding oversight.

Americans never seem to talk about Tea Pot Dome when calling Big Data new “oil”. In fact data is nothing like oil, and yet Big Tech antics are just like Tea Pot Dome: private exploitation of public resources, use of national security as justification, and corruption of oversight processes.

As we stand at the threshold of the AI era, Microsoft’s manifesto should be read not as a vision statement but as them cooking and eating the AI canary in broad daylight. Their selective reading of history, combined with their own troubling track record, suggests we’re witnessing the trumpeted call for a new chapter in corporate exploitation – one where AI technology serves as both the vehicle and the excuse for avoiding responsibility.

Microsoft is sacrificing something (ethical oversight, worker protections) for perceived strategic advantage, just as historical robber barons sacrificed safety and worker welfare for profit.

The question isn’t whether Microsoft can lead in AI development by pouring billions into their race to monopolize it and spit out even their own workers as a lesser caste – it’s whether we can afford to repeat the mistakes of the past by allowing companies to prioritize speed and profit over human welfare and safety. History’s judgment of such choices has always been harsh, and in the AI era, the stakes are even higher.

One theory about the Navy L-8 crash in 1944 is “new technology, being tested to detect U-boats, emitted dangerous and poorly shielded microwaves that overpowered the crew, causing them to fall out of the cabin”.
Era Historical Pattern Microsoft’s Echo Historical Consequence
Railroad Era Railroad barons securing land grants while preaching free market values Seeking public AI funding while claiming private sector leadership Taxpayers left with failed infrastructure and mounting costs
Industrial Safety Triangle Shirtwaist Factory ignoring basic safety measures Dismantling AI ethics teams during rapid AI deployment Catastrophic human cost from prioritizing speed over safety
Labor Rights Factory owners using contractor systems to avoid responsibility Permatemp system and modern contractor exploitation Workers denied benefits while doing essential work
Monopoly Power Standard Oil’s predatory practices and regulatory capture Aggressive AI market behavior and lobbying for deregulation Concentration of power through regulatory evasion
Security Theater Tea Pot Dome scandal disguised as national security Using China competition narrative to justify monopolistic practices Public interest sacrificed for private gain
Energy, History, Security

Gravitic Drones From China: Classic Counterintelligence Pattern in Livelsberger Case

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The gravity propulsion claims in Matthew Livelsberger’s communications merit separate analysis from his testimony about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. This distinction is crucial not only for evaluating his evidence of war crimes but also for understanding current drone operations security.

Claims about gravity control propulsion systems require extraordinary scrutiny because they don’t just suggest advanced engineering – they imply a fundamental revolution in physics that lacks the observable development patterns, infrastructure requirements, and technology supply chains that accompany all major physics breakthroughs. This isn’t merely unlikely; it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how scientific advancement works.

Our current understanding of gravity comes from Einstein’s General Relativity, one of the most thoroughly tested theories in history. Any gravity control system would require either overturning General Relativity, finding fundamental physical mechanisms that have left no trace in any experimental data or theoretical frameworks despite decades of careful measurement and testing, or developing engineering capabilities that bridge enormous theoretical gaps. The closest historical research programs, like the Air Force’s gravity research in the 1950s-70s, produced valuable theoretical work on conventional gravitational effects (like Kerr’s discoveries about rotating masses) but found no pathway to gravity control.

Modern attempts to unify gravity with quantum mechanics – arguably the largest effort in theoretical physics – still struggle with basic questions about gravity’s nature. The idea that classified military research has solved these fundamental questions while leaving no trace in material supply chains, engineering education, or infrastructure development contradicts all historical patterns of technological advancement.

Even if we entertained the possibility of a gravity control breakthrough, implementing it would require a massive scientific and engineering infrastructure, supply chains for exotic materials and components, testing facilities and programs, training programs for operators and maintenance personnel, and fundamental changes to aerospace engineering education. The scale of such an enterprise would be impossible to completely hide.

