The MIT Technology Review has a very naive feel-good story about “AI to let a single voice through” that doesn’t mention anything about the famous and decorated 1960s or 1970s spy-thrillers let alone prior hyper-focused directional microphones.

MIT instead should have written more about how our identity can be seen as a collection of things, such that a high-fidelity sensor for AI is able to ingest a complex signal and then maintain a “private” connection between two points better than static and manual credentials. That’s an arguably positive development, as it suggests pre-shared keys could be switched to instant yet more sophisticated credentialed communications.

I mean the upside to presenting a secret for ID is that it’s disconnected from our true selves. And the downside to presenting a secret for ID is that it’s disconnected from our true selves. Which is preferred and when? It depends, so technology and tools are better when they provide options for our complicated world.

Or let me ask this a different way. Do you want to hear a specific person in this crowd? Is it a person with A, B and C attributes?

Either you setup a secret sharing system to manage that connection or… you can imagine using AI with a microphone to train on a particular Chinese woman’s voice and then alert you to her presence in any crowd while translating her speech to English.

What if a Sheriff could detect someone who is young, someone who is also Black, someone who is also male… and classify their speech as “threatening” to unleash extra-judicial assassination?

Who gets authorized for such massive scale micro listening accuracy, and for what purposes? And what could be more spooky?

It’s reminiscent of the infamous IGLOO WHITE project (sensors meant to detect men walking in the jungle and relay their position to close air support), which cost over a billion dollars a year in 1968 yet still didn’t achieve mission success. Are we there yet?

In other words, imagine a radio in a combat zone keeping contact with a single voice because attributes, where authentication is based on that voice being measured for its particular uniqueness and entropy.

And now imagine the countermeasures. One obvious safety device would be to require a secret to “key in” on a particular voice. Like the patented “PIN login” method I invented in 2006, for tens of millions of users of Internet devices at that time, commercial versions of this AI product could be prevented from detecting a voice unless it also had a pre-shared secret to authorize such a “connection”. No key, no key in.

The MIT article thus seems very lacking because it blindly reports about AI product development, really about academic research, that is within a very old technology space. It lacks any of the proper context of real-world markets (and dangers), as if ethics are somehow a separate consideration than the main one.

They could help wearers focus on specific voices in noisy environments, such as a friend in a crowd or a tour guide amid the urban hubbub.

Yeah, sure MIT, “such as a friend” or a tour guide. Positive thinking. Not such as… a target for harm.

The MIT author even uses the word “target” yet fails to mention any of the history and philosophy of targeted identity management and private point-to-point communication risks, let alone why military intelligence is desperate to game obfuscation in order to pinpoint targets for spying or even… targeted assassination by drone.

As the extreme far-right AfD party repeatedly gets called out in German court for crimes including trying to diminish horrors of Nazism, the Guardian has posted a new first-person account with incredible detail of the pain and suffering from fascism.

Maxwell Smart still feels at his safest when it rains. The 93-year-old first learned this as a boy of 10, alone in a forest, lying on a bed of leaves in a makeshift bunker, waiting out the Nazi occupation of Poland. For two years he hid in the forest, evading hunters. Detection meant likely death.

“It was a sport to kill a Jew,” he says. “[Your typical Nazi] is not going to go in the mud and get dirty and filthy; he is doing it for happiness, for enjoyment. So when it was raining, I knew I was safe.”

When Elon Musk jokingly pals around with his AfD contacts and other extremist far right-wing hate groups and accounts on social media, one has to wonder if it brings him happiness, or enjoyment. Here’s what lies just behind such droll exchanges.

One day a notice was given for all Jewish men aged 18-50 to register for labour. Smart’s father was ordered to the town square along with 350 others. His father told him he’d be right back. On the square, the men were separated into two groups: one for professional workers (doctors, lawyers, teachers); one for skilled tradesmen. The professionals, including Smart’s father, were taken to a nearby hill and shot. Smart did not find this out until many years later.

The families were told that their men would be released if they relinquished their assets. “I remember my mother went to borrow money to pay them off,” he says. “It was all just a story. They were already dead. They collected the money but I never saw my father again.”

It’s extremely harrowing tales like this that beg the question why Elon Musk on Twitter (and with orchestrating the purchase of Twitter) has generated a reputation of being heavily and personally involved in promoting extreme right platforms around the world. Here’s what that really means.

In one Gestapo raid at the apartment his family shared with others in the ghetto, his grandfather was shot in the head right in front of him. “I could not really associate myself, a nine-year-old boy, with death,” he says. “I knew old people died, but I didn’t even think that it was possible to kill. It’s only when I saw that in front of my eyes I realised they were murderers.”

The family were imprisoned and the next day, they were violently herded into trucks. His mother told him to run.

“I was angry,” says Smart. “I said: ‘What do you mean you don’t want to take me? You are my mother.’” He followed her until she pushed him away and boarded the truck. “This saved my life,” he says.

Smart knew he would be shot if he ran, so he removed his Star of David armband and walked away until he reached a bridge, where he saw a German officer walking towards him. “He takes out the gun, points it at my head and he says to me: ‘Tell me the truth, are you a Jew?’” Smart denied it and somehow the officer believed him. “I am not a religious man,” he says. “But I believe it was a miracle.” He never saw his mother and sister again.