For comparison, when the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, despite wartime secrecy, thousands of physicists knew the theoretical possibility, the broader scientific community understood the underlying principles, and multiple nations were pursuing similar research. No comparable foundation exists for gravity control technology.

This makes gravity propulsion claims particularly useful for very targeted counterintelligence purposes. They’re superficially plausible to non-experts yet effectively impossible to disprove (unlike claims about conventional technology). They map onto existing UFO and advanced technology beliefs, and they’re so extraordinary that they undermine the credibility of any associated claims. This pattern appears repeatedly in intelligence history. The now famous U-2 program long ago benefited from UFO speculation when stealth technology development was obscured by absurd claims. Advanced drone programs often attract similar technological mythology for similar reasons.

The U-2 case is particularly instructive because it shows how counterintelligence operations deliberately introduced fantastic elements to protect real classified technology. When civilian pilots reported strange aircraft at impossible altitudes, the Air Force would provide multiple, often contradictory explanations ranging from weather balloons to hints of more exotic possibilities. This created a ‘noise floor’ of speculation that effectively discredited legitimate observers by associating their accurate observations with increasingly outlandish claims.

This pattern of introducing fantastic elements to discredit legitimate observers has claimed numerous whistleblowers before Livelsberger. WWII British Naval Intelligence under Godfrey and Fleming used a “double cross system” – varying fake details were inserted into real documents about convoys to detect which German spies were active in specific regions, based on which version of the false information showed up in intercepted communications. In the 1990s, several Gulf War veterans who raised concerns about chemical weapons exposure found their legitimate medical complaints becoming entangled with increasingly exotic theories about secret weapons testing.

Livelsberger’s case follows a well documented progression. His detailed, verifiable testimony about drone strikes and civilian casualties has become intermixed with gravity drive claims in a way that mirrors these historical cases. The key difference is that modern counterintelligence operations maybe have become sophisticated at exploiting integrity vulnerabilties — using combat trauma such as TBI to accelerate a process of narrative contamination. While previous cases often relied on external social pressure and deliberate contradiction to introduce doubt, Livelsberger’s communications suggest a more insidious approach that leverages mental harm and psychological suffering to blur the line between direct observation and introduced fantasy.

This vulnerability-based targeting becomes particularly concerning when we consider the timeline of Livelsberger’s service. His record suggests someone whose moral objections to civilian casualties made him a potential risk for whistleblowing. The introduction of exotic technical elements into his narrative may represent a calculated attempt to force him out of operations through an early retirement on disability status – a modern evolution of old counterintelligence tactics that exploit rather than surveil potential whistleblowers.

If this was indeed the strategy, it backfired tragically. Rather than quietly accepting a glass ceiling leading to medical discharge, Livelsberger appears to have recognized attempted interference and manipulation. His final communications suggest someone who, despite or perhaps because of his combat trauma, maintained enough clarity to provide separate claims. He gave both direct observations of war crimes, as well as exotic claims he was being fed. His choice of suicide while explicitly providing testimony about civilian casualties regardless of the gravity drives suggests a determined effort to ensure his credible core evidence wouldn’t be lost under plausibility of technological revolution.

Meanwhile, modern drone operations face genuine security challenges around detection and tracking capabilities, counter-drone technologies, command and control security, autonomous systems limitations, international airspace regulations, and civilian oversight mechanisms. These real operational concerns, and likely exploits, require serious analysis. Claims about gravity propulsion not only distract from actual drone advanced capabilities but also from legitimate questions about autonomous systems, civilian oversight, and accountability in targeted strikes.

For the national security community, separating these narratives is crucial because Livelsberger’s testimony about civilian casualties in Afghanistan aligns with UN ground investigations, Brown University casualty data, known changes in ROE and reporting requirements, and documented operational patterns. His descriptions of drone operations reflect standard military procedures, known technical capabilities, established command structures, and verifiable policy changes. The gravity propulsion claims, by contrast, show classic signs of introduced disinformation through physically impossible capabilities, absence of supporting infrastructure, and violation of known scientific principles.

Understanding how gravity propulsion claims function as interference helps clarify both the credibility of Livelsberger’s core testimony and the ongoing challenges in drone operations security. It demonstrates why extraordinary claims about breakthrough technologies should be evaluated against the required scientific infrastructure, the broader research community’s knowledge, the physical principles involved, and the historical patterns of similar claims.

When evaluating whistleblower testimony about classified programs, distinguishing between operational reality and introduced disinformation remains essential. Claims that require overturning fundamental physics deserve particular skepticism, especially when they appear alongside more credible testimony about conventional operations and policy violations. This separation allows proper attention to both the serious evidence of civilian casualties and the real technical and ethical challenges in current drone operations – without being diverted by speculation about impossible technologies.

References:

  • Experimental evidence: None exists demonstrating controlled modification of gravitational fields beyond natural mass-energy effects
  • Theoretical framework: Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity – our most thoroughly tested theory of gravity – demonstrates that gravity is not a force that can be “canceled” but rather the curvature of spacetime itself caused by mass-energy
  • Mathematical proof: Forward, R.L. (1963). “Guidelines to Antigravity,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 31, pp. 166-170. Mathematical demonstration that any practical antigravity device would violate fundamental laws of energy conservation.
  • Engineering analysis: Bertolami, O., & Pedro, F.G. (2005). “Gravity Control Propulsion: Towards a General Relativistic Approach.” Instituto Superior Técnico, Departamento de Física, Lisboa, Portugal.

    Understanding our calculation as the energy that must be spent to control a region of space-time, leads to a radically different conclusion. From this point of view, gravity manipulation is an essentially unfruitful process for propulsion purposes.

  • Engineering analysis: Dröscher & Hauser (2009). “Gravitational Field Propulsion“, cites Tajmar’s definitive conclusion:

    Even if modified gravitational laws existed, their usage for space propulsion is negligible… nothing has been uncovered to allow any action-at a-distance force field for space propulsion in interplanetary or interstellar space.

History, Security

Facebook Engineering Disasters Are Not Inevitable: Moving Past Casual Commentary to Real Change

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In the wake of Facebook’s massive 2021 outage, a concerning pattern emerged in public commentary: the tendency to trivialize engineering disasters through casual metaphors and resigned acceptance. When Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain likened the incident to “locking keys in a car” and others described it as an “accidental suicide,” they fundamentally mischaracterized the nature of engineering failure… and worse, perpetuated a dangerous notion that such disasters are somehow inevitable or acceptable.

They are not.

Casual Commentary Got it Wrong

When we reduce complex engineering failures to simple metaphors that get it wrong, we do more than just misrepresent the technical reality, we misdirect the shape of how society views engineering responsibility.

“Locking keys in a car” suggests a minor inconvenience, a momentary lapse that could happen to anyone. But Facebook’s outage wasn’t a simple mistake, it was a cascading failure resulting from fundamental architectural flaws and insufficient safeguards. It was reminiscent of the infamous north-east power outages that spurred the modernization of NERC regulations.

This matters because our language shapes our expectations. When we treat engineering disasters as inevitable accidents rather than preventable failures, we lower the bar for engineering standards and accountability, instead of generating regulations that force innovation.

Industrial History Should be Studied

The comparison to the Grover Shoe Factory disaster is particularly apt. In 1905, a boiler explosion killed 58 workers and destroyed the factory in Brockton, Massachusetts. At the time, anyone who viewed industrial accidents as an unavoidable cost of progress had to recognize the cost was far too high. This disaster, along with others, led to fundamental changes in boiler design, safety regulations, and most importantly engineering code of ethics and practices.

The Grover Shoe Factory disaster is one of the most important engineering lessons in American history, yet few if any computer engineers have ever heard of it.

We didn’t accept “accidents happen” then, in order for the market to expand and grow, and we shouldn’t accept it now.