There is so much more to his story, one that obviously needs to be told again and again especially given recent AfD news.

…of the 8,000 Jews who lived in Buczacz, fewer than 100 survived. “I am one of the 100 and I kept it a secret,” he says. “I should remember. I have to remember. I have to tell it to the world.”

Elon Musk repeatedly has tried to weigh into German political affairs with his clear support for the AfD party, widely recognized today as Nazis.

Recently, for example, Musk used his social media platform to downplay the harm of Nazi propaganda. He passively suggested that well-known Nazi slogans shouted at a German political rally should not be illegal.

Björn Höcke, the chair of the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) in the eastern state of Thuringia, was found guilty of intentionally deploying a slogan used by the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing in a speech at a campaign rally. He has to pay a 13,000-euro fine

That AfD leader was found guilty of a crime against democracy. He chanted a phrase so well known among Nazis that it would be equivalent to someone in Texas yelling “remember the Alamo” to incite violence against Mexicans. Musk pretended he was too stupid to understand the connection, as if it’s a valid tactic to “know nothing“.

Notably a conviction came despite Musk campaigning globally against censorship of Nazi propaganda, after he was in direct and even public communication with the AfD and Höcke.

The AfD “finding itself again” platform (FIA) is really just a poor translation and imitation of the KKK’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) platform, if that’s not obvious.

Asking any German “why is [promoting Nazism] illegal” is the peak of playing dumb, especially given Musk’s grandfather was convicted of being a threat to democracy and moved his family to South Africa expecting to build a white ethnostate there. He might as well be asking “why did grandpa go to jail in Canada and I had to grow up in South Africa”?

In other words look at how and why Elon Musk fled the end of Apartheid in 1988 to become an illegal immigrant in America, yet repeatedly sides with political parties that hate immigrants. Apparently it is because… racism.

Now the German courts have ruled Musk communications with the AfD are to be treated as extremist, a formal threat to democracy on the grounds of illegal racism.

…the court suspects large parts of the AfD of wanting to create a two-tier society, where people judged to be “ethnically German” would have more rights than people whose families originally came from abroad. This, according to the German constitution, would be illegal discrimination.

The far-right AfD is suspected of extremism, and their communications will be monitored due to the perceived threat. Meanwhile Elon Musk apparently changed the Twitter logo to a swastika to orchestrate the largest hate rally in history.

For example Musk fomenting German anti-Islamic hate groups on his swastika site garnered urgent attention and very personal invitation from infamous AfD leader Alice “Nazi-Schlampe” Weidel.

Awful, on so many levels. To be clear, the “Nazi-Schlampe” reference is rooted in around a decade of her being implicated in Nazism.

In the case of Alice Weidel, [a social psychologist at Germany’s Hochschule Niederrhein University] said, her anti-Muslim rhetoric allows her to distance herself from her outsider identity…

Worse? AfD politician Marie-Thérèse Kaiser was convicted of incitement to hatred. She received a fine for anti-Muslim hate speech on social media. The court specifically found her in violation of laws against incitement to hatred… and guess who tried to weigh in on her legal trouble?

Once again Musk “plays dumb” about obvious Nazi propaganda by asking if “anything inaccurate” was said in racist hate speech. A regional German court (Landgericht) convicted her on the basis of fairly clear violations of law.

Das Landgericht urteilte: Der Beitrag ist in zweifacher Hinsicht volksverhetzend. Einerseits habe Kaiser mit dem Post zu Hass aufgestachelt, erklärte eine Gerichtssprecherin. Zum anderen handelt es sich um einen „Angriff auf die Menschenwürde“ einer klar abgrenzbaren Menschengruppe – besagter 200 Ortskräfte.

I would translate that as “On the one hand, the court spokesperson explained Kaiser incited hatred with the post. On the other hand, the post constituted an ‘attack on the human dignity’ of a clearly identifiable group of people — 200 workers.”

She addressed a specific group using gross misstatements (falsely accusing them of gang rape culture) with a call to violence, in no way prioritizing accuracy.

Was anything inaccurate? Yeah.

Elon Musk raised a completely bogus question of inaccuracy, in what appears to be his attempt to defend an AfD politician caught spreading weaponized lies meant to incite targeted hate.

Höcke, Weidel, Kaiser, Chrupalla… communications these with AfD politicians trying to end democracy is clear. Apparently he cares a lot about a German platform bringing Nazism back to mainstream. This all comes after he had very loudly retweeted hate towards immigrants with a shout-out to Germany, including a not-so-subtle hope that AfD wins elections.

All that, and I haven’t yet even mentioned the AfD leaders charged with treason.

Related: AfD 2024 leadership now in “turmoil” due to open Nazi remarks by its board member.

Maximilian Krah steps down from AfD board and suspends campaigning after saying not all SS members were criminals.

And on that point, for easy historical reference:

The number of suspects that have been brought to trial is a tiny percentage of the more than 200,000 perpetrators of Nazi-era crimes, said Mary Fulbrook, a professor of Germany History at University College London. “It’s way too late,” she told CNN of the latest trials. “The vast majority of perpetrators got away with it.”

Is it too late?

The AfD leadership — along with Elon Musk’s loud English dog whistles of “why is shouting Nazi slogans illegal” and “what’s inaccurate in hate speech” — appears to be giving German lawyers a new chance at prosecuting Nazis today.