Reality Matters Most in Failure Analysis

The Facebook outage wasn’t about “locked keys” since it was about fundamental design choices that could be detected and prevented:

  1. Single points of failure
  2. Automation without safeguards
  3. Lack of fail-safe monitoring and response
  4. Cascading failures set to propagate unchecked

These weren’t accidents by Facebook, they were intentional design decisions. Each represents a choice made during development, a priority set during architecture review, a corner cut during implementation.

Good CISOs Plot Engineering Culture Change

Real change requires more than technical fixes. We need a fundamental shift in engineering culture regardless of authority or source trying to maintain an “inevitability” narrative of fast failures.

  1. Embrace Systemic Analysis: Look beyond immediate causes to systemic vulnerabilities
  2. Learn from Other Industries: Adopt practices from fields like aviation and nuclear power, where failure is truly not an option
  3. Build Better Metaphors: Use language that accurately reflects the preventable nature of engineering failures

Scrape burned toast faster?

Build fallen bridges faster?

Such a failure-privilege mindset echoes a disturbing pattern in Silicon Valley where engineering disasters are repackaged as heroic “learning experiences” and quick recoveries are celebrated more than prevention. It’s as though we’re praising a builder for quickly cleaning up after people plunge to their death rather than demanding to know why fundamental structural principles were ignored.

When Facebook’s engineering team wrote that “a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity,” they weren’t describing an unexpected accident, they were admitting to conducting a critical infrastructure test without proper safeguards.

In any other engineering discipline, this would be considered professional negligence. The question isn’t how quickly they recovered, but why their systems culture allows harm with such a catastrophic command to execute in the first place.

The “plan-do-check-act” concepts of the 1950s didn’t just come from Deming preaching solutions to one of the most challenging global engineering tests in history (WWII), they represented everything opposite to how Facebook has been operating.

Deming, a pioneer of Shewart methods, sat on the Emergency Technical Committee (H.F. Dodge, A.G. Ashcroft, Leslie E. Simon, R.E. Wareham, John Gaillard) during WWII that compiled American War Standards (Z1.1–3 published 1942) and taught statistical process control techniques during wartime production to eliminate defects.

Every major engineering disaster should prompt fundamental changes in how we design, build, and maintain systems. Just as the Grover Shoe Factory disaster led to new engineering discipline standards, modern infrastructure failures should drive us to rebuild with better principles.

Large platforms should design for graceful degradation, implement multiple layers of safety, create robust failure detection systems, and build infrastructure that fails safely. And none of this should surprise anyone.

When we casually dismiss engineering failures as inevitable accidents, we do more than mischaracterize the problem, we actively harm the engineering profession’s ability to learn and improve. These dismissals become the foundation for dangerous policy discussions about “innovation without restraint” and “acceptable losses in pursuit of progress.”

But there is nothing acceptable about preventable harm.

Just as we don’t allow bridge builders to operate without civil engineering credentials, or chemical plants to run without safety protocols, we cannot continue to allow critical digital infrastructure to operate without professional engineering standards. The stakes are too high and the potential for cascade effects too great.

The next time you hear someone compare a major infrastructure failure to “locked keys” or an “accident,” push back. Ask why a platform handling billions of people’s communications isn’t required to meet the same rigorous engineering standards we demand of elevators, airplanes, and power plants.

The price of progress isn’t occasional disaster – it’s the implementation of professional standards that make disasters preventable. And in 2025, for platforms operating at global scale, this isn’t just an aspiration. It must be a requirement for the license to operate.

History, Security

From Nice to New Orleans: Vehicle Borne Attacks as Urban Terror and State Control

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There has been a dramatic increase in vehicle attacks on pedestrians after 2008 (from 16 over 35 years to 62 over 10 years), reflecting political promotion of their use as an offensive weapon for asymmetric urban conflict.
When historians examine how societies normalize mechanized violence, the period between 2016 (Nice) and 2025 (New Orleans) will demand particular attention. This era marks a fundamental shift in how vehicular force evolved from terrorist tactic towards automated system of violence.

The Mineta Transportation Institute’s analysis of 78 vehicle ramming attacks between 1973-2018, for example, reveals a clear tactical progression foreshadowing the New Orleans tragedy.

The attacker drove around barricades and up onto the sidewalk of Bourbon Street, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said, avoiding barriers that had been placed by police. Kirkpatrick said the man “was trying to run over as many people as he could. We had a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there, and he still got around.”

Vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) represented the early apex, requiring extensive knowledge and complex logistics. Their sophistication proved their weakness – the 2010 Times Square bombing failed when the device malfunctioned, while in 2007, two separate VBIEDs in Britain failed to detonate, one even towed away for illegal parking before discovery.

Everything changed on Bastille Day, 2016, in Nice, France. The attack that killed 86 people stripped away complexity, requiring only a truck and a driver. This brutal simplification of attack echoes the natural pattern of mechanized violence evolution – wherever vulnerabilities are made more complex attackers tend to pivot towards opportunities of least resistance. The Nice attack marked one such tactical regression of deadly consequence, where an average of 3.6 fatalities per vehicle incident abruptly rose to 22.0 in crowded zones.

The American “car culture” response to the shift in attacks proved particularly telling. Within months of Nice, while counter-terrorism experts were still analyzing implications, seven U.S. states saw legislation introduced to grant legal immunity for driving into groups of people.

The language in these bills is remarkably similar from state to state, and in some cases, nearly identical.

North Dakota’s HB 1203 explicitly protected drivers “exercising reasonable care” when using their vehicles as weapons.

…the bill got introduced for people to be able to drive down the roads without fear of running into somebody and having to be liable for them.

Florida’s SB 1096 went even further with logic reversal, shifting burden of proof to American victims of terrorist attacks.

…the bill would have put the burden of proof on the injured person, not the driver, to prove that the driver’s actions were intended to cause injury or death.

The bills were written with cynical claims about protecting vulnerable drivers despite a reality of non-violent groups of unarmed people in the street. It was an obviously false victim construction with zero logical basis.

…existing laws already protect drivers who need to flee from a riot to defend themselves and their families. In both the criminal and civil contexts, self-defense laws provide justifications for a driver to use force to protect himself. A driver is further protected by either prosecutorial discretion in a criminal lawsuit or by comparative negligence law in a civil lawsuit. Because of these existing mechanisms, the statute is unnecessary to protect drivers from liability…

Thus, the new bills acted as a coordinated push to codify private vehicular force as state-sanctioned crowd control; the car as political power to undermine safety necessary for people to assemble or even move in public. The normalization of cars hitting people as an offensive action, as rooted in 1930s racist jaywalking laws and forced “side walks” (versus British word “pavement”), created a permissive atmosphere where boundaries between accident and attack, between self-defense and aggression, became deliberately blurred. Use of vehicles as an asymmetric weapon was surreptitiously promoted into common thought.

Media outlets played a crucial role in this normalization immediately following the horrifying Nice terror attack. Major platforms including Fox News and The Daily Caller published, then quietly deleted, articles in 2017 encouraging drivers to dehumanize and assault people as a form of political action.

Here’s a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the way by cars and trucks. Study the technique; it may prove useful in the next four years.

Social media likewise was filled with information warfare campaigns systematically promoting vehicular violence as white supremacist political action.

St. Paul police have placed a sergeant on leave as they investigate a report that he posted on Facebook, “Run them over,” in response to an article about an upcoming… protest. The comment detailed what people could do to avoid being charged with a crime if they struck someone [using their vehicle intentionally to cause harm].

While legislators and media normalized intentional vehicular violence, a parallel development was emerging from a notoriously racist car company: the automation of vehicle control systems. This shift would prove significant, as it removed even the psychological barriers that might give human attackers pause. Instead of requiring radicalization or intent, demonstrated within Minnesota police themselves, automated systems could now cause widespread harm through a programmatic indifference to (race-based) pedestrian safety.

A permissive framework would prove prophetic when autonomous systems began demonstrating systematic failures. Tesla’s Autopilot system has primarily revealed how automated control can inflict widespread damage globally without accountability. Between 2020-2024, over 900 “phantom braking” incidents and 273 documented crashes demonstrated how mechanical systems could exceed human actors in efficiency – a single software update affecting hundreds of thousands of vehicles simultaneously.

The contrast is stark:

  • New Orleans attack (2025): 15 deaths, massive response with claims of ISIS links
  • Waukesha parade (2021): 6 deaths, national crisis
  • Tesla Autopilot (2020-2024): 273+ documented crashes, treated as acceptable business risk
    1. “Phantom braking” incidents: 900+ cases risking chain collisions and dozens killed
    2. Monthly Tesla fatalities surpass historic terrorist vehicle ramming attacks
All Tesla Deaths Per Year. Source: TeslaDeaths.com

To put it another way, when three students in Oakland, California were killed by an electric fire in their Cybertruck, Tesla said nothing about the unexplained tragedy and the CEO was uncharacteristically silent even as regulators announced their investigation. However, when one person was then killed by a fire in their Cybertruck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, the Tesla CEO immediately promoted the concept of a truck firework and camping fuel fire being an unknown concept worthy of his entire senior team’s commitment to a full investigation.

Fireworks started an estimated 31,302 fires in 2022, including 3,504 structure fires, 887 vehicle fires…

And yet:

Likewise, within hours of the New Orleans attack, officials announced the discovery of an ISIS flag in the vehicle, prompting immediate calls for particularly targeted surveillance and control systems. This familiar pattern – using terrorism as justification for increased mechanization of particular control – obscures a crucial shift: while earlier attacks required human ideological motivation, automated systems can now inflict similar damage through simple errors or intentional manipulation. The flag, whether planted or authentic, serves primarily to maintain older narratives about vehicle violence while missing the much more pressing and broader systematic vulnerabilities (flags flown in Tesla factories).

The response to New Orleans illustrates this misdirection perfectly. While media is dragged by racist politicians into reporting a single flag in a single vehicle, twisting the narrative to serve their selfish nativist/xenophobic agenda, the more significant threat comes from concentrated private autonomous vehicle networks designed to exploit loopholes in urban safety. The same politicians who cited the ISIS flag as a cause for action simultaneously have discussed removing regulations and fast-tracking permits for Tesla to deploy even larger unrestricted fleets – effectively increasing the very vulnerability they claimed to be fighting. The cynical manipulation of terrorist narratives more fundamentally will be about control of emergent technology for urban warfare. As politicians stoke fears about individual attackers using one vehicle, they’re simultaneously enabling deployment of massive autonomous networks that weaponize thousands of vehicles via simple software changes. We’ve moved from isolated incidents requiring human intent to infrastructure-scale vulnerabilities that will be triggered remotely.

The Grünheide Tesla facility near Berlin exemplifies this blind spot in urban security. America has demonstrated how quickly societies normalize mechanized violence – first through social media campaigns promoting vehicle attacks, then through weak regulation of autonomous systems, and now through massive concentration of networked vehicles near population centers. Each step made the violence more efficient while reducing accountability. Export of these weapons systems to other countries is yet another predictable outcome.

When future historians analyze this progression, they’ll note how “dual-use capability concentrations” were hidden behind marketing promises of hands-free driving and cheap taxi rides. The evolution from Nice to New Orleans shows how vehicular violence became systematized – from complex terrorist operations to simple ramming attacks, then to legally-protected tactics, and finally to automated networks that could be weaponized through existing command infrastructure.

The critical question isn’t whether such systems will be deployed; they already exist in cities worldwide and are being quietly tested. Charlottesville saw a rare exception where a terrorist using the heavily-promoted “run them over” tactic was convicted of a hate crime. Would he have gotten away with it if he had used remote control instead and wasn’t in the car?

Source: NPR

The question is whether we’ll recognize this pattern of weaponized vehicles for asymmetric attacks before the next wave of manufactured crises further normalizes urban population terrorism.

The racial bias in jaywalking enforcement (shown above) laid a groundwork for historically selective application of vehicle violence laws. Source: StreetsBlog

References: